This last trip was made very special because it was my first time to travel solo. Before I did solo-travel, like going to Puerto Princesa for the first time, or going to Manila from time to time, but with these I get consoled by the fact that when I got there I had friends and acquaintances to go to. Myanmar was different: I went there, knowing not a single soul in that blessed land! Months before my travel I was excited, but weeks into it made me nervous by the day, until I even decided not to go. But reason got the better of my feelings, and the trip went through.
In a certain sense, I see my Myanmar trip as a personal odyssey, sort of a test of my limits, and boy am I just glad it came out great!
The Air Tickets and Preparation
One thing I learned from this trip is that nothing can beat a well-planned and prepared trip. Going to Yangon, Myanmar from Iloilo, Philippines was a 39-hour journey! You may ask, why that long? (1) As of writing time, there are no direct flights to Yangon from Manila (this may change in a year's time if Cebu Pacific will launch it's Manila-Yangon route which has been in the rumour mill since June this year), (2) I flew using different carriers, I took Cebu Pacific from Iloilo to Manila and Manila to Kuala Lumpur but I used AirAsia from Kuala Lumpur to Yangon. Finally, (3) all my tickets were on promo, so I had to add buffer-hours (I felt the standard 4-hour between-flight stop-over was not enough) to ensure the continuity of my flights.
Getting my tickets was epic on it's own, I booked my Iloilo-Manila-Iloilo tickets way back in February when I didn't have any plan going to Myanmar at all; at that time, I bought the tickets only for our Fall Break. My Manila-Kuala Lumpur flight was booked 3-months after. I just came from my Abu Dhabi vacation and stumbled upon a piso-fare promo by Cebu Pacific. I bought the ticket because I was still raring to go to Nepal, and thought anytime AirAsia offered promotional offers for Kathmandu I'd grab it! Barely 5-days after, AirAsia did offer promo fares but Kathmandu was not on the list, so the choice was cut-down to Colombo, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Yangon, Myanmar. The biggest plus for Yangon was the visa-free entry for Philippine passport holders, this greatly decreased chances of set-backs like denial of entry etc., noting that I would travel solo. Once the choice was made in favour of Myanmar, the trip began to take form, as early as the second week of June.
Fears and Second-Thoughts
School began, and I was back in the daily grind, and then it felt like one by one things were not going my way. Just barely a week after classes officially began our school calendar was changed, now the Fall Break was set a week later which meant all the bookings I got for the trip were a week ahead of school break and I could not possibly be allowed by my bosses to leave! Then in August, I used my travel fund to purchase a luxury item at this time my travel fund was now close to zero. Plus somewhere in the middle of August, a second Malaysian Airline flight was shot down over the Ukraine (the likelihood of this happening was so improbable noting that the same airline suffered a mysterious disaster just 3 months before) and another plane overshot the runway at Taipei, both events occurred just days from each other. It really felt 2014 was not such a good year for flights. By the end of August, I was no longer in the mood to fly and to go on with my trip to Myanmar.
When the Seasons Change our Minds Change Too
When the wet months were over, and September came in the view, it felt also like the clouds of doubt that were on my mind gradually went away. It came out that even though the Fall Break was moved, the week when my Myanmar Travel fell was Sports Week, so I could still request for a leave because I don't have classes to give during those days. My financial problem was solved because I worked part-time giving lectures in a university here. And well, I dealt with my irrational fears with good economic sense. I told myself that if I didn't push through with the trip, it would be like throwing away all the money I spent for my tickets (they were all non-refundable because they were on promo).
A month after I decided not to pursue my trip, my decision changed, and now what was left was to plan the details of the trip.
The Power of the Internet and Travel Blogs
Planning for a trip these days have become democratised thanks heavily to the internet. Gone are the days when travel itineraries were the exclusive game of travel and tour agents. Today one can build a travel itinerary from the ground-up with only an internet access and a credit-card. Here is a sampling of the travel blogs I read to plan my trip:
These are on top, of course, of TripAdvisor, Booking.com and Agoda. The travel season to Myanmar is between November through April. I went on the last week of October which is pre-season, so I booked all my hotels ahead of time to avoid the stress of knocking at the doorsteps of inns looking for a place to lay my head for the night. It made my trip more convenient also because I didn't have to carry cash to pay for my hotels. I generally don't feel comfortable carrying lots of cash and prefer to pay my purchases through ATM or credit card. However, as many travel blogs and websites point out, Myanmar has a long way to go in terms of cashless transactions, which was still true during my trip. Paying through Booking.com and Agoda reduced the cash I had to carry by about 30%. But I'll say more about these in a separate post.
Because I only had 5-days in Myanmar I had to content myself with Yangon and Bagan. I really wanted to include Mandalay, but it really couldn't fit anymore in my very abridged introductory tour of Myanmar. I say introductory because I am really going to go back to Myanmar, if only to be able to go and see Mandalay and Lake Inye.
Final Preparations
As the days of the trip approached, I had to also make my final preparation. One of the limitation I had to work with was luggage. I am not a backpack person, I have rarely traveled by air without a suitcase, and suddenly I am faced with the problem of 0-kg checked-in luggage? Solutions, I had to purchase a new backpack that was within the cabin-bag limitation. Here I had a little strike of luck because I was able to get my bag with a 50% discount from a mall sale here in Iloilo.
My final preparation also involved getting my pristine US Dollars. But, this was not really a problem because here in Iloilo there is big currency-exchange house (Narita) that provide pristine US Dollars at no extra cost. Well, actually I have never encountered getting US Dollars from them that were not crisp.
On the day that I left Iloilo, the last preparations were the following:
- e-mailing myself scanned copies of my passport, Identification Card, credit card, tickets and hotel vouchers; on top of having 3 copies of each of these scattered throughout my bag.
- printing out my personal calling card in case I met new people (I learned this from my first foreign trip when people I came to know shared their calling cards and I didn't have mine to give back, it was so awkward writing again and again my addresses and numbers on pieces of paper);
- making small cards containing the address of the hotels where I am going to stay, they are handy and can easily be shown to the taxicab than pulling out my hotel vouchers from my sheaf of documents. The only flaw in this was that, written in English, they are equally no good in Yangon where majority of taxicab drivers understand Myanma script only. But good thing these cards I made were empty at the back so what I did was, in Yangon, I asked the hotel staff to write at the back flap the Myanma script of whatever was written in front. This made things a lot easier!
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| Address Cards (in English) of my hotels and places to go to in Myanmar. |
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| Back-flap of the cards above written with corresponding Myanma scripts. |
Finally, after these the time had come. I had to say good bye to the Philippines for a while and say hello to Myanmar!
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| My view of Andrews Air Base from NAIA-3 before leaving for Kuala Lumpur. |
24-October, Friday (1855-2000, 1hr 05min travel + 18hr lay-over)
Flew from IIA (Iloilo International Airport) to NAIA-3. Stayed at my cousin's condominium for the 18-hour lay-over in Manila.
25-October, Saturday (1410-1750, 3hrs 40min travel + 13-hr lay-over)
Flew from NAIA-3 to KLIA-2 (Kuala Lumpur International Airport 2). Stayed at the Capsule Hotel by Container for my 13-hour lay-over in Kuala Lumpur.
26-October, Sunday (0655-0800, 2hrs 35min travel)
Flew from KLIA-2 to Yangon International Airport.
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| One of my first glimpses of Myanmar - the Myanma plains seen from the aircraft as it was making its final descent to Yangon International Airport. |
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| Facade of Yangon's Domestic Terminal, the typical Burmese elements in this structure welcomes all tourists to the Golden Land of Myanmar. |
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