Myanmar Adventure Outfitters is a passion project of Byron & Eileen Hartzler, an American and Canadian couple who has lived and worked in Myanmar and Thailand (working into Myanmar) for more than 7 years, focused on developing people in the Shan State of Myanmar.  They are avid outdoors people and are new to business.  The passion that drives them is to create opportunities in Northern Shan State to slowly prevent the movement of unemployed people to neighbouring nations, where they are at risk of countless forms of injustice. 

THE VISION IS SIMPLE

1. We want to go out and explore with you into Northern Shan State, introducing you to and giving you a love for both the natural beauty of the land as well as the diverse and rich cultures that inhabit the region.  

2. We intend to give back and invest in the communities you encounter on your adventure.  Merely travelling to isolated communities creates opportunity for them via a new industry, but we also work together with these communities, partnering our profits with their vision for community progress.

Myanmar Adventure Outfitters (MAO) is a social enterprise, and our focus is to invest profits back into the communities we interact with.  So that MAO can grow and thus create more opportunities in more communities, we need to reinvest into our own growth, creating a sustainable means of investing in communities, not reliant on outside or NGO funding.  Our growth means more investment in communities and a broader reach into more communities.  In our startup couple years, we will reinvest most of our profits back into MAO with fewer profits being invested into community progress.  But our goal is to grow so that a greater percentage of profit can go to communities we engage with in Northern Shan State.  

With the allocated profits, we will collaborate with others and listen to the communities we engage with to invest some of our profits in Progress Projects to see sustainable progress in these communities.  In this way, as a traveller, you can be confident that an adventure with us is both for you and for the people you interact with along your journey.  

We believe that the vision of the Myanmar's national government's Ministry of Hotels and Tourism (MOHT) reflects our vision for the far north of Shan State.  We want to develop the tourism industry responsibly, and celebrate Myanmar and its varied cultures!