Burma: hotels all booked up in Yangon
A Burmese girl looks out the window waiting for an overnight train to leave the Mandalay train station in Myanmar.
A warning to foreign tourists pouring into newly popular Burma: don't touch down in Yangon without a hotel reservation.
This well-reported piece in The Irrawaddy suggests an unpleasant fate awaits those who fail to secure rooms in Burma, officially titled Myanmar, the pariah state-turned-travel hot spot du jour.
"They might end up walking the streets all night or sleeping in a monastery … there will simply be no beds for them," a travel agent in Yangon told the outlet.
For now, Burma's infrastructure can't keep up with its buzz. The nation's crumbling British colonial architecture and stuck-in-time vibe — secured, in part, by heavy Western sanctions — play a large part in constituting Burma's tourist cachet.
But while I'm sure a wave of new hotels are on the horizon, for now you'll want to lock in those hotel bookings before you land.
And, remember, Yangon has no ATMs, so bring a gigantic brick of extremely pristine, smudge-free $100 US bills. If Benjamin Franklin has one whisker out of place, the black-market money exchange crews will reject your bill in a heartbeat.
The story you just read is available to read for free because thousands of listeners and readers like you generously support our nonprofit newsroom. Every day, the reporters and producers at The World are hard at work bringing you human-centered news from across the globe. But we can’t do it without you: We need your support to ensure we can continue this work for another year.
When you make a gift of $10 or more a month, we’ll invite you to a virtual behind-the-scenes tour of our newsroom to thank you for being with The World.