Mandalay Hill

On the Mandalay Hill  we were admiring a great monastery and people working at its renewal. From the hill we could enjoy a beautiful panorama which confirmed the enormity of city with more than one million inhabitants.   We are leaving out the names of the monasteries, temples and stupas, because ...

Mandalay and its life

Mandalay on the Irrawaddy River is the second largest city in Burma. In the nineteenth century it was briefly the capital of the country. The city has about a hundred workshops making votive gold flakes. This job involves many hours of ponding a plate of gold, until it become a very thin flake. The...

Burma or Myanmar

The country has eight nationalities (called here the races), and in each there are varying ethnic groups which total up to 165! Hence permanent deep social and political separations, and in the past, for those reasons, the country had easily surrendered to the British colonization.   At present, B...

Asiatique

Asiatique is a large outdoors shopping centre in form of a theme park. Situated on the river Chao Phraya, in place of the old transhipment port of, formerly managed by the Chinese. This is a middle class shopping centre, but you have fun there at any time of the day, if the weather allows. We happ...

Bangkok first

We got to Bangkok via Helsinki with Finnair. Traditionally, here we begin our travel in Southeast Asia. We get organized here and get rid of the jet-lag. Today we are going to the ancient capital of the kingdom of Thailand - Ayuttaya. The Kingdom existed in the years 1330-1767 . The most interest...

15. The Koh Larn Island - the end of holidays

At the end of our  holidays a  trip to the island of Koh Larn. Unfortunately, we were not the only tourists there. Actutally, there were hundreds of people - on  a small island and the beaches  could hardly accommodate everybody who arrived there. It also was  a new experience for us. ...

14. b. Pattaya by night

Today two entries. b. It is obvious that holidays in Pattaya without a hard night, it's not vacation. For many, this means strolling down the streets from bar to bar, from store to store. But Pattaya its "Wwalking" Street" is something special. Pictures do not reflect the buzzl...

14.a. Pattaya, as you like it

Today two entries. a. Tuesday Pattaya has a bad reputation: Mafias, drugs, sex tourism, crowds of tourists and dozens of thousands of Russians with their own businesses, agencies, advertising in their language, etc. There could be a long list of reasons why not to go to Pattaya. ...