The boat chugged to a stop as we reached Inle Lake and I started cursing myself: I should have known something was up when the guide I had hired told me she wasn’t going with us, leaving me in the boat with a Burmese boy as ‘captain’. Unlike the guide I thought I had hired, my young boat captain only spoke Burmese.
It's early morning and I've just walked through a gauntlet of souvenir stalls, locals setting up their wares and getting ready for the onslaught of tourists to hit. At first, I was reluctant, I'm not interested in shopping, I want to get a glimpse of local life and culture; and while souvenir hawkers represent a small sliver of a community's culture, this is not what I had in mind.
When I started researching my trip to Myanmar, one of the things I had decided to do was the circle train line. A three hour journey, the train ventures into the outer edges of Yangon, for K300, which is about 31 cents.
It all started with a Skype call with my editor at Bootsnall (a popular indie travel website that I've been using since 2009), a conversation about solo travel in Southeast Asia, and adventure. A conversation where I ended up suggesting an article on travelling solo, and before I realized what was happening the word 'Myanmar' had trickled off my tongue. I didn't even thinking about getting my Myanmar visa.