The Wanderings of busman7

Well managed to do it again, clicked on the wrong thingy & presto my 1st post on Myanmar vanished to the nether regions of cyber space!! Oh well s**t happens so here we go again.

The disappeared post was basically about the trials & tribulations of acquiring a visa & cash to enable a traveler to visit this unique country that has many similarities to Cuba. That said a major difference is NO AI resorts so the casual tourist had best stick to Varadero or Cancun where you have a beach that could be anywhere in the world & leave Myanmar to the dedicated traveler!

For the visa don’t even think about jumping through the hoops required to get your visa from your home country, merely set aside one day in Bangkok & go to the Myanmar Embassy along with 810 Baht for the visa + 450 (about $40 CAD)for same day service (pick up at 3:00pm). All you need is your passport + a photo copy of it, 2 (not 3 as the web site claims) passport pics, the name of your first Guest House & the cash, get there near opening at 9:00 am get the 3 forms, fill them out then go exploring until 3 pm when you pick up your passport with visa at the express window (no need to stand in the long line with the rest who were too cheap to pay the extra $14 but chose to make a second trip to the Embassy & had 3 days to kill) or who paid for a service to do it for them.

Now you have the visa the tricky part is getting US $ (as there are NO ATM’s & very few, if any, places that accept credit cards) without paying the rip-off bank charges, only tried 2 banks in a mall on Sat morning but would imagine most are the same in requiring you to get Thai Baht at the ATM only then will they give you US $. As my cc limits cash withdrawals to $500/day I was forced to bite the bullet & pay for some on Sat. However Thought there was a way to beat the banks at the airport & finally discovered an ATM, in the gate area past immigration & security that will give you the whopping total of 5 US$100 bills so you only get stuck for the cc withdrawal charge + (of course) the daily interest until due date, however I beat them there as I had preloaded my US$ card.

The next interesting thing with money (as the airport money changers do not have any Kyats) is finding a black market money changer in Yangon (only place with decent rates) that has a good rate & won’t try to short change you. When I changed mine the rate was 1000 Kyat/US$ so that meant that for every US$100 changed you received 100 (1000 Kyat) bills, that makes quite a stack when changing for a 3 week budget. Good thing Myanmar is a safe country to travel.

Entry was a breeze with no problems but they take the swine flu (pandemic, yeah right!!) a touch overboard by all immigration officers wearing masks & of course the temperature check upon entering the airport.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 10:19 and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.