Day one in Yangon

We’re here! Day one in Yangon.  Connecting in Bangkok was a breeze—Thai Air meets First Class passengers with guides and an electric cart to whisk you from one area to another. The flight to Yangon was a little over an hour in an Airbus 330—and hot meals were served to everyone.  Imagine that on a US carrier!

The city is greener and more lush than we expected and there is new construction very near our hotel.

Guides from Akorn/A & K were there to usher through visas, customs, bags and such. The whole thing too less than ½ hour.

We met our guide, Nyi Nyi Thun, and he told us he would be with us the entire tour, with the exception of the Irrawaddy cruise and our last days on the beach. So he will be trekking in the mountains of Shan State, visiting the elephant camp—everything.  The people at Akorn warned me that we would love him—and it’s already true.  He has a wonderful sense of humor, and a photography nut (has Canon equipment) who knows his culture and history.

We are smitten!  He wears a longyi (the skirt-sarong thing than men and women both wear). He did a bit of orientation, dropped us at the Savoy Hotel, and will pick us up first thing in the morning for a day of pagodas. We have asked that he balance tourist sites with exploration of daily life and the local people and he seemed very pleased.

The Savoy is just what we hoped—a small boutique hotel with the feel of a colonial manor house.  High ceilings, polished teak and mahogany, French doors….like that. We had upgraded our room a bit and have a lovely suite on the ground floor looking out on the pool.

 The famous Shwe Dagon pagoda (Pres. Obama visited in November) is very near our hotel. A walk at rush hour shows tons of small bus transports with people hanging on, hopping on and off. It is much scarier trying to cross the road here than it was in Saigon.  No lights, no crosswalks.  We just duck behind locals and run!

Walked around the city a very short time (Nyi Nyi has warned us to watch out for holes in the sidewalks and told us to always carry a flashlight at night. Good advice!

Now…to bed in a real bed!

Our plane being loaded for the 11 hour flight. Lufthansa puts their First Class in the upper deck on their 747’s, but Thai air uses the nose. We are in the very first seats, 1A and 1K—so the first four windows on each side belong to our “pods”. It is really, really quiet up there—with the engines so far behind us.

We took off to the west over the water.

And I just have to write about Thai Air First Class. We (of course) use frequent flyer points, but I have to say if you’ve got the $20,000 + for a RT ticket, it’s gotta be almost worth it. We first flew them in 2006 for our Southeast Asia trip and were blown away then—now they have upgraded their 747’s with individual pods with what looks like 32” flat screen TV’s, and seats/ hassocks that make into lie-flat beds and also provide an extra seat for chatting with a travel pal. Pajamas, slippers.  Wow.

The bathrooms (2 large ones for the 6 of us in the cabin) are just as I remembered.  Fresh flowers, full-length mirror, Bulgari amenities, linen hand towels.

One of the 4 flight attendants likes taking pictures, and posed us around the cabin so we’ll have proof years from now that this wasn’t all a dream. 

Before you take off they go over menu and drink choices.

You can pre-order your meals on line, so Bud got steak and I got lobster. It was great—and they even came around beforehand with caviar set-ups and vodka.

The flight itself was very smooth.until our Rome-Bangkok flight path took us over the area in between Baghdad and Islamabad. Then it seemed like all hell broke loose—I can’t remember turbulence being that bad since we hit the edges of a cyclone over the Pacific on the way to New Zealand in 2003.

The flight attendants have it all figured, though.  They serve dinner and gets the beds all made up so people are sleeping (at least as much they can) when the worst hits.  I woke up when we got to smooth air and one of the flight attendants told me this always happens…and that it would be smooth until we get to the Indian Ocean—then very bumpy again. At least we know what to expect on the return flight to Frankfurt!

Time for breakfast!

The screens at our seats show our flight path from Rome to Bangkok.  The section in between Baghdad and Islamabad was really, really turbulent.  We are up in the nose, and I don’t even want to think how the tail of the plane was being whipped around.  From Bangkok we’ll take the short flight back to the west to Rangoon, or Yangon, as it is now known.