Our journey to Mandalay from Bagan was long but pretty much uneventful. We had Anton in tow and had say goodbye to Pete our fluffy friend from New Zealand. The bus dropped us off mile outside of Mandalay which seems to be the normal thing in Burma purely so the bus companies don't have to pay the government fuel tax. We caught a local jeepney into Mandalay centre and quickly found the accommodation thanks to lonely planet. We opted for a triple room because it w...

We booked tickets for the 7am bus to Bagan, we arranged to be picked up from our guesthouse at 6:30am so got up early, ate our breakfast and waited, and waited - we were really worried because we were under the impression that we had to get back to the road junction at Shwenyaung (where we were dropped off) which would take at least 15 minutes to get to. We asked our guest house if they could find out if we were actually going to be collected - they made a few ph...

So we got the bus which left at 4pm and was due to take 16-20 hours according to lonely planet. As we left Yangon to surroundings started to become more and more sparse and we could see small wooden huts in the fields, men working with oxen and a layer of smoke that drifted from the fields. We were on the road that ended up in Mandalay and this was strange in itself. The entire journey until we turned off the road was straight, no bends for miles, as if the gover...

As we are on a really tight budget for our Asian trip we worked out we could only afford to be in Myanmar for 10 days - and as you can only fly in and out we had to make a decision that 10 days would have to do :-( The accommodation is much more expensive than other neighbouring countries and you have to pay for many government entrance fees. So we planned a whistlestop tour from Yangon to Inle Lake, then to Bagan and finish off in Mandalay........ We didn't rea...