Three countries, one day

Feb. 3, 2009

Time has flown since I arrived in Thailand on January 4. Sleepless overnight bus trips and nights on the islands that stretched into the next morning left me tumbling through each day. When I returned to Bangkok to meet up with Julie, my sense of time and place seemed warped. My journal from that time is filled with an attempted recollection about the days on the islands, but it amounts to little more than this:

Jan. 7 - Jan. 22: Left BKK, arrived Ko Phan Nang and painted myself in day glo to attend jungle trance party and Full Moon Party, hung out for two days in Krabi, met some Brits in Ko Lanta, hung out in a tree house with some Thai Rastafarians, drank buckets, went to Ko Phi Phi, met Aussies and Canadians at a hostel called the Rock, drank buckets, partied, saw a shark, painted others in day glo, partied, lost 600 baht at sea, ate banana chocolate pancake, partied.

There's also some other stuff in there about a half-naked, leaping Australian, but that story (like so many others) will be saved for the book.

Anyway, as I said, time flew and suddenly I only had a few days left on my visa. On January 1 of this year, the new Thai government changed some of the tourist visa rules. To extend my visa in the country, I would have to pay about $50 and would only get seven days added on. However, if I left the country and returned by land, I could get two extra weeks for only the cost of transportation and the fee for the other country.

Julie and I were bound for Chiang Mai, a city in the mountains of northern Thailand. We were planning to do a lot in the north country. We had a jungle trek scheduled and wanted to take Thai cooking lessons and look into a short meditation course. If I wanted to stick around town, I had to make a visa run.

I booked a day trip to Burma through a company that also offered some sightseeing along the way.

I left early on the morning of Jan. 28th. Our first stop was to a hot spring near Chiang Rai. It was a complete tourist trap. There was a big, boiling natural fountain in the middle of a parking lot encircled by chintzy souvenir shops. The highlight of that stop was boiling an egg in the spring.

Next we headed to a pagoda in the old city of Chiang Rai. There I learned the difference between a pagoda and a stupa. Both are holy Buddhist structures, though a stupa normally holds the bones of a monk or members of the royal family, whereas a pagoda is larger and contains fragments of the bones of the Buddha or the king or queen.

Our next stop was to the Golden Triangle, where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar all converge along the Mekong River. The area used to be known for its intense opium trade. Drug dealers used gold to change instead of fumbling around with the different currencies of the three neighboring countries.

We took a boat trip across the Mekong to the Laotian shore to visit a small village which was also just a big tourist trap. There were Canadians walking around the village with life-jackets on like they were expecting the river to suddenly recede and then surge with the force of a tsunami.

The stores in the village offered much of the same jewelry, T-shirts and souvenirs you can find in Bangkok, though they also sold really cheap cigarettes and python whiskey. (See photos). That was pretty cool.

After spending 30 minutes in Laos, we returned to the Thai side of the river and headed up to the Myanmar border where our guide took myself and two French Canadians across to get our visas extended. I enjoyed my stay in Burma, all five minutes of it.

Our last stop was to a Karen Longneck village. The women in these villages wear loops of silver wrapped around their necks and knees. The purpose, our guide told us, is to protect the women from tiger attacks and snake bites. It all just seemed like blatant subjugation of the women to me.

The women sat in their huts not speaking, staring out at us tourists like listless caged animals in the zoo. The whole scene made me uncomfortable. I snapped a few photos before retreating to the van where I waited until we left to head back to Chiang Mai.

I was exhausted. It was a long day running across the borders of three different countries. I was ready for some down time in the city.