I turned out that I was the last man on the Thai Air Asia plane and everybody was waiting for me. I sheepishly slinked over to my seat and we were off. This time, my travels will bring me to the isolated and controversial country of Burma or Myanmar. Most of the my co-passengers were Burmese heading back home. I didn’t see too many foreigners on the plane. There were still a few though.
Because of exhaustion, I quickly fell asleep in my seat. I really have a great nap. By the time I woke up, we were already about to land. After all, Myanmar is just right next to Thailand. We landed at the capital of Yangon. As I looked around the airport area, I saw something that I was not used to seeing. An empty airport. There were only a handful of planes are the airport. A complete contrast from the huge number of planes in Bangkok and Singapore. A fellow foreigner mentioned to me: “This is a very quiet country.” That statement can never be any truer.
Myanmar is an odd 1 1/2 hours ahead of Singapore being at +6.5 GMT. I didn’t bother adjusting any watches, since I don’t bring any. I didn’t even bring my mobile phone since I won’t have any access to their network. Besides, it is said to be illegal to bring in such devices, so I didn’t want to risk it anymore. Mobile services in Myanmar is still at its early stages and it is still extremely expensive. Normal people cannot possibly be able to afford such luxury. But this is to be expected in this country which is seemingly stuck in the 1950s.
The airport terminal is a suprisingly modern one. It turns out the terminal was built only in 2007 and it really still smells new. Immigration was rather interesting since there were three people at the counter to cater to each one of the passengers. One looks at my passport and goes through the details then passes it to the next one who also goes through it and writes stuff on it. Then they pass it to the guy behind them who still does stuff with it before it is send back to me. They were courteous enough, but I didn’t know whether they spoke any English.
Having no check in baggage, I quicly got out. First order of business was to change money. I was unable to get any Myanmar money called kyats in Singapore nor in Bangkok. Guidebooks say to change money in Yangon where the rates will be cheaper. For fun, I asked how much the exchange rate at the airport was and the man told me it was K400 to the US Dollar. Market rate should be around K1000 or more to the dollar. The funny thing is if you give them Kyats to take advantage of the exchange rate, they won’t change it to US Dollars. I smiled at the man, and he smiled back saying that “This is government”.
Stepping outside the terminal I was suddenly transported from the 21st century airport to the 1950s of real Yangon. There were a lot of people outside. There were also a lot of taxis, old model taxis. The kind you don’t think runs anymore. Most prominently, there were people who are on the lookout for tourists. One particular guy who spoke decent English kept pursuing me and offering their taxi service. He said that it costs US$7 to go to central Yangon. I told him that I needed to change money first before going to a bus station to buy a ticket out of Yangon. He of course agreed and I was off to the mysterious world of Myanmar.
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