Sometimes when we travel we just simply cannot avoid touristy places. They are touristy for a reason, because they are amazingly beautiful or very distinctive. You can both accept that and wish there would be very few people around or you can skip the place at all. Phi Phi Islands are one of those places, I guess. On one hand we did not want to see crowds of tourists and on the other we really wanted to see Maya Bay and Phi Phi Leh. We came in a low season so we thought the place would be a little bit deserted but we could not have been more wrong. We knew we could not expect Ko Phi Phi Don to be quiet and small but we did not anticipate such a development of western bars and ... read more

Ayutthaya and Bangkok And we are back in Thailand. We flew in on Wednesday and were supposed to meet our Japanese friend over the weekend so we decided to head to Ayutthaya first and then come back to BKK. From the airport we went straight to the train station and took what must be the cheapest train in the world to the old capital (13Baht/0.3$ per 2h ride). We wanted to stay on the Ayutthaya Island so we had to take 2 minute ferry (4Baht) on the other side of a river. We found our guesthouse immediately and walked around to check where what was and how we could go about this place. It was too hot to embark on the temple tour so we rented the bikes only for the evening when temperatures went down ... read more

From Hsipaw we only really had one option of getting into Inle Lake and it was again an overnight bus (16h, 18,000K/22$ pp) so we took it. Somehow the time of journey quoted is always way longer than it actually takes to get to a place and you always find yourself being dropped off somewhere in a middle of a night. We got to Nyaungshwe town around 4 am and had to wait for some transport to town. Public shared taxis (500K each) officially start to work around 7 but we managed to catch one just after 5 am. It was either the waiting time or a private car for a whooping 8000K. Because we arrived so early we managed to escape paying the 5$ government fee for Inle which was an achievement in a way ... read more

Arriving at a new place in the middle of a night is never nice. For one thing you are still half asleep and for another you feel much disoriented about where you are and what you are doing there. It is also a time when your common sense may be switched off for a while and you are more likely to agree on some room or rickshaw or simply any other fare that normally you would not. We had no choice though if we wanted to save some time and not to overnight in Yangon. We really, really did not want to take a night bus (not a sleeper bus) but that way we could save some money on accommodation and some time on getting into Bagan. We were rushed out of a bus and some ... read more

We entered the country that is still buried somewhere in the 80s Ah Burma...finally...after so many months on the road we were finally about to experience it. We must admit that the beginning of our tour around Burma has come in exactly the right time. As much as we loved those a few past months in Cambodia, Laos and northern Thailand, we also found them...well, quite similar. It is true that we did not find Vietnam amazing at first because of many things that happened during our stay there but at least it was different to its neighbouring countries. Now we can appreciate this fact. Yet Burma, we were more than certain would have been quite something extraordinary hence our big excitement. Of course there is this problematic issue of money when you travel to Myanmar ... read more