M Y A N M A R - (Burma)

The second country of our trip, is the Republic of the Union of Myanmar (often still known by many people as Burma). This countrie, opened to the world yust a few years ago. Also the entry of tourists is recently made easier. This fact, have some positive and some negative affectations to the visit of the country nowadays. As the country has been quite isolated from the world for many years, you have the feeling that time has stopped here, during the last hundred years. This gives a special charm to this place, but it is changing very quickly.

It is really a pity, that like many other countries, they have their own "tourist scam industry" and they can be really annoying. Obviously, these people are just a small part of the inhabitants of this country, but they are the ones witch you have to interact most of the time.

An other big issue in this country, is that all tourist services are extremely overpriced, and they are increasing prices every day. I guess they will continue doing so, until tourist really get pissed of, and stop visiting the country.

In Myanmar driving is on the right side, since they changed it on 1970, but almost all vehicles (even new ones) still have the steering wheel on the other side, as in the UK or Thailand. This is especially a problem in the case of the buses, as they have the passenger door on the wrong side. There use to be two kind of solutions. One is to make somehow a new passengers door on the other side, or just do nothing, and passengers have to enter to the bus from the street side.

Most of the population still wears the traditional longyi or sarong, consisting in a piece of cloth sewn into a cylindrical shape, which is folded and tied in the front side. It looks more or less like a skirt. It is cool, comfortable and there is no problem if you win or lose weight, as there are all one size.

It is also quite common to see women and children with yellow painting on their face. That's "thanaka" a kind of natural cosmetics, which also provides sun protection.

Althought for us it may look a bit strange, they love to put a lot of colorful shiny led light behind their Buddhist statues. We got sometimes the feeling of being in a casino.

Something most of burmese men love, is to chew something called "Paan". It consists of areca nuts, mixed with other things and wrapped in betel leaves. It has stimulant and psychoactive effects. It is addictive and it has adverse health effects. It generates a red colored salivation, like they would have blood in their mouth. When they spit it on the street, it leaves red marks everywhere, but it gets camouflaged among all the other dirt, that it's thrown on the street.

Here is a video of how to prepare it:

Regarding the money, the have also some peculiar "traditions":

When you are paying something, the bank note you give them must be in perfect condition (almost as if it had never been used), otherwise they won't accept it, specially it it is US Dollar. We don't know the exact reason for that, and not everyone is so strict with the "US Dollar acceptance guidelines".

Having Kyat (Myanmar currency) in cash its also not so easy. You cn only get them in Myanmar, it is even not possible to get Kyat in their neighbor countries like Thailand for example. This is specially very important to keep it in mind when you are leaving the country. Everything you didn't change before leaving the country, becomes automatically a souvenir that you never will be able to change into "real" money.

They don't apply the same exchange rates to all your bank notes, Smaller bank notes have a worse rate than bigger ones. The best is to go there with 50EUR/USD or 100EUR/USD notes.

The option to withdraw money from an ATM, is not much better. There are not many around the country, and the ones we found at the airport, just gave us a maximum of 20000 kyat (about 20 USD) and a processing fee of 5000 kyat! (5 USD), that's a 25% !!!!!!!!!

And guess witch is the firs word that every "tourist-scam-worker" learns in Myanmar... Of course, it is "MONEY", afterwards maybe they learn other useless words like "hello" and so on.