Getting Around Mandalay

If you want to make it to Amarapura, Inwa and further on to Sagaing, then private transoprtation is your best bet. In fact we hired the wagon car we used the previous day to tour around Mandalay and the cost was 20$ for a half day tour to Inwa and Amarapura.
Inwa though is a bit more complicated case. Your car drops you off at a place where you have to take a river boat and cross the river after a short ride. Then you hire a horse cart to tour around Inwa's attractions (3-4 hours)-impossible on foot. If you have only half day, like we did then skip Sagaing and visit first Inwa and then Amarapura for the lovely sunset on U Bein bridge.

It's easy to find your way around in Mandalay. All the main streets are numbered. 1st street up to 45th street run east-west and streets 46 to 90 run north-south.

Bear in mind that the enormous Mandalay Palace is in the center of town. This means you can't travel uninterrupted along 13th through 25th streets (east-west) and 67th through 89th streets (north-south). If you wanted to, say, get from one end of 20th street to the other, it's take about 45 minutes because you'd have to go around the council.

There are numerous little side streets too but the numbering system makes it quite easy.

One of the best things about riding in open vehicle like this is seeing the countryside. It didn't work so well here.

A lot of the taxis and taxi buses in Mandalay are quite small. If you're tall, you might find it awkward to see outside. I had to hunch over all the time so I wouldn't miss anything.

It sounds minor but it's a bit of a pain if you're in the vehicle for hours on end and there is so much to see!

Foreign independent travel (FIT) has been legitimate in Myanmar for some years now. I visited there in May-June this year. It's no trouble to visit the main tourist areas, Yangon, Inle Lake, Mandalay, and Bagan, but to travel to border areas, especially around the golden triangle, is still problematic as I understand it. I only went as far north as Lashio.

The $300 exchange for FITs was reduced to $200 in August. Package tourists (non-FIT visas) don't have to exchange any dollars to FECs in Yangon. It has long been rumored that there was no FEC exchange booth in Mandalay, but with the new international airport this may be changing.

4 more images

At 9 pm departs a train to Bagan arriving in the early morning, upperclass US $ 10, comfortable seats, ordinary class wooden seats, but very bumpy tracks.