Pyin Oo Lwin

Pyin Oo Lwin

Visiting an old British hill station in the middle of Burma definitely felt a bit unsettling. No matter how much I'd read about it, stepping into this charming little town felt so odd after we'd just spent days seeing hundreds of pagodas everywhere. It was now time for horse-drawn carriages, colonial houses and lots and lots of trees! We were most excited to spend a few days in Pyin Oo Lwin because of its much cooler climate (it's situated in the mountains, a couple hours by car from Mandalay). Temperatures still reached 25ºC during the day but after months in near 40ºC weather every day, the air almost felt cool and actually a bit cold at night, if you can believe it. Like most people, we came here to relax, which we sure did plenty of. But looking back on our time in Pyin Oo Lwin, what I remember most is the friendliness of its inhabitants. Yet again, Burma treated us with nothing but kindness.

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Start of our Kiwi Road Trip: Mount Cook, Queenstown, and Milford Sound

Start of our Kiwi Road Trip: Mount Cook, Queenstown, and Milford Sound

New Zealand was somewhere both of us were extremely excited to visit. Anaïs had never been and, while I spent a semester in college studying at Otago University in Dunedin, I didn't explore the north island at all. We were excited to return to a few places I had been and to venture on to places new to us both. Given how expensive travel can be there, we planned to spend only about a month traveling across the country and we needed to make our time count.

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1 Place 2 Names: Foz do Iguaçu / Cataratas del Iguazu

1 Place 2 Names: Foz do Iguaçu / Cataratas del Iguazu

The final stop of our short 2-week Brazil trip were the well-known Iguaçu Falls, which we traveled to from Rio. After a full 25 hour bus ride and 2 more inter-city ones, we arrived to the Brazilian side of the falls. That's right, these waterfalls are so immense that they spread across both Brazil and Argentina. Lucky for us, we got to enjoy both sides.

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