Travelling to Myanmar (previously Burma) is like stepping into a different world, filled with spirituality and adventure. Long isolated from the world, Myanmar is finally opening up. With heartwarming people, breath-taking landscapes, and some of the most impressive ancient temples in Asia, Myanmar is the perfect destination for those after an authentic escapade, off the beaten path. Follow our top Myanmar travel tips to make the most of your travels…

When to go

Luckily you can travel to Myanmar all year round, although November to February are fairly busy months (especially with Chinese New Year) and accommodation availability can be tricky.

Visa & passport advice

When planning your trip to Myanmar, it’s important to ensure your passport is up to date. You’ll need at least 6 months validity beyond your intended return date to get a Burmese visa. You’ll also need to have a visa before you arrive. Single-entry tourist visas last 28 days and cost US$25.

Safety

Myanmar is a very safe country to visit—in fact, I would say it’s probably the safest. The Buddhist culture discourages crime and so thefts or robberies are very rare. Since the 2015 elections, the country is gradually democratising, and the influence of the military has diminished.

If you’re consulting the FCO’s foreign travel advice you will see most of the country marked green, though with several specific areas marked yellow (‘advise against all but essential travel’).

We work with local partners who have operated in Myanmar for years, and our network of local guides know their areas like the back of their hands. Myanmar is considered a safe destination for tourists, including solo female travellers.

Money

The national currency of Myanmar is the Burmese Kyat (pronounced chat). It often appears as ‘K’ or ‘MMK’ and it only comes in notes.

ATMs are now plentiful in airports, cities, and major tourist destinations, though occasionally travellers find that their debit cards don’t work in Myanmar. Bringing cash is a good idea: do make sure to take clean unfolded notes (folded or tattered notes may not be accepted) and US dollars are more easily exchanged than Pound sterling.

Note that travellers cheques are not generally accepted anywhere.

Food

Myanmar is brimming with culinary delights, offering its own distinct cuisine though also influenced by Chinese, Indian and Thai cuisine.

Your first thing to try is a Burmese curry, which is not just a meal but an experience. After your main dish a seemingly never-ending succession of little side dishes will follow, making this a true foodie adventure.

Myanmar is also known from some specific dishes, such as the tea leaf salad known as lephet, Shan-style rice, and the Mohinga breakfast — fine, round rice noodles served in a hearty broth.

What to see

Myanmar is a very cultural destination and there’s plenty of interesting places to see. Of course, we highly recommend including key sights such as the cities of Yangon and Mandalay, Inle Lake, and the temples of Bagan.

Our tour of Inle Lake takes you off the usual tourist trail and lets you experience village life on the lake, while our cycling tour in Bagan gives you a local guide as well as ample free time to explore some of the hidden temples around the area. If you want to do something a bit different, you can also visit the fringed shores of Ngapali Beach (yup, Myanmar has also a beach!) located on the Bay of Bengal coast, in Rakhine State. Cocktail in hand simply kick back and relax.

Oh – and don’t miss the less famous (but no less interesting!) locations such as the hidden temples of Mrauk U, the emerald hills of Kalaw, or the charming colonial city of Pyin Oo Lwin. It’s especially the smaller places that give you a true taste of Burma.

Etiquette

The typical Myanmar character is friendly, helpful and polite, so please do smile, it’ll lighten up everyone’s day.

Don’t touch anyone on the head as it’s considered an aggressive action, even for children.

Cover your shoulders and knees when visiting pagodas and temples also take off your shoes and socks. If you need to sit, please ensure your feet are tucked away so they never face the Buddhas.

Don’t disturb people praying or meditating and try to be as quiet as possible when in sacred areas.

Learn a few words in Burmese, the locals love it!
mingala ba – ‘hello’
thwa:bi – ‘good night’ or ‘good bye’
kyei:zu:tin ba de – ‘thank you’

You might experience electricity outages. Please remember Myanmar is very much unspoilt by mass tourism and it can have its limitations.

Inspiration

Myanmar is a truly cultural, unspoiled destination and it offers plenty of opportunities for meaningful experiences. If you like a bit of moderate trekking Myanmar is the perfect destination for paths-less-travelled.

If you’ve got enough time you can also combine a trip to Myanmar with neighbouring Thailand. With easy flight connections between Bangkok and Yangon, you’ll be able to experience Myanmar’s tranquility with buzzing Thailand.

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A Culinary Odyssey,on a Path Blazed by Orwell- The New York Times by JANE PERLEZ MARCH 11, 2007

GEORGE ORWELL, who memorably sketched the stark existence of living on bread and thin soup in Paris in the 1930s, hardly seems like an obvious guide to exotic food in the tropics. Yet, in his classic novel “Burmese Days,” Orwell creates a vibrant scene of his hero and heroine wandering through market stalls filled with ripe pomelos the size of green moons, red bananas, dried fish, crimson chilies, ducks cured like hams, larvae of the rhinoceros beetle, heart-shaped betel leaves, and “baskets of heliotrope-colored prawns the size of lobsters.”

The list, in full, is so extravagant and inviting that, for me, it served as a kind of mental eating map during a recent road trip through Burma, now called Myanmar by the authoritarian government. Much has changed in Myanmar since Orwell served there as a policeman in the 1920s, but because of the government-enforced isolation from the rest of the world (the country has little processed food and imported food is rare in the countryside) Burmese still live off the land and its abundance of vegetables, fruits, fish and spices.

Even before I crossed the border from China into Myanmar, I had a taste of the delicacies to come. At Ruili, the bustling trading center in Yunnan Province that serves as the entry point for cheap Chinese goods into Myanmar, a Burmese trader invited my guide and me to a lunch of multiple dishes — steamed whole black chicken that fell from the bone, tiny grilled fish that you eat from head to tail, bean leaves with garlic, and most unusual, opium poppy seeds with tofu. Chopped coriander sprinkled on top added a little spunk — and color — to the mild tasting seeds that had been churned with the tofu into the consistency of a soupy porridge.

Immigration officials don’t allow foreign travelers to dawdle at Mu Se, the first Burmese town over the border. So we drove down the old Burma Road — the artery that the Americans used in World War II to hold back the Japanese — to the village of Kutkai, then to Lashio and on to Hsipaw, a town with a good market and friendly guesthouse, a favorite stopping spot for tourists.

Our destination, though, was a sleepy dot off the map, the village of Ohnoma, about two hours south of Hsipaw. Ohnoma was a major destination of our 10-day trip. It is the home of a trucker’s restaurant known fondly as the Fatty Lady’s Place — the formal name of the five-table establishment is Napi — which I remembered with great fondness from a trip several years before. I had eaten lusciously then — the freshly caught fish, in particular, cooked several different ways, was memorable. So was the invitation into the kitchen to observe short-order cooking of the Burmese kind. I remembered, too, the lusty appetites of the drivers who had parked their huge trailers outside.

I was not disappointed this time, either. Tucked on the ground floor of a two-story house bearing large advertisements for London brand cigarettes, Ma Aye Shwe — owner, chief cook and a woman of large proportions — was still there, whipping up tangy fish, vegetables and sauces in less than 20 minutes over a wood stove. Burmese cuisine veers between the influences of India with its tradition of curries and Thailand and its flavors of basil, lemon grass and coriander with a few oddities left over from the British. At Fatty Lady’s you get straightforward Burmese cooking with a slight tilt to the Thai side of things.

As soon as we arrived, tired and dusty, for a late 4:30 lunch, Ma Aye Shwe asked one of her nieces — three of them work as her helpers — to catch a foot-long catfish from the pond just outside the kitchen window. This was done rapidly by grabbing one of the fish by hand, giving it a wallop to kill it and then gutting it and chopping it up into about one-inch pieces. The niece sprinkled some salt on top of the pieces, some pieces of ginger as well, and threw the pieces into a pan of super hot fat. That was to be our fried fish.

In a second wok, the chef stir-fried some garlic, ginger and sliced tomatoes, added some water, added pieces of the fish, a huge bunch of basil leaves, and then covered it all for some 15 minutes, fanning the flames with rapid flicks of a reed fan. A second niece prepared a quick chicken stir fry with bamboo shoots. For a vegetable dish, our hostess tossed tomatoes and garlic with cauliflower pieces and their leaves (a leftover from the British days) in a wok for five minutes. Accompanying everything were side portions of a spicy yellowy sauce: dry mustard, garlic, ginger, chilies, and onions boiled with the green stalks of the mustard plant. For the fried catfish, there was a sauce of tomato, garlic, green chili, vinegar and sugar cane.

The food was served on large white china plates placed in the center of our round wooden table, along with a large bowl of white rice. I hadn’t expected to find any of the wonders of Orwell’s market stalls here. I got what I came for: an invitation into the small kitchen (two benches, a couple of chopping boards and sharp cleavers, two small overhead fluorescent lights) and a mouthwatering straight out of the pan meal — for about 7 kyat, the equivalent of $1 a person.

During the rest of the trip, we ate at several roadside joints that offered unfamiliar combinations of tastes. Yellow papaya flowers sautéed in garlic seemed a variation on the classic papaya salad. Frogs cooked with an assortment of bitter leaves, and braised cashew leaves served with raw cucumber slices gave a sense of the pungent streak in Burmese cooking. I rarely spent more than 10 kyat each for a single meal. Most of the time my guide helped with the ordering, though with smiles and gestures I could have managed on my own.

At the beachside resort of Ngapali on the west coast, I found my way to Best Friends, a simple indoor-outdoor restaurant nestled among a row of small places catering mostly to tourists. I settled into a table on the deck where a few tables were taken by Germans and French. I savored the most delicious avocado salad on earth, and asked for the recipe. It turned out to be basic — chopped avocadoes, sliced onions and shallots and tomato cubes, mixed with a little sugar, vinegar, oil and a dash of fish sauce. Coriander on top. What made the difference was the lush avocado straight from the farm.

At Ngapali, where the Indian Ocean laps at the shore, I expected to revel in prawns the size of lobsters, as recalled from the pages of “Burmese Days.” After all, I had seen pomelos, red bananas, mounds of dried fish, green coconuts and strange-looking bugs in almost every market. Heart-shaped glossy betel nut leaves, just as Orwell described them, were abundant at the ubiquitous stands that serve up the betel leaf and a piece of hard chewy nut laced with lime.

But the prawns were not to be had in the markets or at Ngapali Beach. I glimpsed them only briefly — glistening in their translucent shells on the steel tables of a fish export factory — as they were weighed and packed for air freight to Japan.

For better or worse, this was a sign of modernity since the days of Orwell.

Correction: March 25, 2007

The Explorer column on March 11 about dining in Myanmar misstated the value of the kyat, the Myanmar currency, and the price in kyats of meals there. A meal at Napi, also known as Fatty Lady’s Place, in Ohnoma cost about 1,250 kyats, not 7 — the equivalent of $1 a person. Meals at several roadside joints in the countryside rarely cost more than 1,800 kyats, not 10. (Although the official exchange rate is seven kyats to the dollar, almost all private transactions use rates of 1,000 to 1,250 or more kyats to the dollar.)

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page TR8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Culinary Odyssey, on a Path Blazed by Orwell.

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How do I get a Myanmar visa?
No matter what passport you have, we strongly suggest getting your visa in advance with a visa agency who will process your visa application on your behalf for a fixed fee beyond the cost of the visa itself. Paying this fee is almost always worth the hassle and time saved over arranging a visa yourself, and your visa application may be processed quicker and more efficiently.

What is the currency in Myanmar?
The local currency in Myanmar is the kyat (pronounced “chat”). The official exchange rate fluctuates, so your best bet is to check online. (As of this writing, US$1.00=1340 kyats.) Currencies you may exchange are: US dollars, Hong Kong dollars, Pounds Sterling, Malaysian dollars, Euros and Australian dollars.

At home my cash gets all wrinkled and folded. That’s ok, right?
Oddly, no. Myanmar banks and money exchangers will only take American bills in perfect condition. American money needs to be mint: crisp and clean with no rips, folds, water marks or pen marks.

Can we use our credit cards at the hotels?
Many hotels in Myanmar accept credit cards.

What’s the electrical voltage in Myanmar?
The voltage in Myanmar is 230 volts and the frequency is 50 Hz. The plugs that will work at the hotels are C,D,F and G. Many hotels have multi-purpose outlets that can take Australian 3-pin plugs. For laptops and phones, a simple plug adaptor should be sufficient.

What airlines fly to Yangon?
Airlines that land in Yangon, please see the link below. Flights arrive in Yangon direct from Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and many other destinations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangon_International_Airport

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