Three Visa-on-Entry's in 16 hours.

My days in Thailand were numbered. I headed north, to the town of Chiang Rai. I was only going to be there a day, then move on to Myanmar/Burma if it was possible. Nothing’s ever certain with Burma, so I wasn’t staking my entire travel plans on it, but I made my way up there anyhow.

Chiang Rai is supposed to be another place to base some trekking out of, but to be honest, there didn’t seem to be much of anything going on there when I arrived. I got there a bit late in the day, sometime around 3ish, having taken a bus (and one final burger from a really pretty solid chain of burger places in Chiang Mai, Mike’s Burgers if I remember correctly. It looked like this:

And its amazing hamburger looked like THIS:

But anyway, so I got on the bus at around 11am or something like that.  On the way towards Chiang Rai, they actually provided us with bottled water, with the bus's logo on it, which I thought was bizarre. Since when do buses have their own brand name of consumables?

When I got to the bus station at Chiang Rai, I realized I didn’t know how to get to my guesthouse for the day. I wandered out a bit, and found my way pretty quickly to a small internet cafe, and got online real quick to get the details. I called the guesthouse to try and figure out if it was walkable; the information in my Southeast Travel guide was a bit out of date, and it turns out there’s been a second bus station built in town, which is where I landed, and it’s not really walkable from there to central town, where the guesthouse was.

There was a bit of confusion between the person I spoke to on the phone at the guesthouse and myself; I was trying to find out what the best way in to town was, and somehow this became reduced to asking for a ride to the guesthouse. Well, whatever. I ended up having to call another few times after it was first promised, and finally almost a full hour later she arrived. She was in fact the owner of the guesthouse. I’m still not really sure what the hold up was, but whatever. She had a pretty fancy car, and we went on a short ride back to the guesthouse, which was ten minutes away by car.

She gave me some pointers about the various points of interest about town; there weren’t many. There was a couple of markety areas, including one where the local people sold their produce and such. There was also a random gilted clocktower in one street that I took a picture of at night, which looks like this:

No explanation as to why it was there. She also told me a bit about herself, which was fairly interesting. Before running this guesthouse, she worked with . . . one of those big international health agencies, and worked in particular to try to help educate and fend against AIDS, particularly with same-sex couples and the like. The building that is a guesthouse now apparently was originally the office building of this health agency. Maybe it was UNICEF? I forget.

Seems like she was a pretty interesting lady, and I’m sure she had more stories to tell. I never really got to know them, however.

When we got to the guesthouse, she also gave me a tour of the premises; it was well fenced away from the rest of town, and was a rather nice building. My room was a 8 bed room that looked a little like a hotel-style room with lots of beds, rather than the standard hostel look. There was only one other person in my room. I never got to know her, but apparently she was from some Spanish-speaking background.

The owner had given me a few tips of what to do in my short period of time for that evening, so I tried to wander the town a bit. I found dogs chasing me away from a few different parts of the place, so I didn’t really get to explore even as much as I would’ve like to.

The market was pretty standard for markets. I’ll never understand the appeal of markets to people. There was a little stage nearby, though, and I saw some guys doing some music performances on it:

Afterwards, there were some dance routines, with some rather beautiful Thai girls and some other not-so-beautiful girls, lip synching to Chinese traditional pop tunes, that for some reason were all wearing costumes that had wings sewn into them. After each song and . . . not really dance, but choreographed movements nevertheless, they’d come down off the stage and stand there with their wings splayed out, controlled by little strings they had concealed by their hips, and wait for their fellow performers to do the same, until the whole troup was standing wing to win, with all kinds of awkward tourists taking creepy pictures of them. I had my fill, and left, wandering up and down the streets over and over with no real purpose. I know at one point I wanted to find a bookstore, but that’s all I recall.

I spent some more of my time that night trying to figure out details about the near future, be it Burma or whatever else, as well as catching up on other things that needed catching up on. All in all, a pretty wasted day.

The next day, I got up walked around Chiang Rai a bit more in the day time to see stuff such as this market:

then got on a bus to Mae Sai, the northernmost town of Thailand. At Mae Sai, you can cross the border to Myanmar, theoretically. The specifics of it wavers through time via the whims of Myanmar’s ruling regime. My hope was that I’d have access to a small area of territory around Myanmar’s border town, Tachilek, and have fairly free reign for a few days, then come back over and move on to Laos.

It took several hours to get to Mae Sai, and actually an hour or two more than it should have. At the beginning of the ride, I had a gigantic monk sitting right next to me on my crappy little wooden board of a bench,

and he had a huge knapsack with him that basically gave me half of the room I was supposed to have. I’ve never been angry at a man of the cloth before, but he did it. That was pretty annoying. He must’ve used his monk-y abilities to figure it out, though, as as soon as space opened up on the rest of the bus, he moved.

When I got to Mae Sai, it was a pretty obvious jaunt from there up a main street towards the border. I was starving, so I searched around for a place to get some lunch, first, and found my way to a Chinese restaurant, oddly enough, where the owner was a little old Thai lady who also spoke fluent Mandarin and no English, so, we used Mandarin to get along, which pleasantly surprised her. It seemed like there was actually a somewhat large Chinese presence in the area, though I couldn’t quite tell you what it was that made me feel this way.

I wandered back up towards the border, and soon enough, had my passport exit-stamped by the Thais, and sure enough, was at the border of Burma. I could sense a difference in the air, though, like the presence of the Chinese, I couldn’t tell you why. The town just across looked pretty dreary, alright, and didn’t really inspire me with a lot of hope. I made it to the gate, where I had to cross in about five feet to get my entry permit. They then asked me where I wanted to go, and I explained to them my intentions; they informed me that if I wanted to travel beyond Tachilek, I would have to have a government employed tour guide accompanying with me. This is pretty much a terrible idea, so I told them thanks but no thanks, and that I’d be going on my way back to Thailand. They let me know I had to pay the entry fee no matter what, so I gave them their damn fifteen dollars and went straight back across the border to Thailand, and immediately hopped onto a bus towards Chiang Khong, yet another border town, but this time, on Thailand’s border with Laos. This time, it really would be my final destination in Thailand. By the way, this picture coming up to the big Myanmar gate is the only picture I took of the place:

To get there, I actually had to take a bus back to Mae Sai, then another bus to Chiang Khong. This meant I had enough time to read an entire book and then some. I read Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami, and then Freakonomics, as well. Fairly different books, but they both did a decent job of keeping my attention diverted from bus hell.

When we got into Chiang Khong, night had fallen. There were a couple others in the bus with me who were also looking for accomodations, so we took a tuk tuk together to be led to some suggestions; the first place, which is actually mentioned in Lonely Planet’s SouthEast Asia guide, was booked full, so we had to pop over to the next one instead. The couple got their own room, and I got my own little bamboo hut. It was pretty cool, actually, and a welcome change from the city life of Chiang Mai and everything that had come before it. The hotel (or whatever you want to call it) was actually on the edge of the Mekong River, and though I could only appreciate it some at that point due to how dark it was, it was obvious that it was a nice view, and I looked forward to waking to it the next day. I'll go ahead and spoil the fun now, as I'm saving the next morning for another blog entry, so here's the view (as well as a couple pictures of the guesthouse area itself. The hut with the "<-- Toilet" sign was my hut.)

I got some dinner at the place, one last round of Pad See Ew, and grabbed some Chang, then went on a walkabout of the town. There wasn’t much to see. I walked for as long as I could, but there really was nothing but a few places to sleep for those moving on to Laos. I booked a boat for the next morning to go on a trip down the Mekong to a Lao town called Luang Prabang. At about 9:30, I settled in on buying a couple more bottles from a nearby convenience store, and drinking them away while writing out some postcards on the edge of the Mekong, before hitting the sack to get up bright and early.

The next morning, I’d be leaving Thailand, and floating down for two days along the Mekong. I was ready for the change, and was pumped to be doing something a little more like the adventures I envisioned myself doing to begin with in this whole darn trip.