The next morning we got some breakfast, then spent an hour at the bike repair place waiting for our new tire. Naturally the whole family hung around and waited with us, offering us beer at eight in the morning before a long day of riding motorbikes. I guess years of watching backpackers [read more…]
Poipet Rhymes with Toilet for a Reason
Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Poipet before—you’re one of the lucky ones. A Cambodian town on the border with Thailand, Poipet has become a miniature exhibition of sorts, displaying everything that’s wrong with Southeast Asia in one convenient location. Many visitors to Cambodia avoid ‘the toilet’ altogether by flying into the country. […]
Monkeying Around on the Motorbike Loop
After the statue cave, we saw another cave. I can’t remember a single thing about it, so it must have been spectacular. Moving on…. Our next stop was a lake located a few kilometers off the main highway down a dirt road. It was our first experience with dirt roads on our [read more…]
Solving the Mystery of the Disappearing Gas
At the rental place, we tried to get the owner to pay for the tube that had to be replaced, but shockingly, he refused. He claimed that we had agreed we would pay for any damage to the tires, which was technically true, but we understood that to mean we would pay to have [read more…]
Japanese Built Road Through Building
What do you do when you’re constructing a highway and there’s an office tower in the way? In Japan, you run the road through the building. This is the Gate Tower Building in Osaka as seen from the rooftop observation deck of the nearby Umeda Sky building, which is hard to miss as it looks […]
Arrival at Indawgyi Military Base
The journey, as I mentioned, was horrible—over five hours of constant pain as we traversed boulders, got stuck in small lakes of mud, slid down muddy hillsides and forded numerous rivers—all features of the “road”. At one point a bridge literally collapsed beneath us. Planks were dislodged and fell into the river below, leaving [read more…]
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…]
Arrival in Mandalay
Once at the station, we boarded our bus to Mandalay and it actually was quite luxurious compared to the one we were just on and just about every other bus I would ride for the next month. The main perk you get when you pay more money is one seat per person and the fact [read more…]