Mandalay Karaweik Mobile Hotel — Hotel in Mandalay District

What a hotel! I've never stayed anywhere like it: 2 ornate chicken heads adorn the twin bows closely backed up by huge white elephants. Surreal enough for you?||You'll have plenty of tourists taking photos of it from the river!||Our ‘suite’ wasnt actually a suite as it was 1 room but it was pretty big. Teak walls and floor with fantastic views over the river. ||V friendly and helpful staff if a little short on the English speaking dept. ||The restaurant is good with a large selection of dishes and cocktails. I don't like eating in hotels, I prefer to go out but we actually ate in quite a lot Plus a litre bottle of absolute vodka is £11! ||The big question: would I stay here again? Yes: the location is good even though it's out of the centre as it's handy for the tours. However it does come with some provisos: ||I'd like to add here that I don't want to sound too dismissive of this hotel, I really did like it, but its worth people noting some of its "peculiarities":||its noisy on the morning from the boats on the river which start around 4.30am but really get going by 6.30am. It's noisy from the restaurant on the top floor. It's noisy from weird mechanical noises from God knows what (possibly setting up for a locals wedding the next day). It was incredibly noisy on our last night when a party of rats escaping the monsoon rains had a party in the space above our ceiling. Never heard anything like it, felt like I was part of the party. ||Being in the water there are plenty of mozzies, especially in the restaurant when someone leaves the doors open all day. We had 2 huge cockroaches on the bathroom one morning (I learnt that they can fly back onto the boat when you try to fling them into the river). ||The tap water is a semi dirty brown colour, the colour you expect it to be AFTER having a bath from a long hot sweaty and dusty day of sightseeing. ||Breakfast could do with some improvement as the American option is toast, a few tiny stands of bacon, bland omelette, chicken sausages and luncheon meat. Asian option is a very basic fried rice. Evening meals are good with decent portions, altho did have to explain that yes the steak we wanted SHOULD contain meat and fries IS NOT fried rice. Comedy. ||WiFi is patchy sometimes nothing sometimes only Facebook or WhatsApp will work but not Google search. The staff were very nice and lent us a WiFi dongle for a couple of days which worked great. ||2 large seats on the balcony outside the room with cooling fan that takes some of the heat and humidity away. Quite delightful local music drifts across the river from the small villages on the opposite bank. If heading to bagan by boat the MGRG ferry is literally next door so takes some if the pain off the 7am departure.||But I still give it 4 stars for the purely unique...

We booked this hotel for 2 reasons: it looked cool from outside and we thought it was close to the Pandaw cruise port. It turned out to be a huge mistake, total disaster.||1. The staff dont speak enough English to communicate. It took five staff 30 minutes to understand what we want: an English-speaking tv channel. Difficult.||2. The room key never worked. It only turned on the room electricity. Every time we come inside to our own room, we have to ask the staff to open the door for us with the master key. Weird.||3. The TV seems working but for the purpose of decoration. Every time we want to change into the BBC world news channel, we have to ask the staff to communicate with someone else to change the channel for us, someone hidden somewhere in the so-called "hotel TV station". Inconvenient.||4. The hot water issue. You really have to decide whether you want the hot water or cold water as there is no other option, it can NOT be adjusted. We both have 30 seconds warm water and after that, the hot water almost burn us to death, our skin still burn. Terrible.||5. The bill issue. The staff are not trained properly. We insisted for several hours to bring us our bill, they ignored. Almost two hours before checkout, we went to the lobby to pay, the staff were like deer in the headlight. They cant even organize our dinner together with the room bill. Ridiculous.||6. The noise issue. Following things make loud noise: the squeeky woodfloor, the tap water whenever we turn it on, the boats passing by, next door water tap...bummer.||It is a total waste of money and we both agree that is THE WORST HOTEL we ever stayed and it is a HUGE MISTAKE. Do not book here. We had to work full time to overcome all these problems -- and had to pay for this awful treatment by the zombie staff....

ok, lets get straight to the point a 5 star hotel this is not - ok, but you are in a developing country that has only been open to tourists for a very short time, so communication with staff is not going to be easy, but then why visit if you think it should be easy.||the hotel is a fabulous experience yes the key rooms never worked, we had to get the staff to open the room for us, but this never seemed an issue, and yes the rooms on teh booking site we used - gave the experience that the rooms were much bigger, but again we were on a boot, ||to get hot water you did need to let the water run for about 15 mins, but once you understood this it was no great issue.||breakfast was interesting - the only opiton being a take on an american breakfast, not much good if you are a vegetarian! but i am sure over time as more guests visit the menu will improve.||evening meals were interesting and after two poor meals we opted to eat out instead, hopefully though things will improve as the staff develop. the beds and rooms were clean and had we not been going out to the night market we could have enjoyed a trip down the river on board teh hotel.||down side is it is very noisy with all the boats who use the river but the views more than make up for this, would recomend that stays are limited to a couple of nights only if you need your...