Eventually our time had come to start our trip back to Mandalay by way of an 8-hour bus journey. Again, we travelled through mountains and hairpin bends but the driver took it fairly steady. This was a great bus with TV's in the seat-back, so we watched a couple of films. After reaching the outskirts half of us got off the bus and on to a smaller one to take us in to the city centre, and from there it was a 10-minute walk to our hostel. It was our weddi...

After our two-day trek and a lovely lunch, we were transported to our Hotel on Inle Lake by long boat. Through "floating gardens", stilt houses and life on the lake, we reached Thanakha Inle Hotel half an hour later. "Thanakha" is a Myanmar traditional yellowish-white cosmetic paste made by grinding the bark of a tree with a small amount of water on a circular slate slab. It is applied to the face, sometimes in attractive designs, for protection against the ...

We said a final farewell to the balloons as they actually passed over our roof top whilst we were having breakfast and took a tuk-tuk to the bus station for our 08.30 bus to Kalaw. The first half of the journey was not spectacular scenery wise, very flat and arid, no crops growing and no greenery as we are still in the middle of dry season. However, later that afternoon mountains appeared and the scenery got more interesting. The bus then started to climb, and...

Alarm went off at 5.00am and in the darkness of the early morning we "sped" through the streets of Mandalay in our Tuk-Tuk seeing the city start to wake up. We arrived at the docks in plenty of time for our boat which was to take 11 hours along the Irrawaddy River (the country's largest) to the city of Bagan. After finding our assigned seats downstairs, we went up on to the deck to watch the sunrise, together with a tour group of Germans and a photography group...

We left Chang Mai for the 1.5-hour flight to Myanmar. Much to Heather's horror, when we walked across the tarmac and saw a small propeller plane. We arrived safely at Mandalay Airport and went through immigration, picked up luggage, drew money out of the ATM and were sitting in a taxi all within 15 minutes. The scenery on the way to the city was large wide roads with very little traffic, extremely dry and dusty but sprinkled with bursts of vibrant colours from...