Weekend Blitz

Today marks one entire month since Jeffrey and I went wheels up in Charleston and headed off on our adventure.

We are really loving our time in Southeast Asia and are trying to pack 29 hours into each day (so far, so good). We’re currently enjoying a slower pace for a few days at the Hyatt resort in Da Nang, Vietnam, where we’re bronzing in the sunshine and digging our toes in the white sand before diving into Big City Life again.

Here’s a look back at our first month by the numbers…

In the past 31 days, we’ve traveled to…

2 [...]

Friends who had visited Myanmar before us had completely skipped Mandalay, but we wanted to take our time exploring as much of the country as we could, so we (somewhat hesitantly) added a few nights in Mandalay, Burma’s second largest city, to our itinerary.

View of Mandalay from the Hotel Yadanarbon’s rooftop

It’s only about 445 miles north of Yangon (but, in case you’re wondering, if you’re going roughly 25 mph on a train, that’ll take you about 16+ hours). When we arrived on the overnight train around 9am, completely and utterly exhausted, we found scores of people at the train station, all hounding us to [...]

Disclaimer: I can sometimes write with an air of sarcasm, so please do not be put off by this! This trip was a throughly fantastic experience and we are glad that we have the memories from this train ride.

After taking a trip to the Myanmar Railways Booking Office a few days prior to book our tickets, it was departure day and we caught a cab to the Yangon Central Railway. Due to the traffic, car travel is only marginally faster than walking and, if it weren’t for our bags and the excruciating heat, we would have used the latter option this day. We made it to the station around 4:15pm, about 45 mins prior to departure.

The train station, like most in the [...]

You might have already seen this news, but I think it’s so incredibly awesome that I had to share: Google has recently updated its Translate app and it is everything I’ve ever needed.

The updates to this app include automatic language detection. This feature means you can text in real time with two languages and your friend’s texts immediately get translated into the language you’ve chosen. This is perfect for me because I still regularly Skype/FaceTime and email with my host family in Italy who I lived with for a semester while in college. But, because my Italian is rusty (at best), I always end up typing in English and then using a translation website [...]

When faced with the decision on how to get around from city to city in Myanmar, the train seemed like a solid choice. On this trip, the only one like it in recent memory, we were doing our best to ditch the standard “Weekend Blitz” type of travel that we’ve come to embrace, feeling like we’re going at 110% all of the time and trying to cram 25 hours into every day. For this trip, we had time on our side and a greater desire to jump into the local culture and see how everyday life is lived for the Burmese.

So, intent on taking the train while in Myanmar, we settled on the Yangon-Mandalay route. The times were appropriate for taking it overnight which [...]

Note: Booking begins on Wednesday April 1, 2015.

Don’t miss out on Flying Blue’s spring promo, which allows you to book Air France/KLM awards for 25-50% less than normal in June and July 2015:

Award bookings on Air France/KLM routes have been reduced by 25-50% for travel between June 1, 2014 – July 31, 2015.

For those of us sitting in ‘Merica, we’ll be most interested in:

On yet another hazy day in Yangon, we headed up the road to the main train station (the same one that would carry us off days later on the overnight Yangon-Mandalay train) to board the Circle Train, taking us in a circle around Yangon’s “suburbs” and then back into the city.

Because most locals can’t afford apartments in the city proper, the vast majority lives in the suburbs but finds work inside the city. This Circle Train is the preferred method of transportation in and out of the city as traffic can get pretty brutal (and, of course, you have to own a car or motorbike). So, riding this Circle Train provides an unspoiled glimpse into local life away from the [...]