Yangon, Myanmar

The flight from Heho (near Pindaya) to Yangon stopped down in Bagan and so we had another view of the temples from the plane. We knew where to look now so they were easy to spot.

In Yangon they're constructing an overpass from the airport to town, so traffic is a mess now. It takes over an hour to get to and from the airport, which I think would normally be a 15 minute drive. We get to do this a few more times, yay.

We had a view of Shwedagon Pagoda from our room again, but now that we've seen similar pagodas everywhere in Myanmar it didn't seem as impressive.

It was an admin day as we caught up on emails etc in the afternoon, and then went for a dinner nearby.

...

I had left a week unplanned at the of trip in Myanmar. I had roughly planned seeing more temples in towns near Yangon, but we're out-templed and instead looked for some beach time. The southeast area on the Andaman Sea has been off-limits to tourists for a long time, and has just started to open up. There's just two hotels/resorts in all of the Myeik Archipelago - and one of them, the Myanmar Andaman Resort, just recently reopened after renovations. So we booked into the place for three nights.

The resort is on Macleod Island, a 90 minute speedboat ride west from Kawthoung. It's pretty remote!

Kawthoung is only accessible by air for foreigners. There's only four hotels listed in tripadvisor so we booked the top one, which just seemed to be the least bad of the lot (and that was based on only two reviews).

We had to find the Myanmar Andaman Resort office in Yangon to pay cash (they didn't take credit card). We had the street address and also that it was beside KBZ Bank. Unfortunately there's a KBZ Bank every ten feet (or so it seems). After entering a bunch of wrong buildings we finally found the office. The person we needed to talk with wasn't in yet, but they called her and said she'd be there in 30 minutes. They offered us tea and coffee while we waited. The person arrived and we paid, no problems.

We wandered around looking at the big old colonial buildings in downtown Yangon, and then had lunch at the trendy Union Bar. It was so good we made reservations for dinner.

We wanted to visit the Bogyoke Market (aka Scott Market), supposed to be the best place for souvenirs, but it's closed Mondays. Unfortunately when we return it will be on a Monday again, so we we'll miss the market.

Had dinner at Union Bar, just a $3 taxi ride from our hotel. I'm still staying to western food for now, had the braised beef. It's odd to have people smoking in restaurants but they're still a bit old fashioned that way here still.