Singapore is dripping with money. At least that’s what it seemed like after spending 8 days in Burma! more»

Whether or not you should travel to Myanmar (or Burma) is still debated. If you are unaware of the situation there, basically the government is harsh and repressive, and the leader of the National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, has called for an international tourist boycott of the country, fearing tourist dollars will empower the current regime. She is currently under house arrest in Yangon.

Because traveling to Burma is something of a weighty decision, we made a difficult promise to ourselves before setting foot there: to shed 9 months worth of thick traveler’s skin. This is the stuff that you get from traveling to places like Egypt and India, the wariness of dealing with locals who, in those places, seem to only ever want to get at the contents of your wallet. more»

For a change of scenery from the smoggy city, we took a long journey up to the countryside at Inle Lake. Quite different from Yangon, the tiny town Nyangshwe we stayed in was surrounded by the enormous clear lake, rolling mountains, and lush green rice fields. more»

After 9 months on the road, we’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff. So the fact that we were completely stunned by Shwedagon, in my humble opinion, speaks volumes. There’s more going on at Shwedagon than mere architectural splendor, however. more»

The Union of Myanmar, more widely known as Burma, was AMAZING. I can’t say enough about the place! WOW! Because there’s so much to say, we’re splitting it up into a series of blogs.
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If you’ve read our travel plans, you would have noticed that there was no mention of our going to Australia. Instead we were supposed to head to South America after leaving Southeast Asia, for our last major stop of the Big Trip. Well then why is the Australian flag flying in our “Currently In” box? more»

Knowing that Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, was actually smaller than Vietnam, made me think that it would somehow be a little less crazy. I foolishly believed life would move at a slower pace, people wouldn’t incessantly blow their horns, and the old quarter would be be full of relaxing cafes and charming French architecture. more»

If you took one look at a picture of Ha Long Bay, you’d probably think, “I have to go there.” At least that’s what I thought. The place is unbelievably gorgeous and photogenic. more»

Sapa is one of the more popular places to visit in northern Vietnam. When trying to decide how to spend our time in the country, we looked at the map and some google images and decided it was right up our alley. With limited time in Southeast Asia, it made sense to visit a landscape we hadn’t seen since Nepal. more»

Tomorrow we start our short trip to Myanmar, or Burma, or whatever you want to call it. We hear internet access is hard to come by and/or expensive there, so we’re not planning on using much there. That means no site updates, no emails, etc. But fear not, we’ll be releasing our remaining Vietnam posts over the next week. Write-ups of our travels in Burma will have to wait until we get back.

To learn more about where we are going, check out the Wikipedia article. I also updated the maps area (well, the big one at least), so you can see our main route and where we’ll be going all the way up until the trip is over.