I was supposed to be alone. That was the whole point of the trip. But somewhere between a bowl of shan noodles at midnight and a near-mutiny in a minibus headed for Inle Lake, five complete strangers became the kind of people I'd walk into a monsoon for.
We collided at a hostel in Yangon like plot devices. There was Marcus, a 34-year-old Australian banker taking his first proper sabbatical. Yuki, a Japanese illustrator who barely spoke English but could negotiate anything with hand gestures and a disarming grin. Elena, a Russian doctor who'd quit surgery to 'see if she still liked people'. James, a Scottish photographer whose idea of planning ahead was 'I'll figure it out when I get there'. And me, Priya, supposedly here to research solo-female travel and instead becoming the accidental ringleader of what would become the most gloriously unhinged two weeks of my life.
We didn't plan to travel together. But on our second night, sitting on the hostel's rooftop, Marcus said, 'Yangon's meant to be mad. Should we actually explore it properly?' Someone suggested we do a Yangon Evening Street Food and Market Walking Tour. By morning, we'd committed to three weeks together. By noon, I was wondering if I'd made a catastrophic error.
The city that eats after dark
Yangon revealed itself to us at night, when the heat broke and the real city emerged. The Yangon Evening Street Food and Market Walking Tour was supposed to take four hours. It took six because Yuki got into a fifteen-minute negotiation with a noodle vendor about the exact provenance of his broth, Elena asked every cook about their knife skills, and James photographed so many stalls that our guide—a patient man named Win who'd clearly seen worse—just sat down and had tea.
We ate mohinga (the national rice noodle dish of Myanmar) from a cart that appeared to operate out of someone's front room. We chewed through samusas and grilled seafood and drank sweet condensed-milk tea at a stall where the owner's grandmother was teaching her granddaughter the recipe. Elena, ever the doctor, asked about food safety. Win just smiled and said, 'Yangon's been eating here for a hundred years. You'll be fine.'
What struck me wasn't just the food, though it was extraordinary. It was the ordinariness of it all. No Instagram filter, no 'authentic experience' premium. Just the city doing what it does at half past nine on a Wednesday, and five very foreign people weaving through it like we belonged.
We also did the Walking Tour in Downtown Yangon, which took us through the colonial architecture of downtown in daylight. Marcus kept asking if the buildings were 'actually old or just fake-old'. The guide, endlessly patient, explained the layered history of the city: British rule, independence, decades of isolation, the slow opening up of recent years. Elena, who'd done a rotation in Moscow and was deeply versed in crumbling architecture, nodded knowingly. It was the kind of tour I'd normally rush through. But with this crew, every building became a story, every street corner a debate.
Where the temples swallow you whole
Bagan hit us like a physical force. Two thousand years of history, eight thousand temples scattered across a dusty plain the size of a small country. We arrived at sunset, and I watched Marcus's face go slack. 'How do you even start?' he asked.
We started before dawn.
The Balloons Over Bagan was booked for five of us, which meant we split into two baskets. James went up with Elena and Yuki. Marcus and I shared the second basket with two elderly French tourists who, improbably, turned out to run a bookshop in Lyon. As we rose—slowly, the burners roaring—the temples emerged from the darkness like teeth. By the time the sun hit the horizon, we were floating 400 metres above a landscape so old and dense that it stopped being real.
I've done a lot of things alone. I've taken night trains through India and hiked solo in Nepal and lived out of a backpack for five years. But I'd never seen anything quite like the view from a hot air balloon above Bagan at dawn with four near-strangers beside me, all of us too amazed to speak.
The basket landed with a bounce. We touched earth and nobody said a word for two full minutes.
But eight thousand temples demand attention, and half a day of floating isn't enough. The next day, we hired the One Bagan Sightseeing Tour, a proper nine-hour sprint that took us through the actual archaeology of the place. Our driver, a cheerful man named Kyaw, navigated the crater-sized potholes with one hand while telling us stories of temple construction, Buddha statues, and the German engineer who'd accidentally caused some structural damage in the 1990s and never dared return.
James photographed obsessively. Marcus asked increasingly technical questions about Theravada Buddhism. Elena sat quietly and occasionally cried, which she later explained was just how she processed beauty. Yuki sketched in a notebook, capturing the way light moved across sandstone and ancient brick. I took notes for the story, but mostly I just watched my four travelling companions fall in love with a country the way you're supposed to: slowly, then all at once, with no way out.
The trek that made us feral
Kalaw is a colonial town in the Shan Hills, dotted with old British buildings and smelling like pine and apple orchards. It's also the starting point for the 3Days Less Touristic Way Trekking from Kalaw To Inle, and by God, did we need that trek.
By this point, we'd been moving together for ten days. There's a point in group travel when you either fracture or fuse. We were fusing, but also bickering like a dysfunctional family. Marcus wanted to move faster. Elena wanted to stop more often. James wanted to photograph every rock. Yuki and I mostly wanted everyone to stop complaining and enjoy themselves.
The trek fixed it. Three days on foot through hill-country villages, past tea plantations and orchards, sleeping in basic guest houses, eating rice and vegetables and whatever the locals were having. No road, no rushing, nowhere to be but exactly here.
We walked past kids herding goats. We stopped at a monastery where the monks were eating breakfast and one young monk kept trying to teach me Burmese. We crossed a river that was not quite as shallow as our guide promised, resulting in Elena and Marcus wading through water up to their ribs, cursing in four languages. We stayed in a village where the family's house didn't have electricity, and we all sat in the yard playing cards by lamplight while the grandmother made tea and refused to stop smiling at us.
On the third day, descending toward Inle Lake, nobody wanted to talk. We just walked. And somewhere between the mist in the valleys and the smell of earth and the ache in our legs, we stopped being five people who'd met by accident and became a proper unit.
The thing about endings
We had to split up in Yangon a week later. Marcus back to Sydney, Yuki to Tokyo, Elena to Moscow, James to London. I stayed another week, because that's what I do, but mostly to sit with the strangeness of suddenly being alone again.
I've read that group travel creates a specific type of bonding, the kind that doesn't always survive the real world. Maybe that's true. But standing at Yangon airport watching Marcus check his bag, making promises we might keep, I knew something had shifted. We'd been strangers for three weeks. We'd seen each other exhausted and scared and laughing so hard we couldn't breathe. We'd navigated a country together, made decisions by committee, eaten terrible things and amazing things and learned how to move as a unit.
You don't get that alone. And I say this as someone for whom solo travel has been religion and oxygen for years. There's magic in solitude. But there's a different kind of magic in five people who barely knew each other, standing in a hot air balloon above eight thousand temples at sunrise, understanding without speaking that they'd stumbled into something rare.
Myanmar opens itself differently depending on who you travel with. I've read the stories about the spiritual significance of Bagan's temples and the complex history of Yangon, but I won't forget it the way I will forget those details: Marcus' face in the balloon basket. Elena crying quietly at a temple. James capturing the exact moment Yuki negotiated a better price for a bowl of soup. The grandmother whose name I still can't spell, offering us tea in a village that doesn't appear on most maps.
Maybe that's the real reason to travel with strangers. Not for the Instagram story or the efficient itinerary. But because sometimes you meet four people who become your compass, and a country becomes the story you'll tell differently every time, because each time you tell it, you're telling it for them too.
We're already planning to go back. All five of us. Marcus has looked at flights. Elena's negotiating dates around her surgery rotation. And somehow, despite the chaos and the mishaps and the morning someone's bag got stolen and everyone panicked, I can't imagine doing it any other way.
