Episode 4: Chiang Rai to Chiang Khong
Dugout canoe on Mekong
Golden Triangle, Northernmost point of Thailand
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Thursday 9 Dec 1999
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!
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