One day in Burma

On the last day of 2007 we walked into Burma. A government guide met us on the bridge. In the afternoon we walked out with a Burmese monk.

A bridge connected Mae Sot, Thailand to Myawadi, Burma. The difference between the two sides of the river is stark. In Burma there are less paved roads and more dirt. The officials on the Burma side scared me- government, military, repression, injustice, murder. But they smiled and held onto our passports, taking our $20 for one day in Burma. And I felt so guilty giving this government any money, any support. But I wanted to talk to the Burmese, to spend some money in their shops, see how they live. For a while I wasn't sure if I'd get to talk to anybody, to have any sense of the real Burma- A government guide speaking perfect English followed us the first hour that we entered the country. He took us to a beautiful wat where I watched an army officer make an offering and pray to a Buddha shrine around a 600 year old Bodhi Tree. After lunch the guide realized we had no agenda and he left us for his afternoon nap.

Sarah and I walked to a market where they sold powder that makes women's face whiter. Some men also use the powder.

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Thailand

At the border town Sarah and I had our first Pad Thai and spicy soup. We also saw our first 7-11. I naturally bought a diet coke. We caught a bus 3 hours to Chiang Rai. We wandered the night bazaar, tasted some Thai sweet pastries, went to the night food market and browsed the fried cockroaches, crickets and silk worms. We ate dinner at Cabbages and Condoms, a restaurant with a campaign to promote safe sex and prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS. The staff was all women wearing skimpy red dresses. And I began to realize more and more that this is a country of many contradictions.

Our first day in Chiang Rai I noticed something I had not seen in the rest of Asia. There were a lot of western men in their 50s-60s wearing shirts buttoned halfway up to expose their grey chest hairs, wandering the streets in weathered tevas revealing gnarly yellow toenails, wearing khaki pants buttoned tight enough and high enough to keep their fat bellies from cascading down onto their laps. Stroking their arms and giggling, Thai girls that couldn’t be older than 16 or 17 accompanied them.

We had lunch in the market-vegetable soup with fat, white noodles, basil and chilies. A Thai man in his 60’s started talking with us at the table and he was so excited to hear that we were from the US. He had lived in New Jersey for 22 years and proceeded to tell us his life story. He is a retired teacher and now likes to do research, especially helping fight malaria with a cheap water bottle contraption he described to us. After lunch we wandered the market with him, asking questions about some of the produce and goodies for sell. He said you can’t eat black dog with beans because your stomach would explode.

After two days in Chiang Rai, we were ready to leave. It was hard to find places to eat for cheap and the town lacked charm. I decided I wanted to spend Christmas in Chiang Mai. We found a room at Gap's House made of dark wood, seperated into two seperate spaces, with a firm mattress and situated in a lovely garden setting. Sarah made me a Christmas tree out of magazines that she taped onto a pyramid-shaped lamp and cut out vegetables from the magazines to use as ornaments. Together, we hung up the ornaments as I played the one Christmas song on my Ipod- Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Then I played country music because it makes me think of home. Sarah bought two silk bags to use as stockings.

One night we passed a church with a nativity scene. I approached it to look more closely and get a feel for the season. Its hard to make it feel like Christmas when its hot outside and most people aren't celebrating. Inside the church, a choir was singing hymns in another language and it was so beautiful I had to walk away.The night before Christmas Eve, carolers came by Gap's House and sang a song while I was standing there.

On Sunday, just before Christmas, I walked for 10 hours around the city. I looked at markets and searched for a restaurant to have Christmas Even dinner. I met a monk and we talked about politics and peace. Every Sunday in Chiang Mai there is a market covering so many streets I couldn't follow it all the way to the end. It lasted most of the day. I bought Sarah an indigo batik for Christmas. I had sushi and fried seaweed and many Thai treats. At night the street was filled with light and there were street performances-music and dance.

The day after Christmas, Sarah and I took a cooking course at Thai farm. With a group of about 10 we went to the market and learned about the different kinds of rice and the coconuts. At the farm, our instructor showed us the herbs and vegetables that we would be using-eggplant, bitter eggplant, holy basil, basil, kaffir lime, lemongrass, ginger, chillis, long bean, etc. We cooked green Thai curry with tofu, Tom Yum Soup with prawns, Jasmine rice, stirfried tofu with basil, spring rolls and coconut banana. The food was amazing but I couldn't eat most of it. I was sick for the second time.

Sarah and I were both sick on December 27th, the day we had planned to head south by bus so we spent one more night at Gap's. On December 28th we headed to Sukhothai for 2 nights.

After a 6 hour busride we landed in the ancient 1st capital of the Thai kingdom, founded in 1257. But even before 1257 temples had been built, influenced by the Khmer Empire in the 12th century-a very distinct style that I would see an abundance of in Angkor Wat. We biked around the ancient city- the ground was covered in stupas, standing and sitting stone Buddhas, pink azaleas, moats with 3 walls protecting the city, brick and stucco and burnt, quiet. We found ourselves alone around every corner, grass lawns, palmayra palms and canopy trees, columns and stupas with Sri Lankan influence. In the museum we saw adzeheads and beaded necklases from 6000 BC. The place was old and it felt old because the infrastructure for viewing was so poor and very little restoration has taken place.

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Luang Prabang, north and then to Thailand

The roads in the north of Laos are less arduous than they used to be, although you still can't get anywhere very quickly. From Muong Ngoi we took a boat and a bus to Luang Prabang. We stayed in the old quarter, on the peninsula bounded by the Mekong and the Nam Khan rivers. The town reminds me of Antigua Guatemala, with its old colonial houses and narrow alleys and side streets. We ate a lot here, and we ate well. We wandered the town, entered centuries old wats and sacred Buddhist sites. The city is red and gold and everything beautiful you could want in a city. There are many tourists and side-walk cafes. The night market is lit by soft, white lights, with a white roof. The white is balanced perfectly with a plethora of handmade items- artwork on handmade paper, scarfs, wood carvings and silver jewelry. For Hanakuh I took Sarah to a French Restauarant where they served us chilled, pure water and aubergine dip and good French Wine.

From Luang Prabang Sarah and I traveled on the back of a pickup truck with about 15 other passengers, around precarious winding roads to Luang Nam Tha in the far North. The trip took about 5 hours and we arrived at night, at a newly built bus station, with no information on where were were. This is what is tiring about traveling. Constant disorientation. Eventually we hired a tuk tuk to take us several miles into town. That night we arranged a kayak trip on the Nam Tha river and ate Indian food with bad Daal.

It’s the dry season so the river meandered slowly around the mountain, as if it too was wary of the rubber plantations and slash and burn farming that was occurring in the mountains it had cut. Only a few years ago most of these crops were poppy fields. Sarah and I shared a kayak and we went with an Australia family and two guides. Eventually rubber trees turned back into the forest and we entered into the Na Tha National Park. On the river we stopped at a Lintin Village. Sixteen families live in the village and the people are beautiful. These people came from Cambodia. To thank us for visiting their village (they get a percentage of the profit from our kayak trip), they had handcrafted some ornate purses. Indigo-dyed hands, toothless mothers breastfeeding, children barefoot in oversized tee shirts, chickens and mean dogs. These are no pet dogs. They are scared of people because people eat them, especially black dog. It’s eaten in the winter because it makes you very, very full and it makes your body temperature increase substantially.

After passing through the village we had lunch on a bed of rocks along the side of the river. We ate sticky rice, mustard greens, omelet, fish, and a desert of coconut fried chips over a banana leaf spread. We kayaked further down the river and visited a Khmu village where we saw them making the rice whiskey in a ceramic jar. This is unlike lao lao. It tastes like a very sweet red wine.

We finished the river tour and on the way back we had a flat tire on a bumpy dirt road. Sarah and I took the moment to explore a stream with a jungle canopy, cool water ankle deep. It’s beautiful to find yourself in places you would not have expected to visit.

In the evening we ate sweet potato roasting on a charcoal fire in the town square.

The next day Sarah and I took a bus to Muang Sing for the night. Muang Sing is a small town that borders China and is only two hours from Luang Nam Tha, so we thought we would check it out and try to go into China, even though the border is only open to nationals. Sarah and I rented bikes for a dollar for the day and headed 10km uphill to the Chinese border. It was hot as hill, but we could see the hills of China and it was a beautiful place. Very few people were on this road. Some villagers carried baskets on their heads or bamboo across their shoulders. The scene, when I remember it, was shrouded with a soft and gold light. We passed many sugarcane fields, also formerly poppy fields in an effort to stop opium which has been a huge problem in the Golden Triangle. Sarah and biked through many villages, mostly Akha. We saw a village gate up a hill that is bilt to protect a village fromm evil spirits. We biked back to town at dusk and the light was even soft, blurring the hills and fields together into a smear. We stopped for sunset over a rice field and a hut with a cooking fire, sending smoke into the sunset.

The next afternoon we went back to Luang Nam Tha, but first we took a Tuk Tuk into an Akha Village to celebrate our second New Year of the trip. Everyone was playing darts with colorful air ballons. We played a round and each popped two of the three ballons, winning a sweet orange drink as a prize. A family invited us to eat with them and we walked up the steps into a bamboo hut on stilts. I nearly went week in the knees when I saw the scene, so similar to my last sick New Year. I ate a little rice and refused the lao lao this time. The owner of the “Ethnic Restaurant” in town invited us to the tourism manager’s house. We joined them for a while, refusing to eat the meat. They politely inquired why, and we had a discussion on vegetarianism. We bused back to Luang Nam Tha in the afternoon and slept at Zuela Guesthouse. I ate a whole bag of sweet potatoes. For dinner we had banana flower salad for the very first time, a monumental moment. One of my favorite asian dishes!

Laos was my favorite country. People move at a different pace, and they aren’t too bothered by outsiders. The people are warm, the countryside beautiful, the towns so small. I felt years and miles away from the rest of the world. On December 20th we exited Laos from Huay Xai and crossed the Mekong into Chiang Khong, Thailand.