On the Border

This weekend I went on what is best described as “not your average first weekend vacation.” I wasn’t originally planning on going anywhere, but one of my housemates had to make a border run to get a new 30-day visa (very complicated) and needed some company on the journey… as most of the rest of the house was headed to the beach to party into a drunken stupor. One of the other guys in the house has a sister who lives and works in the town of Mae Sot, which is close to the Burmese border, and suggested that as our destination. I was definitely not planning on going to Myanmar, but I wound up really liking Mae Sot for its lively and unique mix of cultures.

(FYI, Myanmar is the country formerly known as Burma, and most people there are Burmese. The government is doing an ethnic purging of sorts, and many Burmese refugees flee to Thailand and work for very (VERY) low wages.)

We took an overnight bus on Thursday night and arrived early the next morning. After exploring Mae Sot for a little while, we headed to the border for the visa run. Typically, the Thai-Myanmar border is not exactly friendly, but this particular area has a safe land crossing that allows for a day-pass into the town of Myawadi. We walked across the “friendship bridge” over a river and arrived in Myawadi. Even just looking across the bridge, you can see a drastic contrast between the two countries. Myanmar is very poor and underdeveloped. Where Mae Sot has tall buildings and lots of motor vechicles, Myawadi has small village housing and saamlaw, which are 3-wheeled man-powered vehicles (basically pedaled rickshaws). Only the main road was paved, and poorly, with the rest of the streets being dirt paths. We were immediately hounded by saamlaw drivers and various people (Westerner = $), and we eventually gave in and let some drivers take us around to a couple temples and a market, which was a good experience. We met some schoolchildren who were just about the sweetest kids ever (didn’t speak English), and other than that we generally felt really out of place. I was relieved to return to Thailand, although I am very glad to have seen the country and met the people that we met along the way. It is the type of thing that you don’t really understand until you see it in person, and it puts everything else (especially Bangkok and our school’s suburb of Salaya) in perspective. We also got to talk to some really interesting people, both in Myanmar and Mae Sot, including a wise-looking man at our guest house who has family in Myanmar and described it as the “safest country in Southeast Asia, because the government is too busy policing its own people to bother with foreigners.” Ponder that one for a bit.

On Saturday morning, we took a Burmese cooking class at a really cool non-profit shop in Mae Sot called the Borderline shop. It sells goods made by Burmese refugee women and donates the proceeds to community organizations. Most Burmese food is vegetarian (likely since they’re so poor) and full of potatoes, which was a nice contrast from Thai food. The dishes we made were really good, and we enjoyed chatting with the cooks about various Thai-Burma issues. The cook, Bo Bo, took us to the market and introduced us to a variety of “foods”, the most interesting of which was a type of egg called hundred-year-old eggs, which are normal eggs that are buried for 10 days in a mixture of dirt, marble, and horse urine and then dyed pink. So if you ever see a pink egg in Thailand, be warned. The inside is black, and I suppose it doesn’t taste too bad if you can get past the fact that it’s black and was basically marinated in grossness. Yeah.

After the cooking adventure, we took a van and then a bus to Sukothai, the ancient capital of Thailand, and relaxed for the rest of the evening. On Sunday morning, we took a sawngthaew (pick up truck with benches in the back) to the old historical park, rented bikes, and biked around the park, which is full of ruins of ancient wats. It was really nice, and hopefully I can get my pictures to upload. After another bus-catching-and-connecting adventure, we arrived back at our house around 12:30am, just in time for me to follow a little bit of the Colts-Chargers game online (SO weird to have football going on in the middle of the night!).

During the course of the weekend, we took just about every form of transportation available in Thailand (except train). This included 3 different classes of bus, taxi, sawngthaew, saamlaw, tuk tuk (motorized version of saamlaw), and one very packed and cramped van. We also usually ride to school on the back of motorbike taxies, which are super fun and only slightly scary when riding side-saddle in a skirt. The VIP and 1^st class busses were very nice, and the 2^nd class bus wasn’t bad until they brought out little stools and sat people all the way up the aisle (talk about a safety hazard). It’s a good thing we weren’t claustrophobic or sick.

This was a long post, but I’ve been getting a lot of positive blog feedback, and I wanted to be more detailed. Pictures to follow... if I can get this blasted internet to work with me. I don’t have any uniform pictures yet – sorry!