firstly you go to a hot spring. it’s not really a hot spring like you imagine, not in nice surroundings or anything like that, just a steaming plume of water in the middle of a car park surrounded by shops. you can buy tack and eggs to cook in the spring and then you get pestered by beggars.
next we went to the white temple of chiang rai. this was really good. inside was a kind of modern michelangelo being painted by the monk who built the temple, depicting hell on one side, with images from the matrix and pictures of george bush and osama bin laden and mobile phones etc. on the other side was heaven, shown by a sitting buddha. it was really interesting, especially how modern it all was, totally different to any of the other temples i’ve been too.
next place on the trip was the golden triangle, the point where the mekong meets with a tributary and forms a point where laos, burma and thailand meet. we had a little boat trip up to a burmese casino along the river before going to a laotion island where i had a bit of snake whisky. there was a choice between gecko, snake, tiger penis and many others, i figured they must all taste the same actually, not very nice, so i just took snake. bit novelty. anyway, the rest of the island was just gift shops and stuff, and more beggars. we heard the theme to mario brothers coming from the back of one of the houses, the original nintendo one with square graphics. kids were jumping in the mekong between sessions of asking tourists for money and jen got a little elephant stamp in her passport, but i forgot to bring mine. our guide described the mekong as a red river, though i think that is a positive spin on the colour brown, apparently it’s 50-60 metres deep.
after a weird buffet of toned-down thai food and chips we went to maesae to the border with burma. jen went to get her visa, said it was scary and confusing and opted not to walk into burma and back. i had to look round more market stalls and shops. shopping is a pastime here and being a foreigner obviously you’re a walking cash machine. it’ll take more than some broken english advertising to make me part with my money.
the last part of the trip was a visit to a ‘hill tribe village’. this was my least favourite part of the whole trip. the village was like a model thai village, it seemed like the people dressed up when they saw the bus turn in. i felt uncomfortable taking pictures of people so i didn’t. you could pay extra to look in someone’s house and see some ‘longneck tribe’ people. i know they make money from us and they are using the tourists as much as the tourists using them, it just didn’t feel right to be staring at people. villagers were sat around and didn’t interact with any of the tourists, probably because they feel like some kind of zoo attraction, i didn’t hold it against them when they refused to say hello to me, though i would’ve liked to try to talk to them. i met a cute dog though.
so this trip was just a bit weird, it made a trip to the border a bit more interesting. the temple and the mekong were really cool and i wished we had more time in those places rather than the watered down versions of ‘real’ thailand that were in between.
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Tags: burma, chiang rai, hill tribe, laos, mekong, river, run, south east asia, thailand, trip, visa, white temple
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