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Myanmar Visa in Bangkok

We have made it to Burma. The visa-acquisition process in Bangkok was smoother than I’d dared hope. Here is a brief account, written mostly to help future travelers who find it on Google.

The Myanmar embassy in Bangkok is surrounded by a tall grey wall topped with iron fencing, and the visa processing entrance is down a little side street. It opens at 9am. It has different hours from the consular office used by Myanmar citizens. Do not be fooled.

We were told that the embassy only processes a limited number of same-day visas every day, and people showing up after 10am are turned away. So we showed up at 7:45 expecting a queue of travel agent runners in front of us, but we were the first ones there.

If you walk down the side street away from the main street, after two blocks you find a little shop that is effectively an adjunct of the Myanmar embassy. They will take your visa photos, give you the application forms and a pen, glue your photo to the form, etc. This place is a must. They know what to do and what not to do. It is also very easy to find: look for a little yellow sign on the right side of the street that says “photos, copies, visa” (or words to that effect).

Apparently getting the visa is no problem if you do not list a profession like “journalist” on your work history (reverse side of the form). It has been rumored that the embassy in Bangkok will google your name and refuse a visa to anyone with obvious journalistic connections, so if you are a journalist trying to sneak into the country you might want to get your Burmese visa elsewhere. Of course in this day and age, it’s a strange distinction to draw, when everyone’s blogging or otherwise communicating their experiences.

We got back to the visa entrance at 8:30 and found a cluster of Western travelers waiting for the door to open. None of them knew about the shop. We strutted around with our completed, stapled, and glued forms and sent the whole lot scampering to the shop, leaving us first in line.

The cost for a same-day visa is 1200 baht. We paid our fee, handed over our forms and passports, and were told to come back at 3:30 to get our visas. We had printed the itinerary for our flights to and from Yangon, but they didn’t seem to care. The whole process inside the embassy took about 15 minutes.

And at 3:30 we had our visas (which had our pictures on them). That’s it.

This time in Bangkok was marginally more pleasant than previous experiences. We discovered the elevated train which is far nicer than the subway in Boston, and we availed ourselves of the excellent shopping to pick up a few supplies we’d neglected to pack (probiotics for my prima donna of a stomach, a new lens for Stephanie’s camera, DEET-based bug spray). Prices are similar to the US.

Yesterday we flew on AirAsia to Yangon, and I’m writing this from our hotel lobby. Yangon is mindblowing. Walking the streets is a huge adventure, like time travel. But more on that later. It deserves its own space.

And they’re off…

After a hectic few days of airline booking and bag packing and visa procuring and hard drive backing-up and impulsive camcorder purchasing, we find our hero (that’s me) at Munich airport preparing to board an Emirates flight through Dubai to Bangkok.

He is is hunched over the last few crumbs of a bagel (not poppy seed — more on that in a sec) and though excited about the adventures to come in the next six months of travel, he already looks a bit worn-out. His eyes droop and his shoulders sag.

Why, you might ask, with this rich bounty of travel ahead of him, and his amazing and sparkling wife by his side, why does he look like such crap?

Part of it is Bangkok. In the opinion of our hero (still me), Bangkok is a sleazy migraine headache of a city. Bangkok is way too stimulating and a little bit disgusting, like accidentally putting on someone else’s underpants in the locker room.

But Bangkok is just a means to an end. It happens to be the only city in the world where our hero, ok, where, I and my wife can get a visa for Burma in less than one day. Which is essential, because we have booked an AirAsia flight to Burma on Friday for two weeks of unplanned exploration. We have a hotel room for the first two nights in Yangon, and after that we’ll just go wherever the wind takes us. A favorite way to travel.

But the main reason for the baggy eyes and dark circles is that amidst all the planning and packing, I stayed up way too late the last three nights hacking.

For some reason, my best ideas come at the most inopportune times, and three times in the last week I was so completely taken by an idea that I hacked deep into the night. The German winter sun is a shy bastard and stays hidden until late morning, giving you long, uninterrupted periods of darkness in which to work. I am convinced this is a major reason for the unstoppable power of the German economy.

Of course, each time I went to bed at 10am, it was after working on a completely different idea, so now I have three brilliant, unfinished hacks on my hard disk. I’m trying to delude myself into thinking that I’ll work on them while traveling, but experience says otherwise. We’re going to be moving every two or three days and there’s so much to do and see. Between that and, hopefully, keeping you apprised of our movements, there just won’t be enough time.

Which brings me to the itinerary. In the next three months we plan to visit Thailand, Burma, Rajasthan, Nagaland, Nepal, Bhutan, Assam, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, and Komodo. It is strange even to be able to tell you that. Normally when traveling, we tend to just wing it, but this time around we wanted to go to several places that require advanced planning, and so we had to get ourselves organized. Google Docs was involved and spreadsheets were produced. Print-outs were even made. It’s unheard of.

After Komodo we have a brief stop in Tennessee for my sister’s graduation from college, and then we go to South America for 6 weeks, and then Africa, and then finally we move to San Francisco to live happily ever after by the end of the summer.

But first we have to get through Dubai. Which brings me to the issue of the poppy-seed bagel. As it turns out eating a poppy seed bagel before transiting Dubai is a good way to end up in Arab prison. If you don’t believe me, google “poppy seed swiss dubai” and check out the story of the poor Swiss schmuck who was imprisoned for three poppy seeds found on his clothing as he passed through Dubai. He didn’t even eat the bagel in Dubai! Other similar stories can be found – google for “dubai melatonin,” for example.

So the bagel I ate was covered not in poppy seeds but pumpkin seeds, in true German-bakery fashion. I’ve searched extensively but haven’t yet found any sign of punishment for fragments of pumpkin seeds, but I’m worried nevertheless. I’ve gone into the bathroom and shaken off my shirt a few times already.

And now they’re calling us to board. Wish me luck.

Birds

In the Everglades in December I had a lot of chances to look at birds. They were everywhere, ancient and amazing.

At the same time, I was taking flying lessons.

So it was impossible not to notice birds exploiting the same aerodynamic effects I learned from flying.

Here are a few, for your reading pleasure.

Ground Effect

Wings fly because they are supported by the air. The wing pushes down and the air pushes back up.

When a wing is very close to the ground, the air that’s pushed down is trapped between the wing and the ground and forms a higher-pressure cushion of air, giving the wing more lift, so that it can fly at a lower speed. This is called ground effect.

One of the things you figure out pretty quickly when you’re learning to land is that in ground effect, the airplane just wants to keep floating and floating. And so if you have a limited amount of runway to work with, you want to approach the landing without carrying too much extra speed.

In Florida I noticed a lot of birds skimming the water and it was amazing how far they could glide just above the surface without having to flap their wings once.

Dihedral

Stand in front of an airplane and look at its wings and you’ll notice that they are not completely parallel to the ground – they are angled up. This angle is called the dihedral.

The purpose of the dihedral angle is to make an airplane self-stabilizing. If a gust of wind causes one wing to drop, the airplane will slip sideways toward the lower wing. This causes the lower wing to generate more lift, to rise, and to restore the airplane to wings-level, without the pilot having to do anything.

And that’s why in a little Cessna, even in slightly rough air, you can often let go of the yoke and let the plane fly itself (unless the guy sitting next to you is a big fatty and unbalances the airplane).

Swarms of turkey vultures dot the sky over Southern Florida, making the location of every road kill.

In this picture you can see that when turkey vultures are soaring, their wings are angled up, like a Cessna (or an Airbus).

I’m not sure why some birds have dihedral and others don’t, but I suspect turkey vultures benefit from it because they do so much gliding. Some airplanes actually have negative dihedral – fighter jets, for example – to make them less stable and more maneuverable.

Landing Flare

When you’re landing an airplane, at the very end, you pull back on the yoke as the airplane sinks, to stay in the air as long as possible so that you touch down with the slowest possible airspeed.

The landing flare also angles the lift vector backwards and helps to slow the airplane down.

Unfortunately I don’t have a cool picture of this but I noticed a lot of birds would flare at the last minute before perching on a tree branch or landing on the ground. They would also flap their wings as they flared, sort of like a thrust reverser on a jet.

Gyroscopes

Of course, birds are ornithopters and fly differently from airplanes. They don’t have propellers or jets creating a longitudinal thrust.

They also don’t have spinning gyroscopes and an artificial horizon to tell them which way is up when they’re flying inside clouds, like instrument-equipped airplanes do. Which is why it has long been believed that birds cannot fly through clouds.

Or can they? Pilots have reported bird strikes in instrument conditions. And in 1972, an ornithologist in New York bought a military surplus radar and tracked birds flying through clouds for several miles – and they were going straight.

It shouldn’t be possible for birds to fly through clouds, but it is. How do they do it? Do birds have some kind of gyroscopic organ, or a magnetic sense that tells them which way is the ground?

I’ve done some googling but haven’t found a definitive answer. The best article is this 1993 classic, The Turn in The Atlantic.

Happy reading.

Ask Nat: How do you pack?

rubenvermeersch asked: Very interesting to read about your adventures! I was wondering: how much and what do you pack for such a long trip? How do you balance between mobility and utility? Are you travelling with just one 55+10 backpack or a pile of suitcases?

We try to focus on mobility, and count on being able to buy what we need while we’re traveling. I have a 55+10 backpack and Stephanie has a 65 liter bag, and neither bag is full. If your bag is full, it takes ages to pack. We want to be able to pack & go, so we leave a lot of empty space in our bags. I’d say mine is 60 or 70% full.

Here’s my full packing list:

1. A pair of linen pants I had custom-made in Hoi An with very deep pockets. Super useful as nothing can fall out.  These roll very compactly.
2. Two quick-dry cargo pants and two bathing suits. One pair are the dorky kind with detachable lower-legs, which I’ve used once or twice.
3. Two t-shirts, one long-sleeved shirt, one very light linen sweater.
4. Two pair ex officio underwear (which I rarely wear, to be honest), and one pair of smartwool socks.
5. A pair of Keen sandals I’ve been wearing for nearly five years that are in great shape. These shoes are indisputably ugly but very practical, and seemingly indestructible.
6. Trail running shoes for hiking and working out.
7. A big bag of medicine like cipro, amoxicillin, azithromycin, sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim, pepto bismol tablets, dramamine, ibuprofen, etc. Our doctor gave us a handful of prescriptions before we left. These have, unfortunately, proved to be very useful as we’ve both gotten various infections.
8. Kindle 3 (Amazon delivered it to me in Thailand)
9. An incredible Petzl Zipka Plus head lamp. This is a very bright, pocketable and head-mountable light that makes it easy to see and be seen in areas with no street lighting (pretty common in e.g. Cambodia). I keep it next to the bed at night, just in case. A lot of people we’ve met have coveted this.
10. 13” Macbook running Mac OS and Linux
11. Panasonic GF-1 digital camera
12. Underwater camera for diving
13. Suunto Zoop dive computer
14. iPhone 3GS with AT&T unlimited international data (works in Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea; didn’t work in Cambodia and Vietnam). We use an app called Expenditure to track our spending and (try to) stay within our budget.
15. Unlocked Nexus One. You can get local SIMs with a month of data for about $20 everywhere we’ve been. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have signed up for AT&T’s international unlimited data plan, which costs $70/month and has been useless half the time.
16. A pretty small toiletry kit: toothbrush (replaced twice so far), toothpaste, razor.
17. An MSR quick-drying camping towel. We’ve occasionally been somewhere with non-existant or disgusting towels, and this was a lifesaver.
18. Deck of cards; useful when it’s raining and we’re stuck somewhere, or waiting for a bus, etc etc. We like to show people magic tricks, too.
19. Fake poop, of course.

My whole kit weighs 9.5 kilos. You can definitely travel on a lot less than that, and my bag has been growing in the last few months, which I think is normal. I started out with a bag that was so empty, it made my mom nervous. I subscribe to the “buy it there” philosophy, which makes packing light easy, but I’ve also added a few things I’ve needed (mostly t-shirts) as we’ve been going along.

In the last week we’ve accumulated some sailing-specific items (gloves, books, rain jackets) that we’ll probably ship back to Germany before we leave Thailand.

Ask Nat: How do you travel?

tjschmitz asked: How are you traveling within Cambodia – air, car, etc? How does it compare to travel in USA/Europe? How do you think it’s affecting your overall Cambodia experience? Thanks again for sharing!

In the country we’re mostly getting around by bus, but we hired a car and driver to get to some of the more remote sites. It costs about $40/day. We had to take a pickup to get to Prasat Preah Vihear because the road was extremely steep.

In the cities we get around by either moto or tuk-tuk. A moto is a motorcycle taxi, and the cheapest way to get around usually. You pay the driver a dollar or fifty cents to take you across town, and hop on the back.

If we have luggage, or are traveling in the middle of the day, a tuk-tuk is a lot better because it’s bigger and provides some sun protection. A tuk-tuk is basically a carriage drawn by a motoscooter. Here’s a picture of our driver from Siem Reap:

(He was great. If you are going to Siem Reap and need a Tuk Tuk driver, He has a web site here.)

Tuk tuks are a lovely way to get around because they’re slow and open air, and you get to see and even interact with people around you. Showing up some places in a car feels a bit like landing a helicopter in the middle of the street in downtown Boston and stepping out to buy some Starbucks.

We flew to Cambodia from Malaysia on Air Asia, which is a game-changingly cheap low-cost airline flying Airbuses all around Asia. I think our tickets were $80, and we bought them the day before the flight.

Mostly we’re trying to avoid flying now, because it’s more fun to go overland. In fact, a friend of ours suggested we try to go overland all the way to India… and we might give it a try.

safari.nat.org

I’ve started a travel blog on tumblr, where I’ll post pictures and other little snippets from the next 6-12 months of backpacking around the world. You can find it at safari.nat.org.