Stayed at 5 hotels during my Myanmar trip. Didn't harbour any expectations prior to the trip, as I had mistakenly assumed that Myanmar, under economic sanctions, probably didn't had too many tourists visiting and hence hasn't had many hotels after Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest was lifted last year.
How wrong I was! I had absolutely no complaints about the hotels. If I were to compare my experience with hotels in Thailand, which is much visited, my preference is for the hotels in Myanmar.
Sedona Hotel Yangon
http://www.sedonahotels.com.sg/oh_mya_yg_loc.asp
Stayed at Sedona Hotel twice: the first night on arrival in Yangon, and the night before I left Yangon. There are two Sedona hotels, 1 in Yangon, and the other in Mandalay. Apparently many rooms are the Yangon hotel are taken up by Chinese working on the Mynmar-Chinese pipeline project. It is a 15min drive from the Yangon airport, which is really great. It's next to the Inya Lake, which makes for a great morning and evening stroll along the banks. Rooms are fairly spacious at 32m2.
A room with breakfast costs at least USD260, which works out to be about twice what I usually pay for a room with breakfast in Japan. But obviously the room rate psf is lower in Myanmar. Obviously.
The Hotel @Tharabar Gate, Old Bagan
http://www.tharabargate.com/Tharabarnew/index.html
Bagan is the place to get a tan. And for that, I was really grateful to the high ceiling and strong aircon of the duplex cottage to hide away before emerging to check out the shrines again at 4pm.
The teak room is huge, and so is the bathroom.
A superior room with breakfast by the pool (nice! but a pair of Asian tourists insisted on dragging their table away from under the branches of the trees. Duh!) costs at least USD96, a really good deal to me.
Mandalay Hill Resort Hotel
http://www.mandalayhillresorthotel.com/www/
Grand is the word at the Mandalay Hill Resort Hotel. Am I gushing too much here?
Thanks to the fact that I was there off the peak season, we were upgraded to the Deluxe room, or so we were told. The view from the room was great. Look down and the pool (with changing lights at night) was there. Look up upon the hills and shrines are there.
There is a very nice spa as well, and a large garden with beautiful flowers, which the gardeners obtain the flowers for the rooms and the tables in the restaurants. Really, why need to pay for flowers when they can be grown in the backyard?
Conqueror Hotel
http://www.conquerorresorthotel.com/
This is the best hotel in Pindaya, or so I was told. I couldn't be sure, as it seems as if we were the only group of guests at this hotel, although the receptionist assured us that there was another group lodging there as well. Well, we didn't see them during dinner and breakfast.
This is another duplex cottage. While it isn't as luxiours as The Hotel @Tharabar Gate at Bagan, the climate is a lot cooler than at Bagan. When night fell, it became cold. Surrounded by mountains and the famous caves of thousand Buddhas, which can be seen from the balcony at the back of the cottage, I can just image the busyness when the tourists descend upon this place.
With breakfast, a cottage costs at least US60.
Inle Resort
http://www.inleresort.com
If "Grand" is the word at Mandalay Hill Resort Hotel, "Wow" is the word here. Whoever booked this hotel probably thought it funny, but we arrived by boat with our luggage on board. All the irrate I felt getting from place to place on Inle Lake vanished when we were led to one of the 18 Deluxe Villages.
I saw a little porch with furniture and a room with large windows. But it didn't seem to make sense because the cottage looked so much bigger from the outside. Guess what? The door at the porch opens to a living room with a day bed and a large window overlooking a lotus pond. Then the porter slid open sliding doors and showed us the huge bedroom, and opened two doors, 1 to the bath and the other to the toilet. Between the bath and the toilet is a vanity top with 2 sinks. 2 sinks! I don't have to wait my turn to wash my hands or brush my teeth. Such luxury doesn't even exist for me at home!
The cottage is 80m2, and because it is so troublesome to have to move around Inle Lake without a boat, we had dinner and breakfast at the hotel.
Seriously, I won't mind making my home at the cottage. Except for the lack of a kitchenette and washing machine, it is no different from a real home.
Splendid.
Right, this is a lot of gushing about hotels in Myanmar, but they've really exceeded my expectations. I won't mind returning to Myanmar, even at the risk of baking myself under the unrelenting Bagan sun again.
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