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...

We left Chiang Rai by bus, a journey of 3.5 hours and reasonably comfortable apart from the air conditioning leaking and occasionally get slightly wet. On arrival there was a taxi desk at the bus station so we hopped in a cab to our hotel based just on the outside of the old city wall which surrounds the old city. We had been to Chiang Mai before, about 16 years ago, but didn't recognise anything. A lot of expansion including high rise chain hotels, McDonalds...

We arrived in to Chiang Rai in the dark and picked up a tuk tuk which took us to our guest house - Chat House. However, when we got there, they had no reservation. Turns out there are two Chat Houses so off we went to the next one. We checked in to our no-frills room, but it was clean, with aircon and a comfortable bed. Chiang Rai is very close to the borders of Laos and Myanmar and is within the Golden Triangle, but apart from that we didn't know anything el...

We hadn't planned to go to Thailand, but the beauty of being flexible - that's where we were heading. We had heard about the slow boat from Luang Prabang on the mighty Mekong which takes two days and thought it would be a really great way to travel. We were picked up at 06.30 and taken to our 35-meter long boat to meet our 38 other passengers - except there were only another 4! So, 6 of us enjoyed a 40-seater boat, with its retractable wooden roof giving u...