When I first started on my travels, the rough idea was to try and travel from South-East Asia through to Istanbul, Turkey and to try and complete that route using land travel as much as possible. Whilst I have taken a couple of flights over the last eight months or so, these have been as part of side-trips, and so I choose to not count them. The one roadblock between SE Asia and Turkey, in terms of land travel, is Myanmar.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, does not allow tourists to cross it’s land borders to transit the country. You can do day journeys into Myanmar from Thailand, but they require that you enter and exit via the same border gate, and they are also, normally, restrictive in that you are only permitted to enter Myanmar up to a certain distance, after which it is a No-Go Zone.

So, to visit Myanmar, I will need to fly in and fly out. The bright side is that AirAsia offers low-cost flights from Bangkok to Yangon (Rangoon), the former capital of Myanmar, so that makes life a bit easier, of course the trade-off for low-cost flights is that to catch the flight I will need to be at Bangkok airport at some ungodly hour of the morning.

One of the other inconveniences in travelling to Myanmar is that, due to the fact that it is controlled by a military junta who have a somewhat sketchy track record for human rights issues, there are trade sanctions in place against the country. Doesn’t mean anything major from the point of view of a traveler, as I am not planning on doing any major trading there, but it does have an effect in that, as a result of these sanctions, there are no ATMs in Myanmar. So, in order to travel there, you have to carry in all the cash you plan to spend in US Dollars. Plus, as is the case in most countries where US Dollars are accepted as an un-official currency (such as Cambodia), the bills must be clean, undamaged and pretty pristine.

So, I ended up spending a day running around Bangkok trying to buy my budget’s worth of US Dollars. I went through nearly every currency exchange around the Silom Road / Patpong area, and even some in the more exclusive Siam (Central) area.

Lesson 1) When selling a foreign currency to exchangers in Thailand, all is well and good, all you need is the cash. However, when buying a foreign currency (ie changing Thai Baht into Euro/USD/Monopoly Money) you are expected to provide ID in the form of a passport. Of course, in an effort to not lose my passport, I had left that in my room, and so the trades I managed to perform were a result of social engineering (sweet-talking the exchange clerk) and/or creative writing (filling in the provided forms with a room number and hotel name for one of the places in Khao San Road).

After finally having scraped together roughly the amount of cash I had budgeted for a two week visit to Myanmar (including an emergency fund, which will simply be stashed in my valuables bag if it is not spent there) I headed home, quite aware of the fact that, in my bag, I was carrying a relatively large amount of untraceable cash.

Having gotten back to my room, I counted and inspected the cash (I did inspect the bills briefly at the counter, to make sure they were the right denomination and were not obviously marked or damaged). A few of the bills have marks from, what I presume are counterfeit-checking pens, which some places use, and some others have marks from some form of stamp, maybe for a similar purpose.

Hopefully, these marks will not result in me arriving in Myanmar with in-exchangeable bills. Otherwise I may be in a bit of trouble. Oh well, if it does cause problems, I am sure I will find a solution.

In other news, I read a report that there were four small explosions in Yangon over the previous couple of days. They are not sure who was responsible for them, nor their purpose, which is unusual. Add to that the fact that, whilst I am in Myanmar, it will be the anniversary of the Monk Uprising there, which may well result in some demonstrations and police/military action. Will just have to remember to try and be subtle as hell if I am anywhere near it, and especially if I am carrying a camera at the time.