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Published: February 12th 2011
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We arrived in Yangon with the afternoon flight of Air Asia from Bangkok. Our first impression was that the airport was very modern; a neat small airport, not busy... however we had to wait about 40 minute for immigration. In the queue my mom got talking to Carmen from Germany, who wanted to share a taxi into central Yangon with us. At the baggage reclaim another traveler, Eitan from Israel, joined our taxi group. He was a helpful traveler, as he had been to Myanmar several times before, traveling for his work as well as for holidays.
After checking a few taxis we finally got a reasonable price($8) to town and got in our windowless and rather shabby cab. We chatted to the other travelers and got some helpful tips from Eitan. We also realized we had come on the trip pretty unprepared and with possibly too little money...however we were booked into our hotel for the first night and decided to figure out the rest on day 2, when we planned to visit a travel contact we had gotten through Van Verre reizen (with whom we booked our custom trip to Indonesia in 2008).
After a nice, simple
noodle soup we headed for our hotel (Thamada, a midrange hotel in a good location, with dark and slightly somber but clean rooms). Having been advised to take malaria pills we took one at dinner, however this made me sick during the night- and hesitant to continue taking them...(I didn't take any more after this, I was told it really wasn't necessary at this time of year, dry season, as long as you use Deet etc)
The next morning I felt somewhat better and we headed for our travel contact, EPG, conveniently located one street away from our hotel. We met with Mr Aung and Aye Mon and explained which sights we wanted to visit during our relatively short stay. We also explained that we were on a bit of a tight budget... A real problem in Myanmar is that there are NO ATMs and you can't use your credit card...so what you bring is what you have. On top of that, you need to bring a lot of US dollar notes, and they need to be crisp, clean, no marks, folds or tears. You can change these into local Kyats or the lesser used FECs (for entry fees
to certain areas). No one will tell you exactly what the exchange rate is, but youll get about 820-840 kyat for a dollar. If you exchange on the street they are likely to give a better rate, around 900 for the dollar but that seemed very risky to us. So we stuck with local businesses. We exchanged at EPG, at small shops and at a restaurant. (Best rates were in Yangon, worst in Kalaw.)
So having explained our money situation, they looked into making travel arrangements whilst we visited the 'gem of Yangon', the Schwedagon Paya. Located just north of the centre, about 20 minutes walk it is a gigantic golden stupa which you can see lit up from all different parts of town. Spotting it from our taxi on the way into Yangon it took our breath away. As you walk into the complex through teakwood stairways it is nice and cool, and very quiet despite the many salespeople. It being the nr 1 tourist sight in yangon I expected it to be full of foreign visitors but instead it was quiet.... There were several local visitors, locals picnicking or sleeping in the pagodas and we spotted only
3 other tourists!! Bizarre..but we have found that in general, we see very few other tourists in Myanmar.
After enjoying a few hours strolling through the pagodas and visiting the different buddhas we walked back to EPG. They had found a logical route for us, including Mandalay, which we'd initially left off our itinerary because of short time in Myanmar and the long travel distances. They argued Mandalay would be a nice starting point for us to take a boat over the Ayeyarwady river to Bagan, so that sounded like a good plan! The transport options were good and they offered to also find suitable hotels in each location. Some of the hotels were pretty expensive and as we still wanted to plan part of the trip ourselves, so we added a few Lonely Planet options in there too to bring the price down and to have a few smaller guesthouses rather than large hotels. The total was very near to our total budget however, so we looked into a payment solution. We arranged we would transfer the flight costs through Van Verre (their Dutch contact) at a later date. Having sorted most of our transport costs we were
very relieved that money would not be a big problem, even though we would still have to watch our spending money!
We now had our travel itinerary and this meant an extra day in Yangon which we hadn't counted on. We needed another night booked in our hotel, but when we checked they were fully booked. The reception staff phoned around for us to several hotels but everything was full... It was Chinese New Year and apparently many people were on vacation.... Eventually we found a budget option downtown (Mayfair Inn, $15 w/out breakfast) and took a taxi there. Finding our guesthouse was a bit of a challenge with narrow oneway streets and a chaotic street scene when it was just getting dark. The street it was in was busy and looked very dirty so this had mom worried, but when we saw the guesthouse it looked clean and quiet. The room was basic but the beds were better than the ones we'd slept in the night before 😊. we walked across Merchant Street where we found another simple but tasty dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant.
The next morning- as breakfast wasn't included at this guesthouse- we
went looking for a little bite to eat. The kind lady at the Mayfair inn mentioned a tea house around the corner so we headed out to explore. When we thought "tea house", we weren't expecting a Starbucks but maybe a small cafe with a few tables. But we couldn't find one. So we bought some pineapple pieces from a market stall, some custard bread from another...and then realized that the 'tea shop' was actually a cart, some plastic childrens chairs and tiny tables (boxes?). We decided to go for it and squatted on the mini chairs. This seemed to amuse the owner and he quickly brought us some nice English tea (with plenty of milk and sugar). The neighboring Indian food stall (we've seen lots of Indian influence in Myanmar) brought a few samosas and a kind of donut and we had our own little Yangon street breakfast! For just 600 kyat! Our 100 kyat tip was 'too much' apparently because when we bought another two bananas at another neighboring stall, they gave a third for free...Smiles all around.
By now it was time to check out so we headed back, packed our things and decided to go
on a small walking tour past the markets and Chinatown. No sign of any New Years festivities but it was busy enough on a normal day. We stopped at a small gallery with beautiful paintings. It really is a shame that tourists have to plan ahead with their budget (and that we usually underestimate how much we spend), otherwise I'm sure this young artist exhibited here would be selling a lot more!!!
After walking around the markets and picking up our transport tickets at EPG we stopped at Cafe Aroma (Myanmars slightly less atmospheric answer to Starbucks) for a lunch/dinner and their good coffee. After that we were knackered and walked to our guesthouse from where we took a taxi to Aung Mingalar Highway Bus terminal, where the overnight bus to Mandalay was waiting for us.
As the sun was setting we caught a last glimpse of the Schwedigon Paya, a definite highlight of our 2 days in Yangon. The road to Mandalay was a long one....
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