Our experience of Myanmar

Better late than never..! We ended up spending 27 days of our 28 day visa within Myanmar. A very interesting country with a very rich history, most of it very much still in the making as policies, governments and public opinions change.

As with India, and every country from now, we had a sit down in an.. Uhm.. Indian restaurant… And thought about what we would and wouldn’t miss about Myanmar.

Together, we decided we would miss:

• Friendly people – From day one it became apparent that tourism was definitely still fairly new in most parts of Myanmar. We arrived in Dawei, driving through small villages and wandering around streets with only one or two western faces to be seen. So few that the locals were very interested to stare and understand exactly what they were looking at. Media coverage has only recently opened up, some children wouldn’t have even realized there were people in the world who looked and sounded different to their own. Only on one occasion with a ‘misunderstanding’ over payment did we meet a person that wasn’t incredibly friendly and welcoming, and very rarely for any money incentives. People who wanted to simply know our background and let us know theirs, monks practicing their English, it was all in all an incredibly welcoming country.
• 3 in 1 coffee – Not exclusive to Myanmar but pretty much the only coffee you can get. We’ve found it in other Asian countries, but certainly not as frequently. Incredibly unhealthy for you, but a cheap, quick caffeine and sugar hit. Tastes like a coffee syrup at first, by the time you’ve had a few of them you’ve forgotten what coffee was supposed to be like and complaining about how they’re just not sweet enough. Probably a good thing we’re going to be cutting back on these really…
  

• Fancy buses – When we heard you get around Myanmar primarily by bus, we imagined what we’d been used to in India and were expecting for Nepal. If you could find a seat you’d be lucky, because you would be standing for 10+ hours. And even if you found a seat, don’t expect to keep it to yourself, a small family and their chicken will come sit on your lap. But this wasn’t the case. Organised, clean, seat allocated coaches, with (fairly) frequent stops, a complimentary cold towel, toothbrush and toothpaste when you do stop off. Blankets, on one occasion pillows, and if we’d paid more some of them even had TV screens for each person. Apart from when they drove past us or didn’t stop for dinner until very early morning, they’re pretty darn good.
• Inclusive breakfasts – Not once did we have a guest house or hotel where breakfast wasn’t included. Whilst it was rarely more than toast, eggs and tea or coffee, some did include pancakes, fruit and all sorts of local dishes such as fried rice and noodles. Likely part of the reason accommodation was so much more expensive, but it made sure we had breakfast, which for me especially doesn’t always happen.
• Shan noodles – One of the only foods in Myanmar we actually enjoyed. To be quite honest, they’re nothing too special, simply noodles in a stock with a few bits of vegetable. But when we were writing our list out, it was one of the best things we’d eaten in our month other than the food cooked for us on our treks, so it made this list. Not bad. Not great, but not bad.
• Mini monks (novices) – Every monastery we visited had a handful of under 20’s running around, generally playing silly buggers and not getting much in the way of Buddhism done. However, it was very interesting to watch, as in our minds monks had always been very disciplined and focused. It was easy to forget that children are children until we saw them flicking each other, running around playing tag and other games, and occasionally bundling another one on the floor.

• Interesting culture – One of the few countries in the world where men wearing skirts and folding their t-shirt up to form a makeshift bra is perfectly acceptable. Chewing betel nut and spitting wherever the mood takes them, piling people into pickup trucks to get good value for money transport and taking the time to learn how foreigners live and act are just a few of the cultural staples Myanmar has impressed upon us.

• Unlimited green tea – If you’re a fan of green tea, or even if you aren’t but can just about tolerate it, you’ll be just fine here, as with every meal (and even if you just order a cup of tea) you’re given an entire jug full of hot green tea. If it runs out, they bring you over another. Morning noon or night, you’ll be able to find refreshment for almost no money in the form of liquid leaves.

And, of course, a few things we won’t be too sad to leave behind:

• Food – Apart from the exceptions mentioned above, most other travelers we’ve spoken to will agree, the food was pretty dismal. It was cheap, we both had a noodle meal for about 30p combined one night, but in general it’s bland chewy meat based meals, swimming in about half a litre of oil. Very few of the meals left any good impression on us, and probably did little for our cholesterol levels either. Enough sustenance to survive, but not a particularly pleasant experience in that regard.
• Slow Wi-Fi – you might think this was just my bugbear but we both got incredibly frustrated with the poor Wi-Fi through-out the country. Granted, it’s better than we thought as we believed we wouldn’t have Wi-Fi the whole month, but if anything perhaps the false promise of Wi-Fi was worse than not actually having it. Every place we stayed had it, but more often than not it wasn’t working, or felt like 56k dial-up speeds. Load one webpage, click a link, go out and get some fairly terrible meal and you might have loaded the page logo by the time you’re back. I believe this will get better though, and we never tried the 3g but that sounded like it was probably a little more impressive. Just enough to let people know you’re alive, but don’t expect to stream any films. Or even load any pictures.
• Crazy money – Our first experience with a currency where it was thousands to one GBP. Naturally this won’t be the most difficult currency to get our head around (although when we went it was around 1700 kyat to £1, which doesn’t really divide into anything very nicely). To add to this, we had to use dollars in a lot of places to get better value, and these were a nightmare. Not because dollars are particularly hard to source, but because of Myanmars EXTREMELY fussy attitude to them. A single mark, crease, heck even a fold in the corner, and they’re treated almost as if you’ve handed them a used wet-wipe instead of legal tender. We had to buy a long rigid purse to keep these in as if they were sheets of wafer thin gold. Any change we received had to be carefully examined for fear of them being rejected in the next hotel. A right faff, and utterly meaningless as once we left the country we could pass on ones that looked like they’d passed through a Labrador without any issue. Weird ruling, but little we could do but go with it.
• Expensive hotels – It seems a lot better when we went than the guide books made out, mostly because we went in the low season, but the hotels were certainly the most expensive we’d been in so far. Cheapest we had for a double room was $14 a night, up to as much as $28 in Yangon. Whilst by no means expensive considering at home I’ve paid £50+ for a Travelodge room, for the area, and especially the quality of some of them, it was a bit of a piss take. However, little we could do about it but sleep in the street, and we’d been advised by guide books and other travellers that we really should book places in advance as there are limited guest houses around. In reality, we never got turned away for a place being full, only by hearing the ridiculous prices they wanted. Very strange, but at least including breakfast somewhat sweetened the deals.
• Mosquitos – Not much to say about this, you all know what bastards mosquitos are. For some reason though in Myanmar these are just about everywhere, I assume due to the jungle habitats and lakes around. Didn’t matter where we were, what sprays and lotions we used, what netting was around the room, we even used a plug in repellent towards the end, but no avail, bites all over the place. My lip turned into a damn ping pong ball.
• Entrance fees for areas – not entrance fees to venues or temples, these were (sort of) understandable (although usually very overpriced for us as foreigners). No, mostly the entrance fee just to an area was a bit much. Turning up at Bagan and being told we couldn’t go anywhere, at 4am, without paying up $40 towards the government we didn’t want to support anyway was a bit much. Luckily only Inle Lake and Bagan had this in place, but it still set us back $60 we would rather have kept in our pockets.

• Pagodas – Plenty more to see around Asia, but unfortunately there were so many in Myanmar that it’ll be hard to hold too much enthusiasm. After a couple of days of photographing just about every gilded building we could see, it soon started to wear thin as every one of them looks indiscernible from the next. Honestly, looking back through my photos I have no idea where each one was located. We weren’t convinced it was the best distribution of wealth, not the first time we’ve thought this whilst seeing the million dollar structures littering cities where people can’t afford to eat.

• Dried fish – Very popular in Myanmar. Every market, and a lot of random street corners when you least expect it, will feature this particularly overpowering musk. Diana isn’t the greatest fan of fish as it is, so this limited our movements a little as we tried to avoid the scents we didn’t particularly want.
• Bus arrival times – As good as the buses were, many of these were scheduled to drive overnight and arrive VERY early in the morning, apparently so the locals don’t lose a working day too often. Whilst this happening once in a while is actually a bonus to us as it saves us looking for accommodation for a night, when it’s happening almost every time we move, it starts to drain on us a little. Arriving at around 9am is nice so we can check in to a hotel and explore, but 3am means we lose our morning trying to catch up on sleep and hoping we won’t be charged another night in the guest house (managed to avoid it so far!).
• Treatment of animals – Honestly this one is going to come up in everywhere in Asia I think. Chickens tied upside down and held in little cages, dogs left in little cages with no water, kicking strays etc. Not nice, not going to be missed, but I think we’ll be seeing this until we reach a more Western culture (Where I'm sure it still happens but hidden away).

As for the places we visited, our favourite was Hsipaw. A fairly untouched town from tourism apart from a few guest houses, it felt the most real of the places we went and the trek we did was amazing, a great tour guide and route, great people, food and locations. Definitely the highlight for us, even if trekking 11 hours in two days did give me some incredibly weak legs for a few days.

On the other hand, our least favourite was Bagan. Although the area was quite nice with all the ruined temples and open layout, it felt incredibly geared for tourists and it gets to a point where all the temples look the same. Add to this a $20 charge each just to get in for up to 3 days maximum and a premium in some of the tea houses because we’re tourists, and we just generally weren’t as excited about it all as we could have been. We spent two days here, it was definitely enough!

Things we took away from Myanmar:

• Guide books are exactly that – guides. We did a lot of research before deciding to go and almost decided not to the day before going to the embassy believing it would be too difficult. We were told there are no ATMs, difficult transport links, impossible to stay anywhere and if we did it would cost maybe $60 a night in some places, no internet and SIM cards costing £20+. Reality was almost exactly the opposite, to the point we disregarded the guide books since. It was a very easy and rewarding country to travel compared to what we were lead to believe, which was a relief. A pinch of salt with all recommendations from now on…!
• Planning every single aspect isn’t good, but a little preparation came in handy. Having clean crisp dollars arranged beforehand whilst we were in Thailand made everything a lot simpler, probably the only good advice we had before we arrived. We would have been pretty stuffed had we turned up with any old US dollars, they really were very fussy!
• Travelling in the low season paid dividends. Everything we wanted to do was fine, nowhere was fully booked, everything had capacity and everyone generally seemed very happy to see us, likely because there were far less customers around at the time of year. It all felt a lot more personal than we imagine the high season would be, where it would be more of a factory getting the most tourists through an attraction as fast as possible. Maybe, maybe not, but we found the low season rewarding.
• Treks give a good insight into the true country. Getting off the beaten track was very revealing of how real life is for little villages, not just the huge cities and tourist trap towns. I’d never been on an arranged trek/tour before, and was dubious about it, but once you get over the severe aches it’s a great way to see something real.
• Our food standards have changed a lot, whilst we used to have meat with almost every meal, we’ve come to appreciate good vegetarian food, partly due to our time back in Sadhana Forest, and party due to the meals in Myanmar being so terrible it made us wonder why an animal lost its life for it. Whilst we haven’t cut meat completely, it’s certainly reduced from how we were.
• We’ve come to appreciate when we get what we believe it a truly fair service. Whilst we’re not quite as budget travelers as some as we had a good run up to our trip to save with two incomes, we are trying to get good value for our money. This works both ways though, and we are happy to pay more when we find people who surpass our expectations.

So that’s Myanmar. A positive experience all in all, we’d certainly recommend people to go if you get a chance, and July time when we went seemed a good balance of not too busy and not too terrible weather.

Bye bye Myanmar!