By Duncan Stearn

The Strand Hotel, a relic of the Imperial Age

The United States has lifted a portion of its sanctions and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has won a seat in parliament. As Myanmar begins the process of moving away from an isolationist dictatorship, tourist numbers are growing exponentially.

I recently spent three days, with an English friend, in Yangon. Formerly known as Rangoon, the former capital of Burma is usually the first place on the itinerary of visitors.

The flight from Bangkok to Mingladon International Airport takes an hour and 40 minutes. Yangon is half an hour behind Bangkok; and about 50 years.

The airport is more provincial and rustic than international and concrete. It’s not yet designed to handle large numbers of tourists. The Customs and Immigration area is expansive and although the lines move slowly, the officers are efficient and courteous.

'Chat' and chew for change

The currency is the kyat (pronounced ‘chat’). There are no coins and the smallest denomination note is the 50 kyat. I was later to require 60 kyat in change from a supermarket. The cashier handed me 50 kyat and a sweet. A polite way of saying ‘suck on this’. Surprisingly for an ex-British colony English is not common. Smiles certainly are.

The money exchange at the airport is almost in line with what is available, apparently, on the streets. The rate of one US dollar to the kyat was 810, although you had to change a $100 denomination bill. Anything less and the rate dropped to  770 kyat.

We were later told the exchange rate on the street was 900 kyat or better. We never managed to get much above 800 kyat. Then again, the difference is so small we hardly cared.

The money-changers and vendors are quite anal about the quality of the US dollar notes you present. One of the US$10 notes I proffered was returned to me, with a very slight tear. I passed it off a few minutes later as the fee for the taxi into Yangon.

Our hotel was the Shwe Taung Tan at US$29 a night. Located in Bahan township, basically a suburb of Yangon, it’s in the potentially ominously-named Swimming Pool Street.

I imagined a road where a spilt drink could force pedestrians to traverse the street while clad in a wetsuit and snorkel. In fact, at the end of the street is a large swimming complex and gym, popular with expats and locals alike. The place has been there since the British were running the country, although it’s clearly had a few facelifts over time.

The rooms in the Shwe Taung Tan were quite good with high ceilings, a solid double-bed mattress, small mini fridge, a wardrobe, writing desk and two chairs. They were spacious and cooled by an old-style air-conditioner.

The bathroom in the larger room, which was occupied by my friend, was bigger than many hotel rooms. The water in the bathroom was not much better than tepid. In my room it never made it beyond cold.

Teashop fare: somosa, baguette, coffee or Chinese green tea

Nearby are a number of restaurants, although most cater to a nighttime trade. Down the road is a supermarket which is well stocked with the kinds of provisions you might want to keep in your hotel fridge: beer, soft drinks, chocolates and the like.

The hotel was about 40 minutes walk from the waterfront, so not central in terms of the popular tourist attractions such as the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. Given that taxis are plentiful and fairly cheap, although you do have to bargain, it really wasn’t out of the way. The swimming pool, proximity to restaurants, a supermarket and 7-11 copy made it a good place to stay.

We found a very acceptable Chinese restaurant at the bottom of the hill and spent two of our three meal nights in the place. The food and service was good and the prices reasonable.

Menus are in Burmese script, which looks like a zero with bits either lopped off or added. Think of the English letter ‘Q’ and imagine a few hundred variations.

Although the Burmese drive on the American side of the road, plenty of vehicles, many of them taxis, have steering wheels on the right-hand side. We were told the country converted to the American way about two decades ago.

“So, how come you have cars with right-hand side steering wheels?” I asked one driver.

“You can still drive the old cars, but when you have to get a new one, it will be with the steering on the correct side,” he replied.

We took different taxis to go to various locations over the three days, some were left-hand drive, the others right-hand. The drivers were clearly comfortable with their machines and negotiating the roads.

There are plenty of late-model cars as well as the stock-standard southeast Asian clapped out old banger that appears to be held together with elastic bands, chewing gum, and string. Surprisingly, there were very few motorbikes in Yangon. I can recall seeing only two.

None of the taxis possessed air-conditioning. The only way air was getting into them was via the open windows, not an especially pleasant experience when you are stuck at a set of traffic lights with a hard-gasping diesel truck belching its fumes 20 centimetres from your face.

Graffiti was more common than you might expect.

I’m not sure what it’s like when the monsoon comes, as a couple of the taxis appeared to have all-but dispensed with their windows.

The smell of diesel hangs heavy in the air. As I remarked to my friend when we returned to Pattaya, “I never thought I’d be saying it’s nice to breathe the fresh air here.”

The mobile phone is yet to be a common sight. Instead, the  old-fashioned push-button handsets are set up on roadside stalls all over the city. There are plenty of public telephone boxes as well. And people use them, presumably to call family and friends up-country, as a mobile network is clearly not in place everywhere.

Roadside stalls and little tea houses abound. Every table comes with a teapot and the stalls all offer free Chinese tea for customers. The tea is poured into handle-less mouthful-sized ceramic cups. Food consists of baguette-style bread and Indian somosas. Cheap and filling.

The outside vendors have low tables and even lower seats. They’re designed for midgets. A person of average height is going to have his kneecaps become closely acquainted with his ears. These low tables might be a reason why men in sarongs seem to outnumber those in trousers.

Towards the waterfront the Strand Hotel is an imposing pile. This relic of the Raj was formerly part of a crescent of grand sleeping palaces of the east. Well-heeled visitors to the exotic orient in the 1930s might start at The Strand, go on to the Eastern & Oriental in Georgetown, Penang, then the Raffles in Singapore, The Oriental in Bangkok, Le Royal in Phnom Penh, and end at the Majestic in Saigon.

The Strand has been renovated and remodelled from the original but still impresses a visitor with its plush interior and elegance; a world away from the dusty street just outside with its uneven pavements and small but persistent group of youthful panhandlers.

Monks and their female equivalents, monkettes perhaps (my word for the nuns), are everywhere. They wander about all day with alms bowls looking for money rather than food. The Burmese version of Buddhism evidently differs in some fundamental ways from that of neighbour Thailand. Colour for one thing: light pink for the females, a more manly mauve for the males.

Nightlife seems to consist for the locals of KBTV karaoke bars. I have no doubt these places are hotbeds of illicit romance; I watched as a young man purchased a packet of condoms from the Seven Mart 24-hour convenience store. He had just come down from one of the nearby bars. I wondered weather he was stocking up because he was on a sure thing or merely living in hope and being Boy Scout-like.

The military is still a pervasive presence.

As with much of southeast Asia, overstaffing seems to be commonplace. Wherever you go there are always plenty of employees to assist. Security guards in many places, especially the karaoke-type nighttime entertainment places, were decked out in a blue shirt with black bow tie, and long, lazily-pressed trousers. Not sure the thongs -flip-flops to Americans and Brits- are the kind of footwear to instill the necessary ‘respect’ the average security type would be at pains to impart.

There are quite a few touts near the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, but they’re not aggressive or obtrusive. Give it a couple of years and 100,000 more tourists and I’m sure there’ll be changes.

We saw our first beggar at the tourist-oriented Bogyoke Market in downtown Yangon. A woman with no front teeth was carrying a baby not much more than five or six months old. I doubt it was hers.

A money-changer lurking in the market offered us a maximum of 750 kyat. We walked away. Another man watched the proceedings and bade us follow him to his shop. He offered us 780 kyat. We changed US$10. Feeling happy with our effort we were soon quite deflated when we came upon an official money-changing shop with the kyat at 817.

A children's street game involving cards and tattered footwear.

In my three days I watched a spirited tak raw game between four young men at the side of a busy road; saw customers perusing the narrow shelves of roadside bookstalls where the volumes all seemed to have the same cover; skirted the razor wire and avoided the glares of steel-helmeted troops positioned behind sandbagged guardposts; perused the plaques on the wall of the Chapel of the Burma Star Association inside the Holy Trinity Cathedral; marveled at the amount of graffiti on walls almost everywhere; was greeted with smiles by a group of children playing a game in the dirt with cards and tattered footwear while a few metres away adults were engrossed in a dice game that could have been Burmese Monopoly, but without the infrastructure; and had to laugh at a sign for the Defence Services Museum, which is not open to the public.

While the gap between rich and poor is very evident, with plenty of people probably wondering where their next kyat is coming from, there was never any hint of violence or any time when we did not feel totally safe.

The taxi to the airport was only 5,000 kyat. There is no departure tax. The departure lounge is not much bigger than a tennis court. There’s only one café, but surprisingly good and not as over-priced as you might expect.

Myanmar has a lot of catching up to do on the world tourist stage, but if our experience is anything to go by it’s on the right road, albeit dusty and uneven at this stage.