We climbed to the highest point in Bagan to try and fathom the density of ancient Buddhist monuments that flooded the plains. The flat, dusty swath of land with skinny cattle grazing on crab grass wouldn’t seem like a desirable place to build the first capital of Myanmar…but the 2,200 temples, stupas, and monasteries tell…
If you are going to find tourists in Myanmar, they are on Inle Lake…but when you get away from the throngs and experience life in the lively canals, floating farms, and stilted houses, its charms are far from lost. We spent three days biking the shores of Inle, boating to the far-flung corners of the…
Sawtooth mountains, serpentine rivers, grotto-filled caves, and golden stupas peppered throughout…Hpa-an has all the makings of a popular tourist destination, but it’s still flying under the radar. The locals are going about life as they always have and when they see a tourist they aren’t trying to squeeze a dollar out of him, they want…
It’s three o’clock in the morning in Mawlamyine, Myanmar and we are looking for a place to sleep. Going from overnight bus to taxi van, we wind down the mountain with toward the moonlit shimmer of the Thanlwin river. The cabby takes us to Breezes Guest House, a crumbling colonial mansion on the waterfront. We…
When we were planning the HoneyTrek route, Myanmar (formerly Burma) was still under a military dictatorship, saddled with sanctions and virtually shut to the world. The regime officially ended in 2011, but after 49 years of oppression it hardly seemed like a place you’d want to visit…but everyone we met who’d been said exactly the…
We’ll admit, when you see ancient temples nearly every day for nine months you can get a little bleary-eyed and jaded…but our visit to Sukhothai was anything but an ordinary stop in Southeast Asia. While going through our photos for this post we realized we had forgotten how stunning and cutting-edge the first capital of…
Said to be the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual heart of Vietnam, Hue is full of palaces, pagodas, tombs, temples, and a dash of French colonial flair. It was the country’s political capital from 1802-1945 under 13 emperors of Nguyen dynasty and their decadence is largely what makes the area so beautiful. Just 80 miles from…
Hoi An was by far our favorite town in Vietnam. A trading port dating back to the 17th-century, it has been shaped by the cultures that passed through its ports—Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Indian and Vietnamese. With its well-preserved homes, shops, and temples, the whole town center has been deemed a UNESCO world-heritage site but it…
Angkor Wat is the impetus for nearly every visit to Cambodia, but stray a bit off the track and you will find the rest of the country equally mesmerizing. When entering by train, traveling by boat, and hitchhiking in anything that moves, we saw so much more to love. The country is rough around the…
As the saying goes, it’s about the journey not the destination, and this could not be more true of our renegade road trip through northwestern Cambodia. We’d heard that within a couple hundred kilometers of Siem Reap was the mother of all overgrown tree temples, a former Angkorian capital, and finally a 1000-year old clifftop…
We’ve seen hundreds of incredible historical monuments and archaeological sites on our HoneyTrek, but up until this point, nothing tops the temples of Angkor. Most people have heard of Angkor Wat with its honeycomb-style towers…but that’s just one building in what was the largest pre-industrial civilization ever to exist in the world. That one temple,…