Adventures on the Burmese border

We had to get the hell out of Thailand. The feds were hot on our tails! So we headed straight for the northernmost point of the country, to one of the few open border crossings with Burma, also know as Myanmar. Sandwiched in line between a portly Swiss gent and a dwarf-like Japanese man with a US passport, our feet trembled in our Tevas. Would we make it out of there alive?

Okay, okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. It's just that until last week, border crossings and Burma seemed the stuff of Indiana Jones movies. The reality is, we had to leave Thailand to renew our 30-day no-visa stay, which you can do simply by crossing into a neighboring country and back. We did just that across the Mae Sai river to Burma. I was a bit nervous about the whole confronting-the-authorities thing, given that just two days previous we had had to pay off the cops in Chiang Mai in order to avoid a parking ticket for our motorbike! Who knew what corruption would prevail at the border? I needn't have worried though; the border patrol ran a tight little operation. Five minutes and five dollars later, we had some new stamps in our passports and Thailand was happy to host us for another 30 days.

I am sorry to say that those five minutes in Burma gave us very little flavor for the country; the border town of Tachilek is to Burma what Hampton Beach is to New Hampshire. It was nothing more than hawkers selling junk and a few very old beggars tapping their cups on the ground. As we crossed back into Thailand, beggar children followed us, tugging at our shirts. It was really sad to see.

Once safely back in Thailand, we dined at the Riverside Retreat, which overlooked the bridge to Burma. As we gazed at the less-than-breathtaking border, we noticed two men passing huge parcels across barbed wire from underneath the bridge. They appeared to have crawled under the bridge from the Thailand side and they were dumping (smuggling?) their freight into a nearby parking lot. I wonder if this had anything to do with the statistic I recently heard that 70% of the world's heroin is smuggled over the border from Burma. Then again, their packages looked more likely to contain baby diapers than opium, and they were smuggling in the opposite direction. There I go with my Indiana Jones plotline again.

The town of Mae Sai was a bustling border town by day, but it was absolutely dead after dark. We had decided to stay on and explore the hilltowns near the border, so we were some of the few tourists left in town. We wandered to a lone tourist restaurant. (I have a fear that all Thai street food has meat in it, and I don't yet know enough Thai to find out otherwise.) Soon after we sat down, an older mustachioed American invited himself to sit at our table. He was Jonathan Shoch, king of stories, talker of talkers. He's been on the road alone for 35 years. "Oh, years ago I was back in Bali. This was before the tourists came. I met a pilot. He said 'Why don't you come to Lombok?' and I rode my motorbike right onto the plane! The locals there had no idea what to do with me. I slept on their floor and when I woke 5 men were watching me sleep!" Traveller's tales, conspiracy theories, politics, physics, you name it. He wagged his tongue at us for two hours until Derek feigned exhaustion and we made our escape.

The next day, we headed for Mae Salong, a hill town that was settled by the Yunnanese from China. They grow tea there. And, as we learned, there are no buses that go there. We went to the bus station in Mae Sai and no one spoke English. "Mae Salong?" we asked. They laughed. Okay, we knew of a town at the junction with the road to Mae Salong. The problem was, it was labeled in our book as Ban Baseng and the Thais know it as Pasang, which sounds totally different with accents. Eventually we got there. From Pasang, we had to take a songtao (literally "two rows"), a pickup with a roof and two benches in the back. These are a totally legitimate form of travel around here; different colored trucks go to different destinations. They function like public buses, except you have to wait for them to fill up before they leave. After we had waited for an hour and no one else showed up for Mae Salong, we had to charter the songtao ourselves, that is, pay the fare of 6 people. Upon arriving at our guesthouse, we met two other couples who had done the same thing earlier! Hmph.

In Mae Salong, we tasted tea and hiked up 707 steps to a Buddhist temple on the hill. The Buddhists like to build their temples up high, if possible. In our next stop, Thaton, there was a Buddhist theme park of sorts set up on the hill. White and gold Buddha heads could be seen from the town, peeking above the treetops. You walk up a steep curved road to find each Buddha in his own little "natural" setting, complete with manmade caves and plaster-of-paris deer. Quite odd, but also awe-inspiring.

After Thaton, we took a boat trip down the Mae Sok River and then a bus back to Chiang Mai. The boat trip was pretty rustic - the boat was about 30 feet long and 4 feet across. You sit on a cushion on the floor of the boat with your back against one side of the boat, your feet against the other. The boat sits about 2 inches out of the water, and it zooms along though rapids! I finally got to use my raincoat.

I've been thinking a lot about that adage "the journey is more important than the destination." In India some of our most frustrating or harrowing trips are the ones we now look back on with fondness. (Other travellers joke "it was an experience.") Until our little border trip, Thailand journeys had been a breeze. You walk into a travel agent and they book you a VIP bus. They serve coke and a snack on board. It's too easy; you don't feel you've earned anything by getting there. And when there is the beach, well, it was all starting to feel a bit soulless to me. Our trip to the border may not have been as dynamic as an Indiana Jones movie, but it did show us that there is much more to Thailand than pina coladas and palm trees. I can't wait to discover more in our next 30 days.