Un-Tours Of Myanmar Offer Adventure and Unpredictability

Dustin Main was living an enviable version of remote work: running a travel gear blog called Too Many Adapters out of Thailand, crossing the border every 30 days to renew his visa. On one of those routine border runs, he decided to stay a few days in Myanmar instead of turning around, and the country hooked him almost immediately.

Over the next several years he went back more than a dozen times, building friendships, picking up some of the language, and learning to navigate a country that can still be unpredictable for visitors. He put together a photo exhibition on Myanmar's shift from military rule to a more open nation, and people who saw his photos and heard his stories started asking to come along. Before designing his own trip, Dustin took one himself — a guided tour of Iran through an Iranian friend, built around local restaurants, food festivals, and abandoned mud villages instead of the usual bus-group circuit. That experience became the model.

He capped his own trips at eight people, calling them "un-tours" instead of tours — small enough to be intimate, even though it limits how much a single trip can earn. His first Myanmar un-tour, priced at nearly $3,000 per person, sold its first seat within a couple of hours of the announcement email, then took a few months to fill the rest of the group. The trip visited neighborhood cafes and temples after dark, and closed with the Festival of Lights, where locals send fireworks-laden hot air balloons into the night sky.

Dustin has since led six more of these trips, refining the model each time: hiring a Myanmar-based guide as an assistant to help plan logistics and troubleshoot on the fly, building in two free days so guests — and Dustin, an introvert himself — can recharge, and setting expectations up front about Myanmar's unpredictable infrastructure and unfamiliar food. He now runs two un-tours a year, largely filled through word of mouth from past guests, and nets around $14,000 a year in profit after expenses. He's writing a book about Myanmar and eyeing Jordan as his next un-tour destination.

As Dustin puts it, “Tour companies typically make money by selling as many seats as possible, and by limiting mine to eight people max, I'm really cutting out the main profit maker.” He's chasing something else instead — trips small enough that everyone gets to experience the country the way he did on that first trip across the border. Find him at dustinmain.com.