Yangon Arrival

03 Feb 2008

I have arrived in Yangon, Myanmar. There are surprises! There are no ATM’s. Sometimes there is electricity!. There is no mobile phone network. Wifi is not yet word in their vocabulary and Internet Cafe’s still serve coffee whilst you wait for the connection. Many people wear pancake mix smeared on their cheeks. Indian’s with all their colourful often flower oriented antics appear to make up a not insignificant portion of the population.

I was met at the airport by a young Burmese man holding a card with my name spelt correctly. That was one of the more pleasant suprises! I was escorted to a taxi and tranpsorted to the guest house that I had found on the Internet whilst in the Coffee World shop at MBK in Bangkok on the 2nd Feb. I am grateful for that welcome as the airport scene looked less welcoming and less organised than any that I have seen elsewhere in South East Asia.

For 10USD a night I have a single room with attached toilet and shower, aircon, fridge and a TV that receives satellite transmitted images at a signal strength that constructs pictures resembling a part finished jigsaws. Peculiarly the sound rolls in a lot less fractiously.

The bathroom presents an initial clean and hygenic image but I have noticed a rat shaped hole in the mesh that covers the right non glazed half of a window (to nowhere except rat city I suspect). I will be keeping the bathroom door tightly shut tonight.

My arrival at the guest house was before 9.30am Burma time. Yangon is the only city I know that makes half hour adjustments to it’s local time against other countries in the region. Yangon is 1.5hrs behind Malaysian time. At 9.30am local time there were guests still partaking in breakfast at the small dining area in my guest house, called the Ocean Pearl Inn.

I sat nearby. I cannot knock the service so far. Within seconds I was being plied with coffee toast eggs and fruit by the kitchen staff. I listened hesitantly to the conversation at the table.

It was French. At the first opportunity I proceeded to make enquiries of their time in Yangon (2 days) and whether the accomodation was to their satisfaction. The general impression painted was ‘approaching acceptable’. One of the girls was convinced that she had seen a rat in her room and the guy advised me not to look under the bed! I think it pretty much summed up how I already felt.