Mae Sot, Umphaeng and Myanmar

Trying to dodge some of the hysteria I'd faced on previous trips to Bangkok's northern bus station, I took the fast minibus and got their several hours before any scheduled departure for Mae Sot. I had no problem securing a ticket for the 9PM ride but shortly found there wasn't all that much to do in the environs of the station. I'd previously observed that there were rows upon rows of shops, but on closer inspection, discovered these all sold identical merchandise (fake guns, playing cards, and wallets). I went to one of the many restaurants and asked that they give me something other than fried rice - the best they could come up with was a pretty weak combo of steamed rice and stir-fried cucumber. The snack vendors seemed to be limited to fruit and deep-fried earthworms. I ordered a fruit/vegetable/bean that I'd never seen before; the seller cringed as he handed it to me as if to say "You're really going to eat that?" - after taking one bite, I had an all-to-clear understanding of this reaction - Thai people have a passion for creating exceptionally foul-tasting fruit - whether by pickling or eating it several weeks too early, they have found the optimum technique for turning even the sweetest fruit hideously bitter.

I ventured out into a nearby neighborhood to find a market selling real fruit and was hit by a rogue 15-minute thunderstorm. Given that I was now soaking wet, it only stood to reason that my bus would be freezing cold, and thus it was a long 8 hours until our 5AM arrival.

Naturally, to bolster the all-important songtaew/samlor/motorcycle economy, the station was nowhere near the town and the town was nowhere near the border, but 60 baht and an hour later I was getting my passport stamped and marching across the Friendship Bridge. On the Burmese side, I had to leave my passport as deposit (it would only be confiscated in the event that I failed to show up by 6PM) and contributed 500 Baht to everyone's favorite oppressive regime.

I have never felt quite so lost as I did in Myawaddy - the signs were all in yet another alien script and next to no one spoke the slightest bit of English or Thai; they hadn't even mastered the ubiquitous "hello" or even "hey you" but would attempt to greet me in their own tongue - as if I would have bothered to learn this for my 5 hour visit; oddly enough, many did seem quite comfortable with the phrase "I love you Michael Owen." As no one had given me any instruction on what there was to see or do in the town, I just wandered around, observed the culture and ate as much as possible. The majority of people here wore white face paint and the women all competed to see who could balance the heaviest, most awkwardly shaped object on her head. The principle means of transport is the samlor (3-wheeled pedicab) and these drivers made up a good 2/3rd's of the population. Another odd feature was the number of random splotches of blood that showed up every few feet on the city's streets.

On my initial trips to the markets, I just threw a handful of baht at the seller, as I had no means of ascertaining the actual price, but I soon found that these people did in fact have their own currency, and even by exchanging small amounts with random, unlicensed money changers, I discovered I could increase my snack/money yield by 30% (in Thailand everything is in multiples of 5, but the base unit in Myanmar is equal to only 3.5 baht and can buy the same goods and services).

There were a few random temples to see but nothing to hold my interest for very long and by 11 I was headed towards the border. I was still loaded down by nearly a dollar's worth of local currency, so even though I wasn't even remotely hungry, I decided to sample the cuisine on offer from a local restaurant. I picked a vegetable curry out of those displayed and ascertained from the owner's son that it would cost 10 baht. Trying to recover from her son's error of giving me a legitimate price, the owner did some quick thinking and decided she would extract an appropriate faraang amount by serving me a ton of stuff I didn't order - so I got two plates of rice and one of every dish offered in the restaurant. It was all delicious and I ate as much as I possibly could - and about 3 plates after that - before conceding defeat. After chiding me for letting all that food go to waste, she announced the price - 85 cents - I opted to let the ordering discrepancy slide.

In a daze from my first, utterly overwhelming dive into Burmese food, I returned to the Thai side of the river. On the way, I came across the first beggar of my trip and gleefully tossed him the repugnant fruit still sitting in my bag from the previous evening; unfortunately, he was Burmese and in all likelihood didn't recognize that this was actually intended for eating - perhaps it kept some of the bugs away from him.

I took a songtaew back to Mae Sot and from there, sought out a ride to Umphaeng 165km to the south. In my search, I came across a samlor driver who offered to take me for 20 Baht. I had a lengthy discussion with him about the physics involved in cycling 165km over the mountains, but he seemed quite resolute on the fact that he could in fact take me - and he could do it for 20 baht, too. Had I had a lot more time, I probably would have taken him up on this, as I was quite intrigued by the thought of watching him make the attempt.

You could not be too far amiss in calling the road to Umphaeng one of the most scenic in the world; looking out the back of the songtaew was a bit like riding a reverse rollercoaster as we soared through the air amidst mist-shrouded mountains and remote tribal villages. Our driver seemed to be in some sort of rush and squealed around hairpin turns and came within a few centimeters of crumbling sections of the road. Around the 3-hour mark, I had a not-so-friendly reminder of the massive lunch I had eaten, but due to an opportune village, the only casualty was an unsuspecting shopkeeper's bathroom.

The songtaew dropped me at the Umphaeng Uphill Resort, which was about as far from an impartial source of visitor information as I could've hoped for. Apparently, there was nothing to do in town and nowhere to go in the vicinity without the aid of a costly guided tour.

So, after searching around for a few hours and finding that there was in fact, absolutely nothing to do in the town itself and no reliable source of how to get out without spending money, I returned to the hotel and booked a 2-day tour that involved rafting, then hiking to the largest waterfall in Thailand, then rafting again, visiting a hill tribe village and returning just in time to catch the last bus of the day back to Mae Sot. This plan necessitated skipping a day of work, but since this is widely held to be the most beautiful spectacle in the country, I was sure my coworkers would understand.

Also included in the package was a multi-course dinner and a hotel room, which in addition to two king size beds, included a TV and hot water. In the morning, we were supplied with a grotesque faraang meal of toast, ham and eggs whilst the staff sat nearby feasting on a wide array of stews and curries – they had apparently mistaken me for some sort of western tourist.

The boat started out at 8 with myself, two Swiss woman, an English(/Thai/Burmese/Karen/Hindi)-speaking guide and two paddlers – this apparently wasn't one of those rafting trips where the tourists are actually called upon to exert themselves. We rafted for 3 hours, passing many caves and waterfalls and seeing many native fruits, a few monkeys and some birds-of-paradise with full plumage. Our guide pointed out all the traditional uses for the flora along the way, and even showed us a type of rock that when ground into a drink, would turn a gay man straight in 30 days (he assured us several times that he was quite serious about this).

When we reached the end of the day's journey and stopped for lunch, the guide explained to me that, despite what the boss had told me, there was no possible way we were going to make it back in time for me to get back to Bangkok by Tuesday morning and I would need to stay in the ever-enthralling Umphaeng village, skipping another day of work. This wasn't going to fly, so I immediately started brainstorming to think of a way to get back early. A Thai group was leaving that day to return to Bangkok, but if I went with them, I would need to skip the waterfall that was the basis for the whole trip. Fortunately there was another detail no one had bothered to mention earlier, so as to more effectively cheat me out of my money – there was a 33km dry-season dirt road running from the waterfall to the road to Umphaeng which I could easily hike in a matter of hours.

For lunch, we were given a ball of rice and a baggie of chicken curry (one of the great mysteries of this trip was how they carried meat for 2-3 days in 35 degree heat in a non-insulated basket without getting anyone sick); our guides had found a bamboo shaft full of tasty grubs, but they claimed these were too expensive to share with me. Our “jungle hike" turned out to be a 3-hour walk down the closed road – it would've been an hour and a half given the fitness of the Swiss and myself, but our guides needed to stop for a smoke every 10 minutes. We reached the national park around 4 and I put my plan into action.

Since the guides planned to wait til morning to see the falls, I had to trek there myself and snap a few hundred pictures in the dwindling daylight hours. In the dry season, you can apparently climb up to an upper level of the falls and jump a dozen meters into one of the pools, but on this particular day, it was somehow unsafe. I returned to camp at just the right time such that all the work was already done for me – my tent was set up and dinner was set on the table. Another group of westerners had shown up – this was made up of 14 Belgians who had booked a 2-week “adventure" trip back in their own country – they used local transport and all the same tour companies, but every detail of their travels was planned in advance. They were led by a man who was on his first trip with the Bangkok-based company – he had never traveled in Thailand, couldn't speak a word of Thai, and didn't seem to have any understanding for the trip's itinerary – his sole job was to translate the English spoken by the Thai guides into Belgium or clearer English; he would spend 9 months doing 15 different tours around the entire country before being relocated to a similar job in a new country where he would be equally oblivious – in short, he had my dream job.

Dinner was the typical Anglicized-Thai fare, and afterwards, the guides gave us thorough explanations of all the insects in the area and how to cook them. Around 10, after the guides had gone off to their own private party and the conversation had become primarily Belgium, I retired to my tent for a brief rest.

At 3 the next morning, I grabbed my things and quietly walked off into the jungle. Hiking through those dark woods in the middle of the night did cause a bit of anxiety. The guides all claimed that they would never venture into the jungle at night, but they never really elaborated on why. There were apparently a few tigers in the area, so I tried to think up a strategy on how to handle the situation if I were confronted by one – it seemed I had never received any instruction on this subject – I could easily cite the steps for escaping a bear, wrestling a crocodile, or scaring off a shark, but there seems to be remarkably little literature available on defeating a man-eating tiger. Aside from this danger, there were the usual fears of being crushed by an elephant, gored by a boar, or bitten by one of many local snakes or spiders that deliver enough poison in one bite to kill a dozen men.

After the first 4 hours of trekking, I realized the real danger – hunger and thirst. The guides had only brought 5 liters of water for the 3 faraang and were strangely reluctant to part with any of the huge loaf of bread they had along, so I was soon closely examining the plants I passed to determine which would be most likely to have water reserves or tasty bark. Around the 5th hour, I came across the first villagers – we passed in silence, they overcome by the shock of seeing me there, and I not feeling at all capable of explaining in their language why I was there. I never managed to find a village but arrived at the main road by the end of the sixth hour.

It turned out that the entrance to the park was 18km from town; I wasn't feeling particularly energetic so I thumbed down the first truck I passed and, hanging on for dear life to the sides of the bed, sped into Umpaeng at 130kph.

I immediately returned to the resort and confronted the manager. Seeing the state I was in, he seemed very apologetic and promptly returned nearly half of my money (he clearly wasn't an advocate of the 100% guarantee – he figured he had gotten me half way and wasn't about to buy my mental anguish angle). He led me to where the staff was eating breakfast and I got the chance to try out a new Thai dish – snail curry (highly recommended, though you may have trouble finding it in your local Thai restaurant). I even got the chance to take a shower and wash off a few of the many layers of mud that had accumulated.

The next discovery I made was that the staff had managed to lose my passport. Before I left, they had stuck it in a garbage bag and thrown it in a random corner of the office – now no one seemed to have the slightest notion of where it could have gotten to. After an hour of searching every room in the place, they called one of the other groups and discovered that it was with the luggage of a Thai group at the waterfall. The boss ran out with a 4WD truck and returned in 3 hours with my stuff; in another 2, I was on the last songtaew back to Mae Sot.

Unlike the first bus over the mountains, this one was packed full of locals, including a number of Burmese from the refugee camp who continuously puked out the back for the last 2 hours of the trip.

My overnight bus back to Bangkok was apparently part of the “mothers with infants" line – I was surrounded on 3 sides by babies and there was about enough leg room for your typical toddler. The Burmese guy sitting next to me seemed determined to use my body as a giant pillow – the first two times he breached the invisible, yet sacred, plane between bus seats, I shoved him back into own – this seemed to really aggravate him, so in the end, I resolved to get what sleep I could with his bony skull jutting into my side.

We arrived at right around 4AM. It was a pleasant morning in the City of Angels – Mo Chit had its usual buzz of activity; outside, it was only me, the bums and the hordes of undead dogs. It would have been very easy just to return on the first bus to Samphran and get to work with time to spare, but today I resolved to tackle part B of the Indian embassy's absurdly complicated visa scheme. (Step 1: Deliver an application for a visa along with 3100 Baht (this includes 1400 Baht “I'm an American" tax) between 9 and 12 in the morning, Step 2: After 5 days, deliver your passport between 12 and 1, Step 3: Pick up your stamped passport between 3 and 4:30 on the same day).

I spent most of the morning wandering around aimlessly and trying to find a new pair of shoes to replace those that had been permanently stained mud-brown. The only significant event of the day was when I accidentally became a homeless bum around lunchtime; I didn't realize it at the time but something about my mud-covered pants, greasy hair, the scent of not having showered in two days, and a bag which showcased toothpaste and soap in the outer net, vaguely suggested that I might be living off the streets.

I was walking down an alley, peering into restaurants and trying to decipher the cryptic menus on the walls when a Thai woman confronted me. As is necessary for any person who randomly approaches you on the streets of Bangkok, I naturally assumed she was trying to rob me. “Woman: I've been watching you wander around, do you need some help?" “Me: I'm just trying to find some food" “Woman: I can help you, what do you want?" “Me: Anything really, except fried rice" "Woman (quietly): Do you have money?" "Me (very cautiously): Yes... a little bit." Apparently, all they served at any restaurant in this alley was fried rice and tom yum gung. “Woman (in Thai): How much is the Tom Yum Gung?" “Restaurant owner (in Thai): 45 Baht" “Woman (to me): It's 40 Baht, would you like it?". I'm thinking that it's pretty silly to order a complicated seafood dish for one person and that this lady is obviously pulling some sort of scam by hiding the true price from me. “Me: No thanks, that's a bit too expensive, I'm just going to walk around and try to find a simple curry" “Woman: No, you don't have to, I'll pay." This seemed very curious to me, but whatever trickery she was going for, I supposed it wouldn't hurt to get a free meal and hear her out. “Woman: You know you can go to any wat before noon and the monks will give you a free meal" “Me (very excited by the cultural experience of eating with monks): Really, they'll feed me at any wat??" “Woman: Yes, there are many people like you who go during that time, and if you ever need a place to stay, they'll let you sleep there too… (half under her breath) it's better than sleeping on the streets" “Me (still pretty clueless): Yes, I guess that's true." I anxiously awaited the part of the pitch where she explained that next to the wat, there was a fashion store where I could buy expensive silk suits for only 100 US dollars, but that never came; the soup arrived, and she simply wished me luck and walked off – I began to have a sinking feeling that this might not have been a scam after all. There are many parts of Tom Yum Gung that aren't meant to be eaten, but I'm never quite sure of which these are, and so, not wanting to insult the chef, I always eat the whole thing; after licking the bowl clean and downing an extra liter of the free water, I walked over to tell the cook how delicious the soup had been. While I was standing there, a nearby shop owner rushed up and thrust a 2-litre bottle of water and a 100-Baht bill in my hand; she ran away before I could recover from the initial shock and reject the gift. Everyone was now staring at me so I made a mad dash for the head of the alley; on the way out a young Thai couple started up a conversation with me, but around my third “I don't understand", the man stuffed a 100 in one of my pants' pockets and they raced away. Another store owner came up to me and offered to give me any help I needed. I was a bit weirded out by all this, and I scrambled out on to the main road. As I walked away, all the pieces gradually came together in my mind as to what had just occurred, and I redoubled my efforts to find new clothes. I decided it would take me days to find enough legitimate beggars (seems like nowadays they're mostly just well-to-do American backpackers in disguise) to whom I could dole out my new-found fortune, so I just took the lazy route and wired the whole lump sum ($7!!) to the Red Cross.

With the remainder of the afternoon, I went to Jim Thompson's house – he was an American architect who had the odd idea of buying 6 traditional homes from distant Thai towns, shipping them in pieces to Bangkok and assembling them into 1 large, western-style house.

The embassy actually managed to stamp my passport after a mere 5 days of review and 4 hours of stamp application, so I was able to return to my job only 2 days later than planned.


Bizarre Chinese temple in Samphran


Those crazy Thais and their backwards driving



A Burmese-style Wat


And thus ends my trip to Burma...



Weird monks with gongs


TV, fridge, hot shower - yeah, I'd say this is worth 100 Baht


Rafting down the Mekong













Next 30 pictures from Ti Lor Su waterfall






























Guide putting on puppet show with local insects


Was my shoe always this color?



This probably doesn't make much sense to you, but to me it says Umphaeng is still 18km away




Refugee village





Jim Thompson's house




Giant goldfish bowl