Burma & Back

Mae Sot, Thailand

 

Mae Sot is a Thai border town and hence kind of one of those skanky, ugly yet mildly interesting hodgepodge cities that you get wherever there's a border, a large income discrepancy, and liberal amounts of bribery and lawlessness on both sides.  It's also got a large, old chinese populace (wherever there is a historic trading community in SE Asia, there is always an old school chinese community) as well as a significant population of both ethnic Burmese (generally darker skinned and more likely to be wearing sarongs) and Karen Burmese refugees (a low intensity civil war with Karen separatists  has been raging across the border in Burma for decades, though many Karens are now good, god fearing Anglicans thanks to Aussie evangelists.

 

In order to get to the border (Mae Sot's about 6km away), you take what is the fairly universal mode of transport in Cambodia/Laos/Thailand outside of major cities - not the motorbike or tuk-tuk, but the Sangkaew, which is a pick-up (or flatbed) truck with a roof over the bed and a few (padded, if you're lucky and in Thailand, wooden if you're not) benches set up for cargo/people.  So this morning I piled into a sangkaew with a bunch of returning Burmese and headed for the "Friendship Bridge" over the Moei River to the Burmese town of Myawaddy. (generally every asian border crossing is spanned by a "Friendship Bridge" or a "Friendship Highway", usually between countries that are usually not very friendly historically (Thailand and Burma being no exception - most of medieval thai history deals with various wars and invasions and counter-invasions by and of the rival Burmese.)  Once the border formalities are complete, you acquire a nifty Burmese passport stamp (I'm not one for trophy travel, but it was cool to get it nonetheless, plus there's not much to do in Mae Sot anyway).  Crossing the border, things take an unexpected turn for the poor, even if you expected it to be that way.  The Thai side of the river is run down and ramshackle, the Burma side is paleolithic - pedi-cabs (trishaws) replace tuk tuks, and motorbike capacity increases to about 6 burmans per vehicle, instead of the ubiquitous, plain spoken navy blue & polyester thai uniforms, you get little kids running around in muddy green hand me downs - who ar the lucky ones as they at least get to go to school.   It's not unlike crossing the Zhangmue/Khodari border (also via friendshp bridge) in between China and Nepal - one side is poor and chaotic by western standards - but the side you cross to is exponentially more so.

 

I was met instantaneously by a bunch of tour guide/translator/hustler types as I crossed the border who i positively could not shed.  Also it was raining and I had no map  and was the only westerner in town so was pretty much at their mercy.  I succumbed to my man (Joti or something like that was his name - he just kept calling me "traveler-visitor") and he proceeded to give me a tour.  There's not much to see in Myawaddy aside from a few Wats (which appear more like Indian or Nepalese Wats than Thai ones do, so mildly interesting) and hear about the stnadard episodes from the life of Buddha, which I pretty much know by heart now anyway.  Joti/whatever kept assuaging my initial fears of cross border hustlers by saying "You can trust me, I not tell lie ever, I very innocent, you traveler visitor, I help you, I no do bad things. We have military government here in Myanmar, if I do bad things, they start shooting!" - which sounded honest enough.

 

Afterwards we had lunch (Myanmar food is not unlike Indian food with Thai influences) and Joti told me about how he loved the Czech soccer team and hated the Norwegian team. I'm not sure why, but he felt very strongly about it.  We also had some conversation about Thai women, who he did not like, as they cost too much, I think.  I sort of missed the gist of that, though once again I was complimented as being very handsome.  This seemingly happens to me everywhere I go here, the women (working and not working) of the Lower East Side of Asia react more positively to me than their counterparts in Manhattan, and even some of the men. THere was a gay security guard at the hotel in Saigon who would escort me across to the elevator, holding my arm, every time I walked in.  I double locked my door there.

 

Tomorrow it's northeast towards Chiang Rai and then over the Lao border.  I'm collecting countries like trading cards at this  point.