In Bangkok’s Don Mueang airport waiting for my flight to Myanmar. Despite all my planning I’m holding my laptop in the air as if I’m reenacting a scene from the lion king trying to get a clear enough signal to book a last minute flight on the other side in Myanmar; which thanks to some last minute research had suddenly become a necessity. Knowing that the internet in Myanmar was bordering on 1990’s dial up, my best shot was booking it here and now. I click ‘book’. I get an error, I try again, it won’t go through… all the while I keep hearing over the intercom that they’re boarding my flight to get into the country.
What’s that saying of best laid plans, Mice and Men and all that…
The necessity came from some last minute research on the Train route from Yangon to Bagan, which were my next stops. The train it’s self ran on the same tracks from when the Brit’s had Myanmar as a colony, which was up until World War II. I’d settled on the idea for a while as it seemed like a bit of an adventure and nice way to see the countryside on the way up; But as I did more and more research leading up to the trip I kept coming upon reviews that were changing my mind and what seemed like a cool and adventurous idea at first, started to seem like a bit of a roll of the dice in-terms of safety.
The final deciding push was a blog post about a backpacker who had been thrown from the train and how they had woken up in a field by themselves in the middle of the night. I decided it was worth the extra ~$200 Canadian to grab a flight. Booking a flight once in Myanmar would’ve meant having to spend a quarter of my cash on hand just for one leg of the journey (more on the intricacies of cash in Burma later…) , and knowing the internet there to do research or shop around was more akin too dial-up from back in the day, I was stuck trying to book a flight through the not-much-better airport wifi in Bangkok.
After two failed attempts, the third time was the charm, the booking went through, my phone rang with a confirmation email, I was good to go. Slamming the lid to my laptop, I grab my bag and run for the gate, I was off to Myanmar.
“It’s Fine”…
I landed in Yangon, completely unsure of what to expect with Burma. They have only started readily letting in Foreigners in the last handful of years and the relevance of a lot of the research I did on traveling here was heavily dependent on how old it was, so much so that there were differences between even 2015 and 2016 as things were changing at a huge rate.
The one thing that was solid was that most people need an eVisa, which is sort of like a Visa-On-Arrival approval voucher. You apply for one through a company and you receive an email with the voucher a few days later. You don’t actually receive the Visa, the voucher only says you’re potentially eligible for one once you arrive at the airport in Myanmar. You can also apply for the Visa in Bangkok but you need to have a good number of day’s to allow for processing. The eVisa though you generally can only use at the airports, not the land crossings, as far as I know.
I went the eVisa route through Myanmar Visa Corp. The process was relatively painless and I received my voucher a few days after applying. The only hiccup were some errors on my pre-approval form with ‘port of entry’ among other things not matching what I had filled in on the application form. I was reassured by the company that “it’s fine”. Now, generally when entering transitioning-military-dictatorship states, I try to keep my ducks in a row when it comes to travel documents, but each time I pressed the issue I was told it was ‘fine’… with all the reviews they had online, I figured it probably was actually ‘fine’.
Having finally landed, I walked up to immigration, handed my travel documents. The lady looked it up and down, looked at me, stamped a bunch of stuff aggressively and passed me through.
Turns out it really was “fine”.
Money Money Money
“It’s not working” a somewhat panicked and stressed sounding westerner let out as he kicked the ATM. I realized I’d sorted out one issue, the visa, and now it was on to the next quirk with Myanmar. One of the most stressful things about traveling here wasn’t the smog, difference in food or level of constant noise, but it’s with money.
They use their own currency “Kyat” (sounds kind of like ‘cetch’) as well as US dollars. But the USD has to be completely pristine if not brand new with zero marks or most shops won’t except them. On top of that credit cards and ATM’s are completely unreliable and are a crap shoot if they ever work. You pretty much should count on bringing everything you need into the country in terms of USD cash.
Using money here is so much of an adventure and practice in patient that I wrote a bunch about it over here(Coming Soon 😉 . If you’re planning on going I really recommend doing your research on the issues with money here.
Into Town
Exiting out of the Airport, I grabbed a cab and we took off.
This was my first experience of with a country like Myanmar. It felt exactly what I would’ve expected India to feel like. Through the constant honking, smog like I’ve never seen it, and cow’s walking through the street, I truly wasn’t in Korea or Canada no more.
That night after surviving the cab ride and getting checked in to my hostel, I decided to wander to find food.
Walking around, I came up to an Asian Noodle hut, sat next there was a lady selling Samosa’s out of her truck, next to her was a Muslim man selling fruit next to him. It hit me right there that I hadn’t realized how much I’d been in the Korea bubble and I could see also full well why they say Burma’s where China meets India.
It’s a smashing of the two cultures, and there’s this blend of multiculturalism I hadn’t seen in a long time. I finished off the night with some samosa’s that were barely a dollar for a bag of some and walked back through the streets lit be the glow of yellow street lights and sound of a thousand horns.
Temple Hoping
The next morning was an early start, and not by choice with horn’s honking and chanting across the city. It was still a pretty unique thing to wake up to. It didn’t matter as today was an easy day spent wandering the city. With a list of what I wanted to see I went and got lost in the city for the day.
I’d forgotten to watch my dresscode and had to buy a longyi to cover my legs. Most of the men wear them here to begin with, so it felt like embracing the culture a little.
China Town
The sun dropped so I took off to check out China town after being told it was where a ton of great food can be found. I came up on a street food hut full of locals, I pulled up a stool and grabbed a bowl of what I can only assume was curry soup with rice and fried chickpea paste as a side. It was barely two dollars, for the entire thing, and it kept me full until the morning.
Colonial History and Imprint
My last day there, I spent exploring another part of the town. If you’re ever here, probably one of the most interesting things I can say to go and do is to wander around the crumbling colonial architecture left over from British rule. You would walk by buildings with imprints over door ways like “John and Wilson Co.” half faded after a century of paint and erosion. Businesses still running in buildings that looked straight out of old prints of streets of London. It was surreal in a way, being in the middle of south east Asia to find this sort of architecture. It also speaks to the history of conflict in this country through the last century and a half.
From there, it was time for the next stop, after grabbing a lunch of tea and fried rice with a German backpacker, I flaged a taxi. It was time to head up for a more ancient history lesson. It was off to Bagan.