Dugout canoe on Mekong

Golden Triangle, Northernmost point of Thailand

I want to bring you up to date before we get into Laos, for I do not think email is quite as prevalent as it is here in Thailand.

The day after our trek the clouds were low over the hills and it rained off and on. Our first relatively bad weather, so instead of rushing around Chaing Mai, we vegged and since the weather had not improved, left by bus the next day for Chiang Rai. We took the local bus up through the hills and over the plateaus. I thought we were going to have to get out and push to get up the mountain passes several times, but Ray assured me the bus had 'lots of power' and we did make it. The back of the bus was filled with young monks, travelling in their saffron robes. You pay the bus attendant for your passage if you get on after the main bus terminal, but the girl attendant had to use a male intermediary to complete the transaction for a monk. Apparently, if a monk is touched by a woman, he will never be a true monk. Too bad.

For the first time, we had trouble getting a room. As usual, I picked a place that sounded good from the Lonely Planet and hired a tuk tuk to take us there. This time, they didn't have a room with private bath left, so we tried another guest house down the road. It didn't have a room with bath either, but we decided to stay anyway, until we discovered they didn't have enough blankets to keep us warm either! Another strike against it was the distance from the downtown core, which means more tuk tuk rides to get to restaurants and the markets. So we left & started looking for another place closer to downtown. After being turned away at several others, we found a room at the Ben Guest House that looked good. We told them to keep the room available, hired a tuk tuk to return us to our original choice, retrieved our bags & returned to the Ben, luckily without having to pay for an unused night. It turned out to be a good choice, mainly because of the people we met.

The weather improved the next day, so we joined up with 2 german tourists staying at the Ben, Harald & Annette, to hire a guide, Apichad, and jeep to take us on a day tour of the Golden triangle, that area of Thailand that joins both Myanmar & Laos. Our first stop of the day was not a highlight. Passing a long line of minivans parked beside the road, we entered an Akhu hilltribe village, which was more like an Akhu Kmart. It was lined with roadside stands selling all manner of souvenirs to hundreds of tourists. Several village women were aggressively pushing baskets of bracelets and dolls under our noses, urging us to buy. The low point came when I was approached by a women carrying her child, aged about 1 1/2 in a sling in front of her. She had her dirty T shirt hiked up over her breasts and demanded '10 baht, 10 baht, take photo', while her child pinched her nipple & she put him to her breast to feed. Talk about exploitation. We had Apichad get us out of there & said no more fake villages.

Instead we drove to the Monkey caves, where thankfully there were few other tourists. We walked to the top of the long steep steps to enter a large cave with a Buddha ensconced at one end and interesting limestone formations on the roof, some like brain, some like fossilized Northern lights. Just outside the cave was a viewing platform from which we had a great view of the valley and surrounding hills. Back in the jeep we drove to Mae Sot, the border crossing point for Myanmar, passing many roadside stands selling local strawberries and pineapples. The area seems to be good farmland and we passed fields of tobacco, corn, rice and orchards of lichees.

In Mae Sot we decided against paying a tax for the privilege of saying we crossed the border & instead had a big buffet lunch at a large hotel. Once again there were many tour buses and lines of minivans carrying tourists all looking at the souvenirs on sale on the street, but it didn't bother us this time. We all took pictures of ourselves at the border signs & I even succumbed to some jewelry on sale.

From Mae Sot, we drove to Sop Ruak, the junction of the 3 countries, and our guide arranged for us to take a 1 hour speedboat tour on the MaeKhong river. This was fun & quite exciting. The driver stopped several times for us to take pictures, especially of a huge hotel complex on leased land on the Myanmar side that is due to open in a few months. Apparently the main draw will be a casino and has been in the works for several years with lots of political problems. We continued on in the boat passing by fishermen in long dugout canoe type boats and 3 freight boats from China, which is 3 days up the river.

We landed at a dock on the Laotian side of a large island, where for 20 baht we could land and say we had visited Laos. This was really another shopping opportunity but was interesting as it included a post office where Annette bought a postcard & mailed it off with a Laotian postmark to her family in Germany. One of the stores offered small glasses of a liquid from different large jars, to be mixed with a selection of whiskies. No one took up my offer of a free drink after they saw the contents of the marinades in the jars. One jar had a whole snake inside and another had a few lizards for flavour. On another table was a poster photo depicting the largest fresh water fish caught in the world. The date was 1973 and a fish, rather like an eel, but apparently a catfish type, measuring about 35 feet, was caught by American GIs right in the MaeKhong river nearby. We left the island and roared back to our starting point where Apichad waited to take us back to Chiang Rai. All in all an interesting day, if rather touristy.

We celebrated our return back at the Ben with a beer, then joined 2 others to walk downtown to the Night Market to sample a Banana Roti. This is a crepe filled with a Banana egg mixture and cooked on a griddle, then drizzled with condensed milk and sprinkled with sugar. Very good, not too sweet, but definitely not low cal or low fat. We then enjoyed some Thai musicians playing on an outdoor stage and watched 2 pretty Thai girls perform a tradition dance. Very graceful. To top off the evening, we made our way to a nearby restaurant which looked like a throw back to the hippy era. There were mostly western clients eating good Thai food and listening to western rock music and later, a Thai girl singing folk songs and playing a guitar. A good end to our visit to Chiang Rai.

The next morning I practiced my bad French again getting recommendations for Laos from a couple from Bordeaux who are long term residents of the Ben. They have been travelling for 4 years, returning to France only for 1 or 2 months during the summer. Since they no longer maintain a home in France, they now play turn about and stay with their children. Look out Ross & Erica!

Several of us were leaving that day by bus, Ray & I to Chiang Khong, others back to Chiang Mai. The bus ride was 4 hours, the first half on good roads through small town, the second half in the countryside, up more hills and across a large valley. We easily found the Nam Khong hotel where we had arranged to pick up our Visas for Laos & here I am finishing this letter on their email system. We leave tomorrow to take a ferry across the Mae Khong to Laos, having picked up numerous other suggestions from the other residents.

So until next time, Happy Christmas shopping to all of you. Keep the cash registers ringing and the economy growing so we can afford to keep travelling!