Note: I found this post in my drafts folder, and never got around to finishing it. Now that I see there’s some potentially useful info on here, I’m happy to publish in case it’s helpful to anyone regardless of the format!
Power: The different types of electrical outlets are diverse from some other areas of Southeast Asia, so you’ll need a converter set.
Food: shan noodles, curry crab on the coast, grilled eggplant dishes are delicious. Spicy food in the Rakhine region, and also lots of fish / shrimp pastes, like Northern Thailand food.
SIM Cards: Use Telenor at the airport, and you can pay 6,600 kyat (about $6.60 USD) for a gig of data, plus another $1.50 for the SIM card itself and some free minutes. It turns out that Telenor doesn’t work up in Ngapali Beach though, and I’m not sure what other coverage exists, as they told me it would work, and alas, I had absolutely no coverage up along the coast.
Money / Currency: Exchange and type of cash: USD externally versus local kyat from ATMs. Only USD, SNG, Euros, and a few other currencies can be exchanged at the airport. Canadian dollars are useless. If at all possible, try to bring in some USD (or Euro), as for larger purchases, such as flight tickets and other items, you can pay in USD. However, we did manage to pay using credit card at quite a few places, but there would be at least a 3% commission added on top of the price. The only place that had zero commission was at Linh Thar Oo Lodge, which was an anomaly from what I understood after speaking with several other travelers. Of course, in many parts of Southeast Asia, cash still rules the day, so make sure you have some handy, just in case. One good thing is that if you’re using kyat, it’s easy to do the conversion in your head, as $1USD is approximately equal to 1,000 kyat.
Yangon:
Lucky 7 Restaurant: not open always, but looks like it was popular and many people wanted to go there.
Eastern Hotel: Very clean hotel for $40-50/night for a double room with breakfast. It’s located in the downtown core, and is walking distance to the main market and many restaurants and local shops. You can also walk to the park and the two pagodas in the area. The breakfast was what I would consider average for a hotel in Asia serving both western and local fare, and the staff were really friendly and spoke English as well as they possibly could, and you could tell they were making their best efforts possible to help with any questions or issues. You can book this hotel via agoda, and likely on other online hotel booking engines, and best to do so in advance, as while we were there, they were full and couldn’t be booked even a few days in advance at one point, when I was thinking of heading back to Yangon after the beach.
Shwedagon Pagoda: We went during the afternoon, and I’m guessing it would take an average of two hours to make it through all parts of this large religious site. The pagoda is gold and beautiful, although they do renovate it every year during the dry (and thus high tourist season), so it was mostly covered up in scaffolding during our visit. While we heard that it was beautiful to go just on the cusp of sunset, so you can see the whole area lit up at night, we didn’t make it there and didn’t want to wait that long to see it, and instead continued on to the lake and walked around the boardwalk back towards the city, leaving out of the East Entrance of the pagoda, through a local street until we hit the lake.
Gulliver’s Travels: French-owned travel agency, where the agents speak fluent French, English and Burmese. Need to book plane tickets through an agency, as all of the schedules and options aren’t available online, and the prices are much more reasonable at the agency (we found it to be $110 USD each way for most flights within the country). They actually just take bookings on a set schedule (where flights need to be confirmed a day in advance, as these may change based on the amount of people who are booked for travel), and a plane from a particular airline will be used depending on the day and what I assume is available at any given time. For example, we had a paper ticket (which they all are), for Bagan Airways for Ngapali to Yangon, but when we arrived to check in, they told us the airline today would be Asia Wings. Everything is still strictly a paper-based process and very manual, and you won’t need to even show your ID or passport when flying domestically within the country. However, we did have to go “through immigrations” when entering and leaving the Thandwe airport for Ngapali Beach, so they do check at one point who you really are.
Ngapali Beach:
Linh Thar OO Lodge: was a great place to stay with beautiful beachfront bungalows. $70-100 for double rooms. All just steps to the beach. While there was no power, and thus no wifi, from 6am to 6pm, it was great for those on a relaxing vacation. However, if you needed accessibility like me, it really wasn’t great as you had to find an internet cafe (Max7 down the main road), or go to one of the larger and more expensive hotels that have power 24 hours a day (and I’m talking in the $400/night plus range). The BayView Hotel next door was quite lovely, as far as a higher end luxury hotel goes on that strip, but if you’re looking for wifi, you’re out of luck even if eating at the restaurant, as the login is based on usernames per room registration and according to the front desk, it was terrible anyway. 🙂 This was definitely the whole case on the beach, but of course, what can you really expect for such an isolated location, that is so newly opened to tourists as well, that they’re still trying to catch up on their infrastructure to accommodate.
Sandy Beach Massage: was the best little beachfront massage place that I could glean from the beach, walking long the whole strip.
Seaview Restaurant: was the best overall in terms of food. Nice family run restaurant, excellent dishes, no matter what you ordered, and of course right on the beach and fantastic for sunset. Also, their cocktails were served in a timely manner and actually tasted delicious (unlike a resto a few doors down, the name of which I can’t recall, which served strange tasting cocktails. We ended up mixing together their version of a Pina Colada and a Ngapali Sunset with orange and grenadine and rum so that the flavours were palatable).
Day Trip: We highly recommend Ko, if you’re looking to do a snorkeling, fisherman’s village, and island beach stopover tour for the day. It costs $20 for 1 person, and then $5 each per additional person. I think you could comfortably sit 6-8 people on one of the longtail boats used for the tour. Ko speaks wonderful self-taught English, and is a great guide, catering your tour to what you’re looking to see and do, up to 4 hours (for the half-day trip). We ended up going snorkeling in one spot to start, and were too cold for the second stop, so we headed over to the fisherman’s village (where he lives), and he explained how the fishing works for the shrimp and other seafood in the area. We asked if we could stop and go into the village and also see the market, and Ko was happy to oblige, explaining things and answering any questions along the way. We asked about the betel nut and tobacco habit that seemed to be a part of the culture, and also the sweet non-tobacco option (which we were going to try, but then were afraid to as we weren’t sure if we accidentally swallowed some if it would impact our sensitive tummies, at the time). If you would like to reach Ko, make sure to call him on the following number! 0887541337
About the Author
