Even before nakedgiraffe went into her isolation camp I got on the bus to Mawlamyine, towards the south of Myanmar. Along the way I noticed that, like many poor countries, Myanmar wastes a lot of money to add new useless religious monuments, for example, massive buddha statues. Most natural attractions are also covered in stupas, buddha statues and altars. I…
The Malaysian capital provided us with the much needed luxury for a long weekend between India and Myanmar. Plus it was so easy to get into the country and no fees or visas charged. Bliss. We went “all out” and got ourselves an Airbnb with a rooftop pool. After 2 months in India, and a month in Nepal, in mostly…
We stayed a night in a “village” called Karunagappally, it was the closest to the ashram we could find a decent accommodation in. When we arrived, noone was there and the house seemed abandoned. We had made a booking on booking.com so V gave them a call – number is no longer valid. Convinced this place is no longer rented…
One morning we went to the forest department office in Munnar (online bookings don’t take foreign cards) and booked 2 nights in the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary: One night in Koottar log house in the north of the park and the other at Thoovanam log house in the south of the park. The next day at 10:30am we took a local…
We got off the bus in Munnar and headed straight to the Forest Department Office to inquire about trekking. They only organise things in the wildlife sanctuaries further from Munnar and nothing locally, so they referred us to the KFDC Office. We went there and they gave us pretty much only one option: Trek from base camp to the top…
Dal bhat power 24 hours, one toilet, no shower. This is the mantra our guide introduced to us for trekking in Nepal. We had dal baht daily for lunch, as you get free “refills” and can stuff yourself properly. First days you’re too shy (not hungry enough) to say yes to refills, but you quickly learn and end up eating…
We crossed the border from Tibet (Kyirong) to Nepal by land, and wow was the difference visible immediately. First, the time changed by 2 hours and 15 minutes as we stepped one meter across. 😄 We won the time. Moreover, on the Nepalese side there were multiple manual checks of passports, then a manual check of the luggage. No scan…
It has been on my high-priority list to visit Tibet, but as independent travel is prohibited we didn’t manage to go 5 years ago when we toured China. So we decided to put it on the itinerary for this big trip. 😍 October seemed the perfect time to visit as it’s the first month off-season (from mid-Oct) and before it…
We started entertaining the idea of long travel in ca Dec 2017. It felt like there will not be a better time for this than now, conditional if a work opportunity will come through or not. Many months of preparations concluded with us packing our backpacks and heading to Shanghai on October 11th 2018. The time leading to it was…