Royal Orchid Sheraton Bangkok

I finally stayed back at this hotel again last August-2015.   This is my second stay at this hotel, being the first stay was more than 10 years ago (2003 I think).

From the decor and layout, you probably can tell that this hotel is quite old, probably as old as I am :)

As SPG Platinum, I have been upgrade to 1 bed room suite with a very nice view of the river.   The room was at 18f, which is a bit inconvenience as I need to change lift to go to club lounge.


These are the view taken from my room.   Sitting on the sofa facing to the window overlooking the river.   I like the view especally around sunset time where you can see the change of the scenery and the lightful boats nearby waiting for dinner cruise.

 Here are the pictures of the rooms.   The bath room has 2 doors, which can be accessed from bath room or from outside.  Hence if you have visitor that needs to use the bath room, you can still keep the privacy of your bed room.

The hotel has a resort type facilities with 2 swiming pools, one is overlooking the river.

The hotel provide a boat shuttle to Saphan Thaksin BTS which make the access to the hotel is less painful.   The boat runs every half hours on the hours and half of hours from the deck behind the hotel and depart 10 minutes later from Saphan Taksin.

In general, I feel the hotel is ok if you are in Bangkok and want to have a relaxing time with a nice river view.   Although the hotel is a bit dated and busy (many groups, as it is a huge hotel), I found it is comfortable enough and sometimes the hotel offers a very attarctive place.

But if you need a lot of traveling around Bangkok, perhaps this hotel may not be ideal for the stay

Road to Mandalay (Part 1)

This post should have been there sometimes ago, however, since I was quite busy I can only manage to put it now.

I had an opportunity to board this Orient Express "Road to Mandalay" trip.  It is basically a cruise along Irrawady rivers in Myanmar.   This cruise was taken place on 31-July to 3-August.  You can either take "one-way" trip either Mandalay to Bagan or Bagan to Mandalay or you can take the whole trip Mandalay-Bagan-Mandalay (this is recommended if you take full trip, as the trip will start from Mandalay and you will see also why I recommend this later) or Bagan-Mandalay-Bagan.

If you take Mandalay to Bagan trip, the package will also include the flight from Yangon to Mandalay.  As the flight in Myanmar will start from Yangan early in the morning (around 7am), the passanger needs to be in Yangon the night before.

As there is no night flight to Yangon from Singapore on Tuesday night, we opted out to fly to Mandalay by ourselves.  I flew to Bangkok on Tuesday night and on Wednesday morning, I and my friend flew to Mandalay from Bangkok.

The Mandalay service is a Thai Smiles services.  At that time it was a 4x/week service, I think it is still the same now.  

This is the plane that took us to Mandalay, HS-TXF, code name Samut Songkhran.  It was still quite brand new plane when we took it.  The flight was delivered on 13-March-2013, hence it was not even 6 months old.  As you may see, the plane still looks quite shinny :)

The A320 was park away, hence we need to take stair.  It also means a good opportunity to take pictures.

The Thai Smiles planes have a 4 rows of so-called "business class" seat.  It is actually the same seats as normal economy seat (perhaps with better legs room?).   It is seperated with a small curtain.  We were sitting on row 5, the first row of economy seat.   I think it the last row of the "business class" is not a good sits as the curtain may be quite annoying.

As you can see there are someone sat on "business class" cabin.  In fact there were 2 person.  Later on, we found out they are Thai employee most likely engineer as they were talking to the ground crew in Mandalay.

 

 

The legs room is quite ok, as I am 6" (180 cm) tall.

 

 

The flying time to Mandalay is 1h55m.  Once we are airborn, the FAs start distributing this bag and hot drinks.  The bag contain bottled water, sandwich and cake for your breakfast.

 

 

 

 

 

 The rest of the flight is just a normal affair.  And now we are landed in Mandalay International Airport.  It is very modest airport with no aero-bridge.  The building is actually not too far and we can simply walk into it.  However, we were fetch by the bus.  The bus looks to me like a pre-war era, however, it is quite clean and ok.

 

 

 

 



 Most of the flights are using propeller planes.   Some of the planes that I saw that morning.

 

 

The Asian Wings will be the flight that took us back from Bagan to Yangon. 

 

 

The airport is very basic and functional with automated bagage claims.  I think there are only few International flights serving Mandalay, TG, PG and FD from Bangkok and may be some other flight from nearby city in China (Kunming?).   I noticed there were also quite some number of  Chinese on my flight.

 

 

 

 

Air Asia provides free shuttle to town from airport.

 

 

We were then greeted by our guide which will send us to the "port".   The drive took us about 45 minutes on the modest yet good road.  

 

We arrived at Swee Kyet Yee River Station which is the base camp of the Road of Mandalay boat.  We were greated by the buttler that served us drink and the boat is waiting for us on the river.  At this pier, at least there is nice wooden path way for us to go to the boat. 

 

I think the boat is really pretty.  It looks mighty sitting on the river waiting for us.


I will continue on the next part as it will become too long if I out it on 1 post.