Yangon, Burma: day one: it begins.

---

The internet in Burma is not so good. It is widely available and almost all the places I stayed had free WIFI, it is just that it was basically useless most of the time. At the first place I stayed (Aung Si Guesthouse in Yangon) my laptop wouldn't even connect to the internet. At the second place (Winner Guesthouse in Bagan) the connection was so slow that it kept timing out: it literally took an hour for me just to open my email account on the first night and then I couldn't read more than a couple because they took so long to open that the “try again” message would come up. On the second night I gave up trying to access my emails after two hours. The third place, Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary, didn't have either electricity or WIFI so that one doesn't count. Back at the Winner Guesthouse in Bagan it surprisingly took only 15 minutes to get into my emails and with numerous hiccups I managed to not only delete all the unrequired ones but actually send replies to others! In Mandalay at the ET Hotel I couldn't get the connection at all for two days but then for most of the third day I had it running at a regular broadband speed! When I got to Kalaw, the place I was staying (Pine Land Inn) only got their WIFI set up the day after I arrived and it was very good. In Nyaungshwe (by Lake Inle) my guesthouse had no WIFI but the nearby restaurants did and it was a good speed. Back in Yangon, the Yoma Hotel had a good connection, and then for the last night I was back at the Aung Si Guesthouse again where the WIFI was perfect (!)

Honestly though, I was just amazed that there even was internet over almost my entire route through Burma!

I will try to get photos on these blogs and some of the preceding ones from Malaysia but I will need to do that in an internet cafe (the Travelblog site won't let me do it from my laptop) so not sure when that will be because it will take up time and money. But, in the meantime, here is what I got up to in Burma......





YANGON (day one): 26 December 2013

The Burma adventure begins today. My planned route around the country was following the standard tourist path which, as luck would have it, is also a good path for bird-watching. A lot of the country is closed to foreigners, although much of that can still be accessed if paying hefty fees for “official tours”, but there is free movement within a certain prescribed area, a sort of “tourist quadrangle”. With the way Burma is progressing I would not be surprised if it is only a couple of years away before the whole country is open – and then I'll be back for the Burmese snub-nosed monkey!! By then it might be too expensive to visit though, because the yearly price increases here are ridiculous and the costs of accommodation, taxis, etc are already far in excess of what they should be. My travel plan went like this: start in Yangon (visit the zoo one day, visit Hlawga Park for birds the next), bus up to Bagan for birds, bus from there to Lake Inle for birds and then on to the hill-forests at Kalaw for birds, then bus up to Mandalay to visit the zoo, bus from there to Bago to bird at Lake Moeyunggyi, and finally bus back to Yangon for departure to Thailand. Twenty-two days total. That was the original plan but there were some changes at the last minute and along the way, including adding in two “non-tourist” wildlife spots (which ramped up my average daily expenditure rate for the country!!) and rearranging the order a little so from Bagan I took a boat upriver to Mandalay and then went from there by bus to Kalaw and Lake Inle.

Burma is one and a half hours behind Malaysia which is a rather odd time difference (normally time differences are in solid hours I thought). I got my first look at Burma from the plane, looking down as we lowered in altitude. Burma is.....brown. Everything is brown – brown earth, brown rivers. And the entire landscape seemed to be divided up into fields, so from the air it had the appearance of the cracked mud of a parched lake bed. It was 18 degrees when we landed, a pleasant change from the high 30s of Kuala Lumpur, although later in the day it got up to around 28 or 30 degrees. My “Airport Bird” (the first bird seen in a country when I arrive at the airport) was a white wagtail. I was booked at the Aung Si Guesthouse in Yangon for US$20. I normally prefer winging it but this is the main tourist season in Burma and apparently the hotels in Yangon get booked up easily because only a percentage of the total hotels available are allowed to accommodate foreigners. Burma may not seem like it would be a popular tourist destination but it is getting to be just that now that it is opening up; it has been described as being “the new Thailand”. So I had pre-booked, and the booking included a free pick-up at the airport which was handy. Outside the airport there were drongos in the trees by the parking lot.

I think I'm going to like Burma. Yangon is a totally old-school kind of Asian town, all chaotic with dusty streets, with bicycles and rickshaws wending through the smoke-belching traffic, with skinny long-limbed dogs roaming everywhere, and with half the people wearing “local” dress rather than “western”. It reminds me of Indonesia. I saw a train on the way from the airport which seriously looked exactly like a full-size version of those tin train models you would have played with as a child if you were born in the 1920s. But in amongst the old is the new, starting at the airport with the giant Coca Cola sign saying “welcome to Myanmar”. Things are changing rapidly in Burma, and I've already noticed several things that are at odds with what my apparently-dodgy research had told me. First up was that I had read you need to declare cameras and computers and such at the airport and keep the document to show on the way out again, and that video cameras weren't allowed in, and that you were only allowed one camera. None of that is true. Motorbikes and bicycles outlawed in Yangon? Rubbish. Everything I had read said there were no ATMs in Burma; you had to bring in all the money you needed for your whole stay and hope you didn't run out. That is no longer the case. At the airport there is a big signboard saying “Get out your Myanmar kyat at the nearest ATM with Mastercard” or something along those lines. If there was going to be an ATM anywhere it would be at the airport of course, but if there weren't any ATMs in the country the sign might be construed as being a little disingenuous. However just a couple of hundred metres from my guesthouse I saw an ATM at a bank. There were some men working on it, but I don't know if they were installing it or just re-filling it. There was a little crowd around them, either waiting for them to finish or simply being awestruck at this wondrous creation that spews forth money like magic. The next day I saw three more from a bus. There's at least one in Bagan that I saw, and they're in Mandalay and Bago and Naypyidaw as well. There's even one in Kalaw and one in Nyaungshwe (by Lake Inle) which are nowt but tiny villages! They are obviously starting them off in the tourist areas, but I expect in six months there will be ATMs at every street corner in the country! The machines only give out the local currency, kyat (pronounced “chat”; there are about 823 of them to one New Zealand dollar; the conversion in your head is easier for Americans because there are about 985 kyat to one US Dollar, so for example, 15,000 kyat equals roughly US$15). I don't know what kinds of foreign cards they accept so you still need to bring in all your money, but no longer are you up the creek without a paddle if you underestimated your spending requirements. I had brought in far more US dollars than I would actually need, because better to have too much than run out with no way to get more! The dollars need to be in perfect condition, not even the tiniest tear or pen mark or folded corner. I checked with the girl at the reception of the Aung Si Guesthouse as to how accurate this information was and she said that is correct; you can't even fold your notes in half because then they won't be accepted. The local kyat notes though, they look like scraps of old paper you found in the gutter. I changed US$200 into 197,000 kyat at the airport, which is only about a dollar different from the amount I got when checking an internet currency site beforehand. I had read that nobody in Burma will accept US$100 notes with a serial number starting with CB because they are associated with forgeries. I had therefore checked my 100s on getting them in Kuala Lumpur, and all of them were brand new and had L serial numbers. Apparently L serial numbers are also not accepted in Burma as I found out when I got there!! Just as well 100s weren't the only denominations I had!

Oh, also, the cable tv system in Burma is called Skynet. That's right, when the rise of the machines happens it will be starting in Burma!! I think that alone is worthy of its own paragraph.

Yangon is a city of crows. They are everywhere, noisy black maelstroms swirling in the sky, out-competing even the feral pigeons and mynahs in number. I couldn't work out which species they were though – when I first saw the flocks I thought they were house crows just from the size of the birds but they don't look like them and they don't sound like them (they sound like seagulls!); then I thought they must be large-billed crows but they are much smaller than the ones I'm used to and again don't sound anything like them. I have since seen written in a Birdquest trip report that they are indeed house crows – very odd appearance! There are both house sparrows and tree sparrows here, and it is interesting seeing mixed flocks of them feeding at the roadsides. The house sparrows are big muscular brutes compared to the delicate little tree sparrows.

I arrived at the airport at 8am but it took an hour to get to the guesthouse (lots of traffic here!) and then after sorting out information and a bus ticket to Bagan and food and everything else it was already after 11am. The Yangon Zoo is only about thirty or forty minutes walk from where I was staying and as this was probably the only day I would get to visit, that is where I went. I made a short stop at a pet shop on the way because outside in a couple of cages there were about forty vernal hanging parrots. Inside was all captive-bred animals (hamsters, Asian arowana, freshwater stingrays, goldfish, etc). The Yangon Zoo is such a big rambling hotch-potch of paths that walking around it is like a little Lego man trying to make his way through a plate of spaghetti bolognese. There are dead ends and back-tracks and loops and extra entrance points. At one point I was walking back along a path I thought I had just come along – and I saw a paddock of elephants! Where the heck did that come from?! The zoo is very green, it is like walking through a park, but the cages sadly are often still the original cages from when the zoo opened a century ago (such as the Carnivora House from 1915). As usual the bears get royally screwed.

After the zoo I tried to find the Aquarium (yes, Yangon has an Aquarium too!). It is right near the zoo somewhere, by the lake, but I couldn't find it so I gave up. I think it must be inside the area that you need to pay to get into to see the temples and whatever else is there. I might have time to try again when I come back to Yangon in three weeks time.

Most of the birds seen today were not new for the trip but all were still new for my Burma list which was starting from zero!! The only additions to the year list were the jungle mynahs around town and the large flock of lesser whisting ducks on the zoo lake (which I am taking to be wild birds). For mammals there was a black rat stealing food from the Burmese star tortoises at the zoo. There were also squirrels everywhere in the zoo which must be red-bellied (Pallas'😉 squirrels because there don't seem to any other possible candidates, but they look really different in colour to ones I've seen elsewhere.

---