The Indian province of Goa has over 70 kilometers of beautiful beaches and excellent cheap food. That combination kept me in my beach hut two weeks longer than planned. India’s transportation network kept me there another two weeks. Flying in and out of Goa seems relatively simple, but leaving by land proved exceedingly difficult. When […]
Why Couldn’t My Train Just Derail Like Everyone Else’s?
Trains in Thailand have a hard time staying on the tracks and the route from Bangkok north to Chiang Mai seems especially prone to derailments, judging by news reports and even a few first-hand accounts on other blogs (like this one by That Backpacker, which actually sparked my memory of the incident in today’s post). […]
Erawan Waterfall: Swimming With Flesh-Eating Monsters
Kanchanaburi Thailand is home to one of the most beautiful waterfalls I’ve ever seen and a couple of other entirely unspectacular sights, like the bridge over the river Kwai and the very appropriately named Death Railway; appropriate not because it’s dangerous, but because it moves so slowly that anyone who boards past the age of […]
I will cheat you and you will like it!
I didn’t have a flashlight and my friend’s was dying, so we decided to just lay down where we were. Not that we had any other options. It was a little after 3am and nothing was open even if we had been able to see it. We felt around for an area that didn’t give [read more…]
A Burmese Train — Seeing Myanmar in Slow Motion
First of all, it was hot. The temperature outside was around 40 degrees Celsius and it felt like twice that in the cramped car. We were near a window so we figured we would get a nice breeze once the train started moving. We didn’t realize that the train would never really start moving. It [read more…]
Welcome to Shwebo Mr. ATM
The next two hours were pretty uneventful and even relatively pain free, since my knee caps had been thoroughly liquefied by this point. We did pass a road construction site on the way and had to wait for a bit as a group of slaves broke up rocks with hammers and placed them into [read more…]
Leaving Yangon for Indawgyi Lake
I arrived at the airport in Yangon never having heard of Indawgyi Lake. In fact, I had no idea whatsoever where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do or see during my month in Myanmar. I figured I would start by taking a taxi downtown and finding a place to [read more…]