Boracay It was hard to leave Manila. I had tried once and already missed a flight and seriously considered missing another. I had met some good people at the hostel and had fallen into a routine of relaxing days and relaxing nights - but I had not come for this and finally dragged myself to the domestic airport bound for the raucous resort of Boracay via Caticlan. There is no airport on the small island of Boracay (9km long and 1km wide) and to get there you must use a pump boat from Caticlan on the island of Panay. Once [View Full Entry]

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Manila After a long round about journey from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur and then from Kuala Lumpur to Clark Airfield followed by a 3 hour bus journey I finally arrived in Metro Manila. Getting off the bus with my ‘Where to now?’ look I subsequently got overcharged with a couple of Spanish tourists by one of the infamous Manila taxi drivers. Fifteen minutes or so later I had found a hostel which became my home from home (Pension Natividad) in the first of my subsequent visits to the Filipino capital. Manila is not so much one city but a collection [View Full Entry]

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Xmas in Samui Well it was that time of the year - full of merriness and good cheer, not to mention a load of beer! It was a little odd spending Christmas away from home and family, but the guys that I was there with were the next best thing. Cheers Tony, Delarmi, Tom, Gaz and Su. Xmas isn’t celebrated by the Thai’s but their happy to accommodate and get into the spirit of things (especially when there’s a fast buck to be made!) and we easily found a restaurant serving traditional English Christmas dinner. It was all good fun [View Full Entry]

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Kuala Lumpur After our 4 hour ‘luxurious’ bus journey from Penang we finally arrived at the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. The transport in Malaysian is excellent and is something we really weren’t used to travelling around other countries in Asia. As with the majority of Malaysia you can instantly tell that there is a meeting of cultures here with the mix of races from Indian, Chinese and Malayan decent and this is shown in the varied architecture of Western, Asian and Islamic styles. After a fair degree of hassle from hotel touts we finally found somewhere to [View Full Entry]

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After a long bus journey we found ourselves at George Town on the island of Penang. It was late. Feeling tired, hungry and struggling to find any cheap/decent accommodation. Our Penang experience didn’t start off in the best way. Eventually we found a room and had at chat with a travelling Filipino band who advised us of the local night spots which we decided to explore. There is precious little to do in the daytime (or night time). Perhaps the main attractions are the Museum and the reconstructed fort Cornwallis. The museum was full of the usual Asian pottery, but did [View Full Entry]

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Ngwe Saung We had read about the unspoilt deserted beaches which lined the east coast of Myanmar. For once we were not disappointed with hardly any other tourists there we had this lovely pristine beach to ourselves and the loan gun boat anchored out in the ocean. There’s very little to do here and we spent four very relaxing days soaking up the rays. This has to be one of my favourite beaches. It is definitely an ideal place to sit and do nothing - something which I'm becoming very good at! The town itself is charming in a small off [View Full Entry]

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Mandalay To get here, the bus ride from Yangon was a sixteen hour adventure sport over one of the world's worst major arterial highways. The bus was packed to the gills, with broken fold out seats at regular intervals in the aisle completing the concept of sardine heaven. We continuously jolted over ruts and potholes large enough to swallow mopeds, through one armed check point (where we had to get off the bus and show our passports), stopped at roadside diners so dirty the moths went elsewhere to buzz the lights, and I doubt we changed driver the whole way through. [View Full Entry]

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Bagan Bagan is one of my favourite ancient cities of Asia, although it's relatively unknown to much of the world, it's an awesome cluster of 1,000 year old Buddhist temples and monuments covering an area that is measured 40 square kilometers, you can find dozens... no, hundreds... oh well, in fact over four thousand temples, stupas, and other strictly religious buildings, resulting from the millenium-old Burmese frenetic habit of trying to buy a better reincarnation. Sat in the back of a cart, pulled by horse power we set off to explore in the blistering heat. Bagan is often compared t [View Full Entry]

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Inle Lake - Nyaungshwe The next stop on our Itinerary was Inle Lake via Kalaw. The fifteen hours our bus ride took from Yangon was horrible. While I was sat on my sweaty broken seat, despite my nudges I had a smelly Burmese guy drooling in his sleep on my left shoulder and to my right I had a speaker blasting out some Burmese Techno crap right down my ear making sleep for me impossible. A few places in front of me sat on seat to himself, listening to an mp3 player while smoking a cigarette was a Monk. With fifteen [View Full Entry]

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