Travel Day 1137-38 – Bangkok, THAILAND
After treating my wound from the past at the Bumrungrad Hospital yesterday, today I had to look at the future and start preparations for my visit in Myanmar…
Central World to SuperRich, Bangkok
Luckily I had taken care of all the visa formalities for Myanmar back in July when I first arrived in Bangkok. Since the visa was valid for 28 days within a three months period, Getting a Myanmar Visa in Bangkok as early as possible had been a great idea to allow more flexibility in case of any complications. To my surprise, the whole visa process was straight forward, quick and without any sort of delay or complications. In fact, the only complications while preparing for the Myanmar trip seemed to arise now that I needed US Dollars…
Much had been written and talked about the currency problems in Myanmar and the importance of US Dollars. One problem seemed to be that a withdraw of cash within Myanmar was not possible and the other was that brand new and crisp US Dollar bills were needed to receive the local currency, Kyat, in exchange. To solve the first problem, enough cash would have to be brought into Myanmar to cover my entire time there and I needed to get that money immediately in freshly baked, colorful bills…
SuperRich Money Exchange, Bangkok
Luckily a fellow traveller had given me the rough idea that it was generally possible to get by on about 20 US Dollars per day in Myanmar. Since I intended to stay 26 days in total, at least I knew that I would need a minimum of 500 dollars for the duration of my stay, but I intended to double the amount for safety reasons. The big question that resulted my calculations was then obviously how to get 1000 US Dollars in brand new, crisp and colorful bills in Bangkok…
All the local banks in the city seemed to only dispense Thai Baht and they were obviously charging me a high fee for doing so. The solution promised to lie in Central World. All important banks appeared to have a branch located there and most importantly my own bank was represented as well. While my bank was obviously allowing me to withdraw money from their ATM without charging me fees, they could only dispense Thai Baht as well and at a maximum of 30000…
Central World in Bangkok, Thailand
After walking from one bank to the other within Central World, I came to the realization that none of the banks were allowed to give out US Dollar Bills. All of the banks accepted dollars but none was allowed to give them out again to customers. This certainly put me in a very uncomfortable situation, especially because the only suggested solution seemed to lie in going all way to the big Suvarnabhumi Airport. If the new dollar bills were available at the smaller airport that I was flying out of was more than uncertain and so a rather certain solution was needed…
Luckily after running around everywhere in Central World a solution was found. Finally somebody suggested SuperRich Money Exchange which was conveniently located across the pedestrian bridge from Central World Plaza, inside the small Rajadmri 2 lane. Even if the name sounded like a joke and the location seemed almost a bit sketchy, SuperRich 1965 turned out to be extremely professional, quick and well prepared. As soon as I mentioned US Dollar bills, they made the connection to Myanmar and knew all the attached regulations, even suggesting 100 dollar bills to me because they would get a better exchange rate for Kyat inside of Myanmar. Great, if only I would have known about SuperRich in the first place, I could have saved a lot of time and energy in my preparations for Myanmar…
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