Month One highlights, lowlights, & the days between

Highlights:

• Myanmar (Burma)
  – Everything about the trip far exceeded expectations. The people, the golden pagodas, a discordant roar of change. A country’s newly found freedom of speech and expression. High hopes for the future and signs of the ancient past everywhere.

• Pai, Thailand
  – Meeting a small group of Americans, Brits, and Germans in Chiang Mai and making an unplanned motorcycle voyage up into the mountains. The Darling View hostel was fantastic.

Pai

• FINALLY getting Filipino dual citizenship and the passport that goes with it

• First visit to Bambike HQ in Tarlac

Bambuilders

• Songkran in Bangkok

• Buddhism

Monks in Mandalay

Lowlights:

• Anything in Celsius with a 3- or 4- handle
  It was so hot in Bagan it made my skeleton ache

• Digestive issues (more specifically, projectile vomit in a non-western outhouse) brought on by “fresh” shrimp, which turned out to be “live” shrimp and didn’t sit well in Chiang Mai

'Fresh' shrimp

• Pink eye

• The ‘grey’ market money changers in Myanmar
  – At some point they’ll just have to start accepting $USD that has even a slight crease in it

• Poverty beside the palaces in Mandalay

• The number of Western travelers in Thailand (-)
  • Most of their tattoos
  • Overhearing in the pool in Pai about the girl who just got the “C*NT” tattoo on her abdomen covered up with a lotus
  • Overhearing on the way back into the hostel in Bangkok: “Did you catch the Muay Thai fight?” “It was sick”

• 7 Eleven (+/-)

• Discovering Bangkok to be cleaner and have much more civilized traffic than Manila (+/-)

• Having to leave your passport in order to rent a motorcycle in Thailand (-)

• Daily brownouts in Myanmar (-)

• Tech that is changing travel: Kindle, iPhone, Google Maps, Hostelworld.com (++)

• Taking out time for blogging (+/–)

• Being offered the ‘happy ending’ (-300 baht)

• Gotye, Somebody That I Used To Know (+/-)

• The Old Man and the Sea by Hemmingway (++)

Sule Pagoda, Yangon