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 sky all