Memoirs of a Wandering Nomad

Agreed that a two-and-a-half day visit, that too only to Yangon , the most populous of the cities of Myanmar , and most of which was spent in the hotel and client's office is not enough to give a fair representation of the country. But then, no matter how much you travel, nothing ever is. So here's to an addition to the list of locations I have traveled, which according to a travel portal is only 139 cities (seems more for sure)  - my first visit to Myanmar, a lesser-known and lesser-accessible neighbor of India in South Asia. Jade stone trinkets at a Yangon market Burmese script on a T-shirt Quite frankly I did not know much about the place, apart from some bits of history and that we share some border with the Burmese. As a practice, I have stopped reading about places before visiting. These days information is cheap and the online overload just kills the sense of awe and amazement from travel experiences. I made it a point not to look up about Myanmar before st...

Well, I travel across Asia Pacific for a living, and must have been to Manila at least half a dozen times. So I guess at some point of time this needs to be done.  And what needs to be done is to review Manila and its nearby areas. Although I am not a big fan of the place, it does have its bag of chips, and so without pushing this any further, here you have a first-hand experience of traveling to Manila. First things first. It is a bustling city, and as unclean as cities go  - with overflowing sewers, unbelievable traffic snarls, parking nightmares and ugly neighborhoods, basically the works. Add to that the typhoons and rains that bring the city life to a complete halt for at least thrice each season, and you get the picture. There was a time I stayed at Intercontinental in Makati for two weeks, and the only way I could get out of the hotel for all that time was through the underground walkways to the mall across the street, as it was pouring oceans of rainwater from the...