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A grand old hotel
By Steve Willard
Our stay at the “Grand Hotel” in downtown Merchant Street, Rangoon was a memorable one. Indeed, if there is a Burmese version of Fawlty Towers, this place is it.
We chose to stay there during our visit to Rangoon not out of free will but because our taxi driver made it impossible to find a room anywhere else. See related article: Arriving in Rangoon
For a start the façade of the place is far removed from any reasonable person’s concept of the word “Grand”. Walk down Merchant Street, look for a small doorway leading up a flight of creaky steps and you have found the place.
Halfway up the stairwell, hidden from street level, is a cheap sign proudly welcoming you to the Grand Hotel.
The foyer has a pleasant enough lounge room with a television set for visitors to watch. Burmese TV broadcasts for just a few hours each day, which is in fact something to be thankful for as the programs are virtually unwatchable – mostly its rousing marching songs and endless vision of Burmese generals sitting around listening to speeches.
Image of Rangoon by Sam Hummel
There is no internet to speak of – you can send e-mails in Burma but every single one goes through a government server and is read by the military. Browsing the web can be done but it could cost you a lot of money.
The rooms in the Grand Hotel are comfortable enough – basic furnishings, a bed, private bathroom and air conditioning.
However as soon as we fell asleep, the airconditioning stopped working and after a while we woke up drenched in sweat. I walked to reception to complain and was ushered into a room manned by a guy sitting in front of an electrical panel.
He turned a few dials and pronounced the problem solved. The problem – Rangoon’s electricity supply runs on such a ramshackle system that the hotel literally employs someone to sit and share the amps around to deal with the fluctuating supply.
We awoke next morning and headed for the wide spacious balcony which serves as the Grand Hotel’s al fresco dining area.
Neatly kept with shrubs and half a dozen dining tables, this fabulous one storey high balcony overlooks the hustle and bustle downstairs and is a great spot to enjoy a little colonial comfort.
Image of Rangoon by Sam Hummel
We ordered from the breakfast menu, however no matter what we requested the answer was “we have run out, sorry”. It transpired they only had eggs, toast, tea or coffee and this remained the case for the whole week.
Even so, it was a wonderful place for sitting and watching the world go by and was the redeeming feature of this otherwise odd hotel.
It was from this balcony that Rangoon served up its last mocking insult to us as we sat one evening enjoying a cold beer. (We brought our own, the hotel didn’t have any for sale)
Pretty much every day we had eaten a delicious hot curry served up by a scrawny street vendor who spent his days serving up curry and rice from a huge set of caldrons.
On the day before leaving Rangoon, we were on the balcony watching him stirring away from above. The chap reached down the back of his shorts, gave the crack of his backside a good hard scratch then without washing shoved the same hand into a bucket of raw meat and threw it into the cooking pot.
Oh joy, why couldn’t I have seen that *before* buying food off the guy for a week.
See related article: Arriving in Rangoon
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HOTEL RESERVATIONS 
