Mandalay Trip

[sceadugenga]

I'm going to do a brief trip report about my four day Mandalay visit last week.

 

The eVisa worked well but I appeared to have inadvertently used an agents website rather than  the government one and overpaid.

We flew Bangkok Airways from Chiang Mai, 4400 Baht return.

We passed through immigration quickly and without problem, very little official interaction.

 

About the only problem we had was that we arrived with no local money, the exchange (at 5pm with an international flight arriving) was closed and both airport ATMs were off line.

Taxis would only accept kyat or USD and when we got to the hotel on promise of payment on arrival the hotel reception would only change USD or Euros.

Fortunately there was an operating ATM in the street by the hotel that produced kyats but I hate to think of the rate we would have got.

Lots of helpful lads at the airport who had no problem accepting tips in baht.

A long drive into town, it was 48km to our hotel.

 

We stayed at the Ayarwaddy River View which was great, the service was first class and the roof top bar and restaurant very popular. 

 

All trips had to be done using taxis, there was no other nearby transport and walking was difficult, particularly after rain.

The taxis, called by the hotel reception, were about 5000 kyat an hour, so a 4 hour tour came to about $20 USD.

We hired a boat for two hours through the hotel which came to 30,000K plus extra for the taxi.

The river cruise was very nice but access to the boat was difficult along a series of narrow planks.

 

Plenty of western food places, Central Park (there's two, one is more of an expats bar, the other was full of local Sunday lunchers) and Koffee Korner stood out.

 

Some nice local sites, the best would have been Mandalay Hill where we stood out as Westerners and were invited to participate in several photos with locals.

On the return the taxi took us (at my request) to a small local silk weaver where I bought a couple of very nice large scarves at 20,000K each.

 

Four days was probably enough without lengthy trips out of town, places like Bagan would have involved overnight stays that we we had not factored in.

Not much English or Thai spoken outside the hotel, some taxi drivers were better at English than others.