Chris and I loved every minute of our trip to Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar.
Firstly, thank you both for telling all the hotels that this was a special 25th anniversary trip. Each hotel did something special for us: the Mandarin Oriental gave us a prime view room, a bottle of wine and spa upgrade, anniversary cake and heart-shaped flower arrangement on the bed! La Residence in Siem Reap upgraded us to a suite. In Yangon we had a suite overlooking the gardens and pool. Not to be outdone, we had a gorgeous river – front suite and flower message on our bed from the resort in Bagan.
We were also given VIP treatment at meal-times and they presented us with a specially decorated anniversary cake.
We soon got used to being met and chauffeured at each location! We loved the oasis of the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok. We had the most fabulous guide in Siem Reap who took us to visit the temple ruins when the crowds were gone – it felt like we were the only visitors!
We fell in love with Myanmar. We were rather apprehensive about our visit there, but the local people are very friendly and desperately want their freedoms to increase. They love having visitors and are so keen to please. Yangon has beautiful parks and wide boulevards (and lovely old derelict British mansions) but of course the crowning glory are the Buddhist temples. So much gold! Our hotel room in Bagan was so lovely and peaceful and the area had so many ancient Buddhist temples. Thousands of them! We managed to do a morning hot-air balloon flight to get a wonderful panoramic view. Our beautiful guide in Bagan even purchased a painting from an artist outside a temple to give to us as an anniversary remembrance! Please do encourage your clients to visit Myanmar – more tourism will hopefully help the freedom process and does help employ people.
This trip was the first time that I had flown Singapore Airlines and they were great. Personally I would rather not take the 1am flight from Auckland again, not just because of the time but because it did not have the new business class flat beds. The return flight from Singapore had the new seat/beds and they were wonderful!!
I would love to do the trip all over again – we most certainly would like to return to Myanmar in say, 5 years, to see how things have (hopefully)
improved. Our sincerest thanks.