The Southeast Asia Travel Specialists Since 1999
So, Inle Lake, U Bein Bridge, Bagan and Shwedagon Pagoda are the spots to get your iconic Burma travel photos but it’s well worth thinking outside the box in terms of your Burma itinerary since some of the lesser-known destinations can often be the most rewarding both in photographic and non-photographic terms. Kengtung Shan State being a case in point…
Kipling famously described Burma as being ‘quite unlike any land you know about’ and the remote Shan State outpost of Kengtung is certainly quite unlike any Burmese town you’d know about. You’ll rarely hear Burmese spoken; few locals wear longyis, you won’t see many girls sporting thanaka paste, there’s little Burmese food and the usually ubiquitous Aung San Suu Kyi…
The second batch of photos taken by Wi on her recent 2-week Discover Burma tour includes some of her wonderful portraits of a few of the characters encountered en-route and, in case you missed the previous set of landscape photos, here’s the link. The Pa-O, like many people in Burma, are big fans of the betel nut but…
For a relatively small ethnic group, the Padaung certainly have plenty of names. Padaung is apparently the Shan term for the Kayah Lahwi– a subgroup of the Kayah ethnic family who are in turn a subgroup of the Karenni or Red Karen who are themselves a part of the wider Karen family. Vulgar terms for them are ‘Long Necks’, ‘Long…
Hiking in the Shan Hills; a few photos and brief description. Firstly many thanks to our awesome local guide Moe Zaw for designing and testing what proved to be an excellent hiking trail close to the small town of Kalaw on the Shan Plateau. Despite terrain seen below, (i.e. picturesque but hilly!), he managed to find us a predominantly flat…
Caves are what the small Burmese, Shan Plateau town of Pindaya is famous for! So, we had intended to write about the famous and spectacular cave temples but seem to have filled most of the post up with cabbage photos so – we’ll call this one ‘the road to Pindaya’ and post a separate temple piece afterwards. The 1-hour drive…
As with, for example, Malaysia the wide ethnic mix of Burma (Myanmar) leads to a wide range of Burmese food. Along with regional ethnic groups such as Karen, Shan, Kachin, Thai, Mon etc that contribute towards the indigenous mix, there were, during the British period, large numbers of Nepalese, Indian ((Bengali and Tamil for instance) – and in more recent…
Some portraits of Myanmar, taken on our recent, 2-week recce trip to Burma (Myanmar). Internet access is, to say the least, limited and since we’ve been a bit rushed off our feet since our return to the Chiang Mai office so we’ll just stick up a few Burma photos for today and ‘normal’ service will be resumed asap! Actually took…
Whilst Tai groups had probably been gradually infiltrating southwards into what is now northern Vietnam, Laos and Thailand for several centuries from their homeland in Southern China the migration of Tai groups into Southeast Asia was hastened during the late 12th- and 13th-centuries as the Mongol armies under Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan extended their empire southwards. Ethnic Tai clans…