The beginning of South East Asia: Myanmar (Burma)

After a tearful goodbye to our home for a year we began an incredible journey around and about South East Asia. We started out where few dare to go in Burma. If you're confused, the militaristic dictatorship there changed the name to Myanmar, but it's often still referred to as Burma so as not to grant any authenticity to the dark and dangerous government currently and illegitimately in power.

We spent 2 weeks in that hot, beautiful place where the going is rough but the people are kind. We visited Yangon, Mandalay, Inle Lake, Kalaw, and Bagan. It was one of the most rewarding parts of our trip, but also the most difficult.


We've got a lot of catching up to do, so it's light on words and heavy on pictures.

A note on ethical travel in Burma:
Amazingly, it's fairly easy to prevent most of your money from going into government hands. If you take privately owned buses, stay in privately owned guest houses, and sneak around the back way to temples with government fees then the only money that you send directly their way is your visa fee, entrance to Bagan and entrance to Inle Lake. We were conflicted whether or not to go, but having been I highly encourage travelers to visit. You'll support the people living off the tourism trade and you'll protect them with your presence. You'll hear people's stories first hand (highly illegal and dangerous for the local telling it, but very common) and see what pictures can't show you. But you should read the pros and cons and decide what you are personally comfortable with. The Burmese themselves say come.

Mongolia Video!

It's been a long, long time since we were in Mongolia. But Brian's just finished the video of the second half of our trip there. We talked about it enough back then, so with no further ado, here it is.

Getting back to it

We're finally back in Merica! We've been thoroughly enjoying the hollidays, visiting friends and family, home food and unemployment, but it's been busy none the less. I'm planning our June wedding and studying Japanese in the hopes of getting a job there through JET, but now that we're finding a rythem I'm going to start updating with posts from all our adventures in South East Asia, including our engagement in Laos. Til then you can check out our wedding website at www.theknot.com/ourwedding/jessbartelsandbrianlaggis. Stay tuned!

Shannon's pictures are here!

Mongolia through Shannon's lens, Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

You can read more about our trip in older posts. It's only 4 more days til we begin our next big adventure! We're not sure how much internet access we'll have, but we'll try to keep this updated with photos and stories of our travels.