Mae Sai is a thoroughly average, slightly dingy, town in Northern Thailand, and would be utterly unremarkable were it not located on the banks of the Nam Ruak river which forms a convenient marker for the border between Thailand and Myanmar. As one of the few (legal) border crossings into the country, Mae Sai has become one of the shopping hubs of Southeast Asia, with sprawling markets purveying loads of cheap Chinese goods that have made their way through Burma. Seeing as shopping is my favourite pastime, as you all well know, I found the place absolutely enchanting…

After getting a bit of a late start out of Chiang Rai (stopping for breakfast at the delicious Boonsita vegetarian cafeteria where I ate every morning), I arrived in Mae Sai in the afternoon, found accommodation in a somewhat run-down (real-estate agents would call it ‘rustic’) bungalow set off from the Nam Ruak, and set to wandering. I walked up to Wat Doi Wao, which has an excellent viewpoint of the country-side and Myanmar, as well as an enormous scorpion monument angrily poised facing the opposite banks. One gets the impression that Thai/Burmese relations may not have been the most amicable, at times.

I hadn’t been planning on going into Myanmar at all, since this border crossing doesn’t allow travel further afield into the country, so I’d essentially be handing the junta my $10 visa fee for the privilege of exploring a Burmese frontier-town for a few hours. Ultimately, I was convinced by a ex-pat Frenchman cafe-owner named Alain who expounded to me about the friendliness of the locals and said that I should at least get a taste for the difference between the two countries.

After some food at the night market on the main drag (night markets are one institution the West badly needs to embrace), I wandered back towards my guesthouse and got to chatting with Alain again. His Thai wife and a couple of other locals were there, as was another young French ex-pat. Alain had been nursing some Thai spirits, and when another bottle was procured, I was convinced to give it a shot. Lao khow (my spelling) is a clear spirit that can apparently be made from rice or sugar cane, and it reminded me a lot of sake’s stronger, nastier brother. You gulp the whole lot down straight, then chase it with water. One of the locals, who was drinking steadily (and seemed content to ramble on at me in Thai, happily oblivious to the fact that I was neither understanding nor responding), kept refilling my tea cup with the stuff, and I ended up drinking far, far more lao khow than I’d planned. It turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable evening, despite the fact that the conversations around me were either Thai or French, and I only had a very drunk old Scotsman who eventually arrived to chat with. When I got back to my guesthouse, there was a big lizard the size of my hand in the bathroom. I thought it was pretty cool.

I crossed into the town of Tachileik, Myanmar the next day, and since my time was so short, decided to actually hire one of the tuk-tuk drivers who perpetually harass passersby to give me a bit of a tour. I should have been a bit more discriminating, since my driver spoke no English, making for a rather opaque round of sightseeing. Sitting in the back of my rickety autorickshaw, we made our way around the town, to a few temples (at one of them, a boy hoping to sell me some junk, showed me a few little rituals that I was supposed to do for good luck), and then to a ‘longneck village.’ I’m not even sure what hilltribe they were supposed to be from (maybe Akha, though I’m not sure the proprietors even specified), but considering it was on the other side of the entrance to the “Regina Hotel and Golf Club,” I didn’t have high expectations. When someone came up to give me an admission ticket for 140 baht, I was downright skeptical and tried to ask what it included. No one could speak English, and I’d seen a sign about a dance show, so I tried to gesture if that’s what it was for, and they nodded cheerful affirmatives. I regretted spending the money. The was no dance show, just a walk up a crass, commercial, hokey version of a hilltribe village that had been erected to milk tourists (and undoubtedly gave lucrative commissions to all the tuk-tuk drivers to take people here). I passed a few of the ‘longnecks’ (village people who have stretched their necks with golden rings) working to make crafts at their looms, but the whole thing felt a bit like a human zoo (and not even a very big one, at that). I felt pretty cheated, especially since I don’t expect anything but a pittance of my money will make it to the people there.

Since my ‘guide’ was incapable of explaining what the sights I was seeing were, I was always a bit in the dark as to what was next, though it had always been largely self-evident. When we drove into a little side street in a residential area, I was a bit puzzled. I was ushered into a room with some dim reddish lighting, a Bollywood music video on the TV, some locals, and some plastic chairs. Someone gestured for me to sit down, but there was no indication of what I was supposed to be doing or seeing. It occurred to me that all the locals were girls, and they had lined up in a row along the opposite wall. There was a pregnant, awkward silence in the air, and I wasn’t exactly sure why, until it struck me. The driver (sitting contentedly a few chairs down from me) had taken me to a brothel. Apparently this must be a common stop on tourist itineraries. I waved my hands to show I wasn’t interested, and we were off again. Next up was a stop at a gem shop. I groaned and didn’t even bother getting out, just urged the driver on. We drove through the market, where a hawker thrust Viagra pills in my face, and ended up back at the border. I paid the driver, thoroughly unimpressed with my tour.

I set out on foot to try and gain some other impressions of the city, and maybe the country by extension. It seemed a little bit dustier, a little bit more run-down than the Thai side, but not especially remarkable. I was hoping to try some Burmese food for lunch, so I went to a local stall, asked about Burmese food, and gestured for them to make me something. I’m pretty sure it must have been a Thai food place, since the (unremarkable) soup was just like a dozen others I’ve had.

Armed only with ‘hello’ (min gala ba) and ‘thank you’ (ce zu tin ba deh), I tried to be friendly and hopefully find someone I could talk to, but found the legendary Burmese cheerfulness largely absent. Distraught with my inability to communicate (I hadn’t felt so out of my element since Burundi), or to glean anything at all about the culture, I wandered a bit more before finally being flagged down by someone who spoke English.

He was a scooter driver (though he’d hired out his scooter to an American that morning, who still hadn’t shown up with it again), and we went to a cafe to chat. Here I got an actual Burmese lunch (that was a bit different from Thai food, but not especially good), and some painfully sweet, milky tea; most importantly, though, I had a chance to talk with someone. While it seemed like he wanted to talk about politics and religion, he skirted the topics somewhat uneasily – he mentioned (between spitting out brown juice from chewing leaves) that nearly a fifth of the people in Tachileik worked for the junta in some capacity, many posed as monks, beggars, or lunatics to act as ears for the secret police. It was a bit of a heartbreaking conversation, since he had genuinely given up all hope that he could improve his lot in life. His university education in agriculture was worthless, his fluent English barely served him here, and his attempts at earning money in China and Thailand had come to naught when he was found out to be an illegal immigrant and had had his savings confiscated. He was a Christian, and when I asked him if it was difficult to practice in a country that was overwhelmingly Buddhist, he said he’d rather not talk about it, alluding to ‘the monkeyhouse.’ He had a wife and a young child, but business as a scooter driver was slow, and he couldn’t afford to lease a tuk-tuk from the monopoly that owned them all. He had lived several places in Myanmar, but found that Tachilek – as a border town with Thailand – was one of the few places that he could actually have some exposure with the outside world. I got his e-mail address, but he told me that he very rarely checked it, since he could ill afford to pay the border crossing fee into Thailand in order to get Internet access.

After, I spent a little bit of time wandering the market (where I could GameStations, iPhones, and ‘brOwn’ electric razors, galore!) and picked up a few postcards of Burma. Items here rarely have pricetags, as bargaining is the order of the day, and I wasn’t actually interested in anything (though I did inquire about a knock-off Strida fold-up bike; I was quoted 6,500 baht), but apparently this is one of the cheapest possible places to buy things. That is, if you don’t care that what you’re getting is a garbage Chinese counterfeit, anyway.

While I only spent four hours in Myanmar, I came away a bit depressed by the whole affair. I do think it would be a fascinating, and quite beautiful, place to spend a few weeks (not to mention an opportunity to at least do a little bit to support the struggling locals) if I had the time, but its not in the cards for this trip.

That afternoon I made my way to Chang Saen, a quiet town southeast of Mae Sai sitting on the Mekong river. The Mekong, which here divides Thailand and Laos, makes for a much more attractive border than the shallow, garbage-clogged Nam Ruak. Had dinner and drinks with a French woman I’d met on the bus, and took an early night (easy to do in such a sleepy town).

The next day I rented a bicycle and rode the 9 km to Sop Ruak. At what has got to be one of the least picturesque stretches of the Mekong, it converges with the Nam Ruak to form the tripartite border between Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar, dubbed the Golden Triangle. There’s nothing much special about it, but the sign alone is a tourist trap (and it obviously worked on me).

The Golden Triangle has quintessential connotations of the illegal opium trade, and so Sop Ruak made a fitting site for the government’s ‘Hall of Opium’ museum, on a huge, beautifully landscaped plot surrounded by lush forest. While I balked a bit at the 300 baht admission fee, the production values are pretty stellar throughout. The first impression is a 107 meter walk through a twisting, cave-like tunnel, complete with diffuse lighting and mood music. Distorted sculptures of human figures, faces, hands, appear partially submerged in the cave walls; subtlety in symbolism was not the goal, I imagine.

The museum had a flashy video introduction in a large auditorium (with a dose of requisite Thai propaganda that I found rather funny), and across two large floors covers the history of opium through the ages, including a significant section on the trade and opium wars that ruined China in the 18th and 19th centuries. There was also an area with an assortment of opium paraphernalia (including some incredibly elaborate pipes, and some rather uncomfortable looking porcelain pillows), a section on the drug’s effect and medicinal use through the ages (laudanum, an opiate/alcohol mixture was often prescribed for teething pains in babies), one on laws, enforcement, legalization, and approaches to tackling the drug trade, and finally some tear-jerker case studies extolling the evils of drugs. The final area was the ‘Hall of Reflection,’ with triangular pillars displaying abstract enlightening quotes from theology and philosophy, where we were to ponder what we had learned. I worry that I’m too cynical for pondering, sometimes.

I rode back to Chiang Saen, and after lunch (well, two lunches, really – four meals a day is de rigeur for a lot of travelers in Thailand, it seems) explored a bunch of the wats and ruins in town. Chiang Saen is actually a rather ancient city with a lot of history, and was actually of great strategic importance in certain eras, though time has largely passed it by. Chiang Saen is only a few square kilometers, so before long I’d seen the lion’s share of the ruins, and ended up on the road out of town to the south. I didn’t really have any aim, per se, but saw a bright white wat atop a hill in the distance, and decided to go there. I tried a shortcut (since I didn’t know where the real path was, anyway) down some rutted roads at the base of the hill, and ended up climbing a hill lined with a row of white and red-painted boxes. I didn’t pay them any heed until I was right next to them and suddenly became acutely aware of the swarms of bees everywhere. I gingerly retreated and decided to abandon the scenic route.

I eventually found a road leading up (the shrines and religious flurry around its base seemed to bode well), and after abandoning my bike and walking up, I came upon a stunning teakwood temple. The relief carvings were among the most incredible I’d seen, and while it was not as huge or ostentatious as Wat Rong Khun, I think its one of my favourites. Modestly scaled, but with absolutely beautiful craftsmanship captured in the warmth of wood, set in a deeply peaceful place on a hill surrounded by forest, it made a real impression on me. If I were the praying sort, I think I’d probably like to do it there. It’s amazing that there is such an abundance of beauty in this country that you can stumble upon it so easily without even looking for it.

A few hundred meters uphill there was the white wat I’d spotted. It was large, and impressive, and nice enough, but didn’t have anywhere near the same charm as the teak temple. Rode back to Chiang Saen – night market dinner, shower, journal, bed.

Today I grabbed a sawngthaew to Chiang Khong along a beautiful stretch of highway parallel to the Mekong. The trip cost me 200 baht, pricey, since me and a Frenchman needed to charter the whole truck for ourselves (he offered to pay 600B, since he was in a hurry and wanted someone to split the cost with). I could maybe have caught the boat to Laos today, but decided to spend an unhurried day here in Chiang Khong instead. Maybe I’ll stake out a nice spot on the Mekong and do some reading.

(Wow, for a relatively straightforward couple of days, this has turned into an absolute monster of a post. Hope the details aren’t too dense for you casual readers)