The ride from Inle Lake to Mandalay threatened to be upended as soon as we boarded the bus. The bus attendant looked at us and immediately said something to the effect of us needing to get off the bus. Confused, we tried to inquire. She said someone inside the bus station would explain. She then walked away and obviously unsettled, we decided we would do the opposite and just stay in our ticketed, assigned seats. Another woman got on and told us we had been ...

Bus journeys in Myanmar seem to be the opposite of most countries we have been to, in that they are typically quoted as taking a certain amount of hours but then actually take less time! So our proposed 10 hour bus from Bagan to Inle Lake got us there in 8 hours, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. It's notable for anyone who is ever going to do this trip that this route involves a very slow and very windy trek through the mountains, and we were extr...

You can spend days at the ancient site of Bagan and not even begin to scratch the surface of what it has to offer. We stayed 5 full days (fellow travellers we met were shocked by this level of commitment) and visited 50 individual sites on the arid plains that are dotted with thousands of temple remains. And you don't have to be a history buff to feel like you could stay longer; the temple wandering is exciting, fascinating, and fun. At such an enormous site...

Yangon is one of those fantastic cities that takes you by surprise. It of course helps when you go in having zero expectations, except as "that city we are flying into that will eventually get us to all the temples". We initially flew into Yangon from Chiang Mai for a few days, left for the south, and returned before making our way up to the central plains. Upon arrival when leaving the airport, confused about the local airport bus, several people immediatel...

The journey from Mawlamyine to Hpa-An is luckily a short one - about 2 hours on a local bus that has no specific timetable and leaves once it is full. (Our patience has grown in spades.) It's a very scenic ride through a landscape that resembles northern Vietnam a little bit in terms of the limestone formations, and although it is getting very cloudy/murky now down in this part of the country, you can tell how absolutely stunning everything would look on a very...