Mrauk U is an ancient city similar to Myanmar’s most popular attraction, Bagan. The former capital of the powerful Arakanese Kingdom was once compared in wealth to the cities of London and Amsterdam. The area is scattered with hundreds of temples and pagodas, but the real beauty of Mrauk U versus Bagan is that there is still active village life surrounding the temples. We met a farmer who proudly announced that we were walking through his garden. Our initial thoughts were, “wow your garden has an amazing ancient temple!” Since Mrauk U is fairly remote and a bit challenging to go there, not many tourists take the time and effort to visit. Even more challenging were the monsoon rains which meant we had to be very flexible with dates of travel. We initially flew in to ... read more

Since arriving in Kota Kinabalu we have taken no less than five internal flights over the past three weeks and none of the flights have been longer than 1.5 hours. We found that flying in Borneo is relatively cheap and maybe we're getting a bit soft, but at this point we'd take an hour's flight over a bumpy 6 to 9 hour bus ride any day. Before our diversion to Brunei, we completed our time in Sabah by visiting the Sepilok Orang-utan rehabilitation centre. Having seen them in the wild, this was a chance to get a better appreciation for these primates up close. Yes, it's busy, full of camera-weilding tourists, but it's quite well done and here we could see more than simply an orange furry blob high up in the trees. Not quite the ... read more

The idea of going to Borneo first came up when we realized that our first wedding anniversary was fast approaching. Our original plans had us in Australia at the time and we decided we wanted to go someplace exotic where we could get a little better value for our dollar. Kind of funny, because what we’ve found is that Borneo is actually pretty expensive compared to the rest of Asia and it’s quickly become a splurge-fest that is costing us about the same per day as Australia. We didn’t really know much about Borneo except that we wanted to see Orang-utans, but the more we read about it, the more we got excited about going. We thought about a beach holiday on a secluded island resort, but instead decided to do something that would be unique ... read more

Snorkelling with whale sharks, the largest fish on the planet, was the ultimate highlight and a nice way to end our Australia trip. After spending a couple days at Coral Bay to get our fins wet and do some snorkelling off the beach, we made our way to Exmouth where we emptied out our wallet and signed up for the whale shark tour. It was a bit of a rough start to the tour as we got absolutely drenched by a storm and there was concern that the tour companies might not be able to get their spotter planes in the air (that's how they find the whale sharks). Things cleared up though, and the visibility in the water was incredible. Even in deep water we could see right to the ocean floor from the surface. ... read more

After flying into Alice Springs we picked up our campervan rental and were pleasantly surprised to learn that we’d been upgraded for free from the older cheaper campervan that we’d booked to a brand new much nicer campervan. Some friends of friends in the area were kind enough to let us camp in their drive way for our first night in Alice Springs and they took us to a place where the locals feed the resident rock wallabies. They also warned us that there might be a problem with mice due to all the rain that they had this year, but things seemed fine in town so we just crossed our fingers that all would be okay. How bad could it be, right? Surely they can’t get into our fancy new campervan? The next day we ... read more