An amazing flow state settled in starting several days ago in Phuket, Patong Beach, Krabi and Rai Lei. Time slowed down and being in the moment was the overpowering sensation, day and night.

     The Thai people are incredibly sweet and kind. It’s their nature, and it rubs off on everyone around them. Super chill and nice.

     Today marks twenty days on the road; the one-third mark of the trip. Crazy, as it feels like I’ve only been gone for a long weekend. It’s so interesting how time is pulled and pushed into longer and shorter pieces, like taffy, on these trips.

     The journey has been tremendous and very educational so far. Terrific scenery, culture, food and people. All I could ask for, and now things are getting cooler and more different, as Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam beckon before I swing through Taiwan and Japan.

     Rai Lei is a dot of a village on a gorgeous peninsula about forty minutes by boat from Krabi. Pretty amazing with its rock formations, caves and cobalt seas. It has east and west sides, with a small village tucked into the forest between them. Approaching east Rai Lei from Krabi.

     This is the kind of place that you could hang in for a good, long while. The rest of the world simply doesn’t exist here; it’s just a sublimely beautiful landscape with shimmering turquoise waters, sand and boats shuttling silently back and forth. No worries, mon…

     Phuket, Krabi and Rai Lei were stunning visually, culturally and in terms of their food. I’ll be back in the north of Thailand in a week or so, and I’m looking forward to more of everything Thai.

     I flew into Mandalay, Myanmar yesterday from the Thai peninsula. The Royal Palace (below) was built in Mandalay in the 1880s and it is beyond enormous. If you look at a map of Mandalay, it occupies about a quarter of the city. I walked around one-quarter of its moated perimeter at a good clip and it took me over an hour. My guess is that it’s well over two miles long on each side. The British took it over during their colonial days and turned it into a military garrison (what else?), then the allies bombed it to smithereens during World War II. I’m sure it represented a very serious threat…. Anyway, it was painstakingly restored in the following decades. Must have been good to be that king…..

The moat seen above is about one-third of one of the Palace’s four sides. Really.

Schoolchildren hanging outside one of the Palace walls. They were totally stoked for me to take their photo.

Kuthodaw Pagoda, site of the world’s largest book. Young monks outside asking for alms. They were incredibly polite and seemed very content.

A sentry at a nearby pagoda. He was around 15′ tall.

These woman had sparrows inside the baskets that they were carrying on their heads. When I asked (to the extent we could communicate) what they were going to do with them (dinner, perhaps?), one said “Free.” That led me to wonder why they trapped them in the first place if the plan was to free them…

     I had dinner at a street fair (they’re everywhere here) and sampled a ton of things that I really had no idea about. The Chinese influence is very strong here, as it’s only a couple of hundred clicks from the border. Everything was delicious and my digestive system handled it all with aplomb….

I walked past this woman on the way back to my hotel. She was so sweet and innocent, just sitting on the sidewalk alone. My heart went out to her.

     I arrived in Bagan this afternoon after a seven hour bus ride from Mandalay (you can’t fly in here unless you go through Bangkok). Way off the beaten path. Ten thousand temples were built here between the 9th and 13th centuries and around four thousand still exist. An extremely powerful 6.8 earthquake in 2016 close to Bagan devastated many, but many have been rebuilt and many more continue to undergo restoration. Looking forward to checking many of them out tomorrow.

Lunch stop en route to Bagan:

The women here wear a light brown / mustard colored paint / makeup on their faces. It’s very pretty and really cool, as the patterns are completely different on all of them. The young girl on the right below was stunningly beautiful.

     Yes – I ate the stuff on top of their heads and on those trays. Once again, I didn’t know what I was actually eating, but it was all excellent. Something that looked like a donut turned out to be a delicious piece of cheese that tasted like mozzarella. Other stuff served on sticks looked like the organs of small birds or chickens, and whole tiny birds were also served. Crunchy….

     The people I’ve met in Myanmar so far, including in Bagan this afternoon and evening, have all been really nice and sincere. They honk their horns a  lot while driving here, unlike in Bali and Jakarta, but they’re not hostile while behind the wheel or motor bike. It just seems to be learned behavior. Remember that this country has been to hell and back during the past fifty years, with military dictators wrecking and plundering pretty much everything over and over again after the Brits did the same during their colonial conquest, carving it from India in the late 19th century. Democracy has arrived, haltingly, although the military still has far more power than it should, and foreign direct investment is flowing. Myanmar is very resource rich, but that alone has never guaranteed success for a nation. Let’s hope that they can modernize and raise the standard of living and well being over the next decade or two. They most definitely deserve it.