My First Impression of Yangon

A couple of years ago, I bought a promo ticket to Myanmar but unfortunately was unable to use it due to some budget concerns. Luckily, budget carriers in Air Asia often have fare promotions and I was able to snagged again a great deal for my tickets to Myanmar last February.

Me and my friend were excited on our flight to Yangon as it would be our first time to Myanmar. I have heard tons of great things about Myanmar and we both could not wait to see it ourselves.

I usually sleep on my flights but not on this one as I was super stoked to see the country for the first time. I have been to some borders of Myanmar in the past for visa runs during my stay in Thailand but I’m not really counting it as a visit to this country.

Visa Concerns

As a Philippine passport holder, we do get a free 14 day visa free access to Myanmar (as of the time of writing) unfortunately our tickets during that time were for 15 days since we bought the tickets prior to the announcement of the visa free access. We were thinking of rebooking the tickets to take advantage of the free visa unfortunately the price of rebooking cost way more than the cost of visa so we opted to get the visa instead in Myanmar Embassy in Bangkok.

The process was really easy although the waiting time was quite long when we took our visa because of the huge number of tourists who were also processing their visas the day that we applied. I won’t write anymore about the process as it’s very easy for almost everyone. I’ll just post a link of Christine’s blog (with a video) about the process, you can find it here.

Money

A lot of people reiterated that we should only bring crisp and clean dollar notes. What we did was we went to various banks and money exchange offices in Bangkok to look for the best rate and changed our Thai Bath to US Dollar. Make sure that you mention to your chosen establishment (bank or money exchange shop) that you need new US dollar bills for your Myanmar trip, most of them know the drill and they’ll give you new bills. Be sure to inspect the bills before you leave the shop to make sure that there are no marks nor stamp as it might not be accepted.

ATM

We only exchange dollar bills that would last us for a week and withdrew the rest of the money at the airport in Yangon. Prior our flight, we’ve read that there are functional ATMs at the airport and we were able to withdrew money successfully. I noticed some ATMs in Yangon although I did not use any of them since we were carrying enough cash for this whole trip (USD and money withdrawn at the airport).

Accommodation

This is the area that sets Myanmar apart from it’s neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. There’s a huge demand for accommodation and there’s a short supply to meet the needs so the result is high prices. The typical $5-$10 kind of accommodation in Thailand, Cambodia’ Laos or Vietnam cost around $12 and up. Luckily we found a very cheap guesthouse in Yangon called Mahabandoola Guesthouse where we paid $12 for an aircon room (double) thanks to for blogging about it. The accommodation was very basic but we’re not complaining since it’s very cheap compare to the other guesthouses in Yangon. It was comfortable though. Hopefully in the coming months or years, there’ll be more guesthouses, hostels and hotels in the city.

People We’ve Met

We’re lucky that most people that we met in Yangon were very nice to us. Despite the fact that we have a language barrier they tried to help us whenever we ask for directions. In instances wherein we didn’t understand each other, some of them called some people who knows how to speak English just to be able to help us. We also walked at night in some areas and got lost and fortunately got back to our hostel safely after asking some locals for directions.

Walking Around Yangon

Our original plan was to spend at least three days in Yangon but we do know that travel plans do change so instead of three days we just spent one whole day walking around Yangon and left the following morning to spend most of our time in smaller towns.

The whole day was packed with exploring the streets of Yangon, luckily there are lots of interesting historical buildings within walking distance to where we were staying.

Here are some of the places that we visited in Yangon:

Burma High Court Building