The Accidental Gang
When I signed up to cover Myanmar for Global Hobo, I expected to do what I always do: arrive, explore alone, write snappy things about noodles. Instead, a last-minute reshuffling of crew assignments dumped five of us on the tarmac in Yangon with a shared itinerary and zero pre-trip chemistry.
There was Delphine, our adrenaline junkie photographer who thinks a proper day involves heights and questionable structural integrity. Marcus, a food writer with the metabolism of a particularly ambitious anaconda. Suki, our cultural researcher who speaks four languages and has the patience of a saint. Chen, a videographer with a caffeine dependency and strong opinions about everything. And me—the person accidentally in charge despite having no management experience whatsoever.
We stood outside the airport like a bad rom-com premise.
Yangon: How a City Actually Eats
Our first night, I made an executive decision: forget the hotel briefing. We were doing the Yangon Evening Street Food and Market Walking Tour Yangon Evening Street Food and Market Walking Tour that evening. If we were going to survive three weeks together, I reasoned, we might as well bond over street food where conversation could be muffled by eating.
Our guide, Min, picked us up at dusk and took us straight into downtown Yangon's old quarter. Not the sanitised colonial strip—the actual neighbourhoods where families were already settling in for dinner. We stopped at a stall run by a woman called Tin who'd been making shan noodles in the same spot for thirty-seven years. Delphine accidentally complimented her daughter's dress (painted toenails, brilliant green), and suddenly we were invited to sit down properly, not just grab-and-go. We ate at a wobbly plastic table. Min translated. Tin's daughter brought us extra sauce.
This is where the group cohesion started, I think. It wasn't forced. It was just five people sitting in muggy evening heat, eating food that made sense in a way hotel restaurants never could. By the time we hit the market section of the tour—moving through the flower sellers and spice vendors—we weren't strangers anymore. We were the people who'd eaten Tin's shan noodles together.
Marcus made a joke about the fish paste that made Chen snort so hard he nearly dropped his phone.
Downtown Yangon: The Bits History Left Behind
The next morning, before the actual work started, I dragged everyone on the Walking Tour in Downtown Yangon Walking Tour in Downtown Yangon. My logic was simple: if we're based here, we should actually understand it.
Two hours on foot, and the guide—a retired architect named Aung—walked us through the layers. The colonial buildings with their peeling paint and wrought iron, government structures that told stories nobody wants to repeat out loud, the streets that had held markets and movements and military vehicles. Suki asked better questions than anyone, the kind that made Aung pause and reconsider. He ended up telling us about his grandfather's bookshop, which the regime had shuttered in 1967.
Yangon isn't a cheerful city. It's a survivor. And once you know that about a place, once you understand that survival has shaped every corner, you can't move through it the same way. The city stopped being scenery for our story and became a character with its own narrative.
Bagan: How It All Feels at Altitude
We caught an overnight bus to Bagan, which nobody warned us would be simultaneously the worst and best bonding experience possible. Delphine got stuck with the broken armrest. Chen discovered the bus's water supply was actively hostile to human digestion. I spent five hours resolutely not thinking about what was leaking somewhere beneath us. By dawn, when we pulled into Bagan, we were a unit forged in mild suffering.
Delphine had already booked Balloons Over Bagan Balloons Over Bagan for sunrise, because Delphine's life philosophy appears to be "if there's a way to do it dramatically, do that instead." I thought it was ridiculous until I was floating above 8,000 temples and pagodas in that soft, impossible light.
From ground level, Bagan is overwhelming—a landscape of ancient structures stretching to every horizon, a thousand years of devotion turned to silhouette. From 400 metres up, it's transcendent. Delphine was crying into her camera lens. Marcus was alternating between awe and the kind of deep regret that comes from realising you're afraid of heights while currently airborne. Suki was quietly reciting historical facts like a meditation. The balloon pilot—a Thai woman called Duangchai who'd been doing this for a decade—just smiled at all of us.
When you're floating above a temple city at sunrise with people you've known for three days, something shifts. Vulnerability tends to do that.
Temples, Logistics, and Not Getting Lost
For the actual archaeological work, we split up. The One Bagan Sightseeing Tour One Bagan Sightseeing Tour picked up Delphine, Marcus, and Chen for the proper nine-hour deep dive—the kind of day where you hit the temples that actually matter, with someone who knows which ones are worth the heat and which ones are just identical arrangements of bricks.
Meanwhile, Suki and I did the independent thing, which was a mistake. We got lost twice, accidentally crashed a local festival, and had to ask a monk for directions in broken Burmese and aggressive hand gestures. It was terrible and brilliant in equal measure.
When the group reconvened that evening, Delphine had approximately four thousand photos. Marcus had heat exhaustion and very strong opinions about which temple's views justified the climb. Chen had footage that made Bagan look like an actual painting. The conversation at dinner was all interruptions and overlapping excitement—the kind of table energy you can't manufacture.
Kalaw to Inle: Where Everything Gets Real
The 3Days Less Touristic Way Trekking from Kalaw to Inle 3Days Less Touristic Way Trekking from Kalaw To Inle was when I learned what my crew was actually made of.
Kalaw is a colonial hill station, all pine trees and old British buildings and the kind of altitude that makes you remember you're not sea-level creatures. Our trek guide, a Shan man called Kyaw, met us at dawn with a smile that suggested he'd seen plenty of soft city people try this route before.
Day one was fine. Day two was not. Delphine got blisters that required taping with medical tape we didn't have. Chen's camera gear was significantly heavier than anticipated. My knee started making a noise that haunts me still. Marcus actually sweated through an entire outfit. Suki just kept walking, periodically checking if everyone else was surviving.
We walked through village tea plantations and down into Shan valleys. We stayed in a homestay where the family's kids were endlessly fascinated by Chen's camera. We ate rice and vegetables that tasted like the earth they came from. We crossed rivers that had opinions. We didn't see another Western tourist—proper hill-country experience, exactly as advertised.
And somewhere between the second blistering session and the third time Marcus complained about his feet, something solidified. We stopped being a crew doing jobs and became actual friends who happened to be working together. These are the people who saw you at your absolute worst—limping, covered in dust, genuinely wondering if your body would make it—and just checked if you needed water.
The Exit
We finished in Inle Lake, naturally. Did the boats and the floating gardens and the one-legged rowers who row like poetry. Delphine wanted more heights (there's nothing much tall around Inle, which disappointed her enormously). Marcus discovered the lake-side restaurants and temporarily forgot about his feet. Suki spent an afternoon in the markets learning about local textiles. Chen got footage of sunset that made the rest of us look like we didn't even try.
On our last evening, sitting on a deck overlooking the water, nobody was in a hurry to leave.
That's the thing they don't tell you about travel: it's not really about the temples or the balloons or even the food, though those are lovely. It's about the people you're moving through the world with, the ones who see you at your absolute worst and decide you're worth keeping around anyway. We came to Myanmar as strangers. We left as the kind of people who'd share a long-drop toilet without awkwardness.
I'd call that a successful adventure.
