What we would skip in Myanmar

There are three kinds of skipping here. Places we simply do not go, and on Myanmar that list is longer and more absolute than anywhere else we operate. Stops we would leave out of most itineraries because they are not worth the time. And a small number of things we will not book at all.

The general position first, because everything below sits inside it. Myanmar is available from us on request and subject to conditions on the ground. Since 2021 the country has been under emergency rule and in a state of internal armed conflict. We assess every enquiry against the situation at the time and for your specific dates and route, before we quote, and we decline regularly. If a region cannot be run properly we say so plainly. The whole of it is in our complete Myanmar guide.

The regions we do not currently run

Not a preference. A refusal.

We do not route through Rakhine State, Chin State, Kachin State, the northern and eastern parts of Shan State, Sagaing Region, Kayah State, Kayin State or parts of Magway Region.

What that means in practice, because these are the requests we actually receive:

That list changes in both directions and we check it against the dates you are asking about, not against the date this page was written. What does not change is the answer when the answer is no. It stays no regardless of how the request is framed or what someone has offered you by email. If we are not confident we can run a region properly, we will not run it, and we will tell you what would have to change for that to be different.

Things we will not book, at any price

The state-linked observation tower at Bagan. There is a viewing tower on the temple plain. We do not use it. There are purpose-built viewing mounds that are free, better positioned and not state connected.

Mandalay Palace. The reconstructed palace buildings sit inside an active military compound. We do not take clients in.

The Kayan village visits at Inle Lake. Groups of Kayan women wearing brass neck coils, relocated to villages near the lake and paid to be photographed by boat parties. Whatever the arrangement is called, this is a display of people and we will not build it. The Kayan home area is in Kayah State, and we do not go there either.

Elephant riding, anywhere, at any property. No, regardless of what the brochure says about the harness.

Gem and jade “factory” stops. Not a trade we are prepared to route clients into, and the roadside version is a commission shop.

Any hotel or operator we know to be state linked. We use privately owned properties and independent guides employed by our partners. That does not solve the ethical question, which has no clean answer. It is what we can actually control.

Stops we would leave out of most itineraries

The sunrise crush at the main mound

Everybody goes to the same one, and you will be shoulder to shoulder with phones held above heads. There are several viewing mounds around the plain, a good guide knows which is empty on a given morning, and an open field with a decent silhouette beats all of them. See Bagan in three days.

Mandalay Hill at sunset

The covered stairway is good, the view is fine, and the top platform in the last twenty minutes of daylight is a scrum around a mirrored pavilion. The U Bein bridge at dawn, three quarters of a mile (1.2 km) of teak posts with the fishermen and the monks and almost nobody else, is the same city at a tenth of the crowd.

Most of Mandalay’s ticketed sites, if you are short of time

The area combination ticket covers a list of sites, several of which are twenty-minute stops. If you have two days, the ones that matter are the Mahamuni at four in the morning, Shwenandaw, the last surviving teak building from the old palace, Amarapura and U Bein, and Inwa by horse cart. The rest fills an afternoon.

The tourist restaurant strips, and the floating restaurants at Inle

In Nyaung U and parts of Bagan there are streets of restaurants serving a flattened version of Burmese food to nervous visitors. Not bad. Not the food. The local place two streets back is better and a third of the price. The same applies on the lake, where the big stilt restaurants exist for boats to pull up at one o’clock. Eat in Nyaungshwe town in the evening instead.

The jumping cat monastery

The cats stopped jumping years ago. The monastery is pleasant and so is the boat ride, and it is on every standard lake itinerary because it always has been.

Kyaiktiyo as a day trip from Yangon

The Golden Rock is genuinely worth doing, and it is not a day trip. It is a long drive, an open truck packed shoulder to shoulder up a mountain, and a site at its best in the evening and at four in the morning when the pilgrims are settled in with blankets. Take a night up there or near the base, or leave it out. The day-trip version is nine hours of transport for forty minutes on the platform.

Trains as transport, and multi-night river cruises

Trains are atmospheric, slow and unreliable in a way that makes them unsuitable as the only way of getting somewhere. The Yangon circular line is worth an hour or two in itself and we build that. Long cruises on the Irrawaddy have been intermittent since 2021, while the day boat from Bagan to Mandalay still runs at reduced frequency and is one of the better days in the country. We only put a river leg into a route when we have confirmed the specific departure rather than the general existence of the service.

Lengths and shapes we would skip

The seven-day Myanmar trip. Two long travel days at either end, four places and two internal flights leaves about three usable days, and it costs nearly what fourteen days costs in flights. We would rather build five nights of Yangon and Bagan on the end of a Thailand trip. See how many days do you need in Myanmar.

Any route with three internal flights in under ten days. Each flight is a half day and a point of failure.

Two nights at Bagan. One full day and two halves, and in the hot months a full day is two three-hour blocks.

A route with no buffer day. A fourteen-day itinerary with nothing spare is a ten-day itinerary that collapses the first time a domestic flight moves.

A domestic flight on the same day as an international one. Never.

Times we would skip

April, unless your dates are fixed. Over 104F (40C) in the central plain, the middle of the day unusable, and standing barefoot on temple stone at noon is genuinely painful. Thingyan, the water festival, closes much of the country for several days in the middle of the month. We will build April with dawn starts and long indoor afternoons and we will tell you what you are taking on.

March and early April for the views. Regional agricultural burning puts haze in the air, which flattens the light at Bagan and removes the long views from the Shan hills.

The monsoon on a tight itinerary. June to October is not primarily a rain problem, and Bagan in the green season is lovely. It is a reliability problem: roads deteriorate and flights are more likely to be disrupted. Green season works with slack in the schedule. It does not work with a route that has to hold together.

More detail in Myanmar month by month.

What we would never skip

Shwedagon in the last hour of daylight and the first hour after dark. Two and a half hours, on your first evening, not your last.

The Mahamuni at four in the morning. The face-washing ceremony in Mandalay, in a hall full of people who got up to be there. The most affecting thing in the country, and it costs you one alarm.

The walk from Kalaw. Two or three days on foot to Inle, arriving by boat, and the best single thing we can put in a Myanmar itinerary. See the Kalaw to Inle trek.

A tea shop for an hour in the afternoon. Fifty cents, low plastic stools, sweet milky tea, and a better hour than most paid experiences here.

The buffer day. Boring, structural, and the reason your trip survives a cancelled flight.

What we would add instead

Every subtraction buys something: a third night at Bagan, a third night at Inle, a guide on the day you thought you did not need one, a day on the Irrawaddy instead of a drive, and one afternoon with nothing planned in it at all.

Related

• Myanmar: the complete guide to planning your trip
• The best two-week route through Myanmar
• Myanmar for the first time
• Bagan in three days
• All our Myanmar trips

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