I can’t talk about Myanmar without saying how beautiful the country is, if you’re heading to Mandalay have a read here, if it’s just nuts you’re interested in (and who isn’t?), then I’ll try to help.

I was travelling Myanmar with a friend who’s allergic to nuts and it was a lot easier than we thought to make sure the food was nut free.

We didn’t manage to get a phrase that made the allergy clear, well at least anything me or my friend could hope to pronounce. Luckily, most places we ate brought out nuts as soon as we sat down so we just pointed to the nuts and said ‘no peanut’ – they’d either let us know if there were nuts in the food or give us the all clear. He’s still alive so it worked well enough.

We found the phrase ‘peanut’ was better understood than just saying ‘nut’, it did seem surprisingly easy to keep peanuts out of the food. If you’re not too keen to just take my word for it, you can always ask at your guesthouse – I’m sure they’ll give you a phrase to quote when you arrive. Hopefully you’ll have more luck pronouncing it than we did!