CHIANG MAI, THAILAND
Any brochure will tell you that Chiang Mai has over three hundred active temples, but what about the ones that have been lost to fires, Burmese invasions and run-of-the-mill decay? Chiang Mai has been the largest city in Northern Thailand for seven hundred years – so many religious sites have been built that no one can even guess at the number.
But we can try. Buddhists won’t intentionally destroy a temple even if it’s abandoned, so while the wooden buildings have long since crumbled there are dozens of brick chedi scattered throughout the city. Each one contains some sort of Buddhist relic – Chiang Mai University’s art department has put up placards on a lot of them, but for most nobody remembers their name or when they were built.
This bad boy is stuck discreetly behind the saddest pawn shop I’ve ever seen:
This one is on a major road, between a pharmacy and a lady selling deep fried horrors:
And a few more:
These are all obvious though, right out in the open. Tomorrow we’ll find a secret one.
Category: Adventures
Tags: chedi, chiang mai, Stupa, temple, thailand, wat
TACHILEIK, BURMA
Well, Shan food technically. Snakehead curry, crazy-spicy side dishes and a pile of vegetables. All you can eat for about US$2.
Category: Adventures
Tags: burma, burmese food, myanmar, shan food, tachileik
TACHILEIK, BURMA
Mae Sai is a pretty average Northern Thai town, but just across the border is an entirely different world. The sidewalks are covered in brick-colored betel nut spit, old toothless women smoke green cheroots and, perhaps most strikingly, everybody looks completely different. Cosmopolitan Thailand is fairly homogeneous (mostly due to the success of Thaification), but the population of Tachileik is a bizarre mix of Shan, Bamar, Lahu, Akha, Muslim groups and Indians from all over the place.
Also, everything is in Burmese. That sounds obvious, but you’ll find some familiar script almost anywhere you go in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam. In Tachileik even the license plates are written in a language you’ve never seen before.
Category: Adventures
Tags: burma, mae sai, myanmar, tachileik, thailand
TACHILEIK, BURMA
We’ve visited Tachileik before, but the failed expedition to Mong La necessitated another three hours in the town. It’s much the same, but I did find out something interesting – the endangered animal parts they sell in the market are real. Being about two hundred meters from Thailand I always figured they were fake, but the general consensus is that Burma doesn’t have any problem with openly selling rhino assholes.
God help you if you bring that crap back into Thailand, though.
Category: Adventures
Tags: burma, endangered wildlife, mae sai, myanmar, tachileik, thailand
SHAN STATE, BURMA
Mong La is defintitely interesting, but Burma is hard to travel through. It’s not North Korea; visas are pretty easy to get and you can fly into Yangon or Mandalay without any trouble, but tourists aren’t welcome outside predominately Bamar areas. Every single one of Burma’s borders happens to be in a minority region, so it’s pretty much impossible to enter overland.
Luckily, for the past few years the Shan State has been the one place in Upper Burma where you can both enter by land and travel beyond the border. The crossing at Tachileik is usually just a day trip – Thais cross the border to buy cheap Chinese stuff and tourists who need to renew their visas can just hop over and back – but the $10 entry permit actually allows a stay of up to two weeks. There’s no damn way they would have ever let foreigners into the rest of the country from Tachileik, but the road to Kengtung and Mong La was fine if you were willing to stop at military checkpoints.
Fine until the Kokang Incident, anyway. In August of last year the Burmese raided “a gun factory suspected of being a drug front” about 250km north of Mong La, sparking a breakdown of decades-old cease-fires with every ethnic minority army in the area. By the end of the month about fifty people were dead and 37,000 refugees had run into Yunnan.
Refugees from Kokang in Yunnan province, from Flickr user treasuresthouhast
None of this happened anywhere near Mong La, but the Burmese cracked down anyway and stopped letting foreigners in. It may have opened up by now, but I didn’t get far enough to find out – Since the Kokang Incident, all foreigners traveling beyond Tachileik need to hire a “guide.”
“Guides”, who may or may not be minders, cost about US$30 a day plus all their food and lodging. If you’re traveling solo that effectively quadruples expenses and I only brought US$250. Nobody could tell me if Mong La was even open, either. The soldiers at the border said yes, the tourist office lady with a curious Victorian accent said no and every other English speaker in Tachileik didn’t understand why I’d ever want to go there.
I did find one guy who was willing to take me without a guide – he wanted to smuggle me through the checkpoints in the trunk of his Lada.
In one week, I’ll be in Calcutta.
Category: Adventures
Tags: burma, china, kengtung, kokang incident, mong la, myanmar
Hi kids,
If you read Everything is Dirty through Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator or any other RSS reader, I ask you to kindly change the feed URL to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/WereLostAndEverythingIsDirty
(or just click the link and it’ll do it for you.) Thanks!
Category: etc
SPECIAL REGION 4, BURMA
Here’s a story about trying to get to weird places no one wants you to be.
Mong La sounds awesome. “Special Region 4,” in the northeastern Shan State, was a major hub for opium production until the junta completely eradicated it in the mid 90s. The region’s only source of revenue was gone, but the ethnic generals who controlled it realized that Mong La’s position on the Chinese border and near complete lawlessness made it a prime destination for tourists. The town quickly turned into the “Las Vegas of the East,” with 600,000 Chinese a year coming for the swanky casinos and brothels full of Eastern European hookers. Rich Chinese people were gambling away untold sums of money and it wasn’t long before luxury hotels, fancy discos and an amusment park were slapped together.
You know where this is going.
The relative of a powerful Chinese bureaucrat pissed up US$100,000 in a casino, so somebody pulled some strings and the People’s Liberation Army was ordered to close the border crossing. Everything fell apart overnight and the town was left in ruins.
Desparate for another source of income, the ethnic armies that controlled the area began to rape the landscape of Special Region 4 and ship the spoils off to China. Now entire mountains are being stripped of trees and any wildlife in the way is shot, dried and sold to middle-class Chinese people who think tiger penises will cure erectile dysfunction.
Well, I gotta check that out. If you want more, Dark Appetites (PDF) is a fantastic report on the illegal wildlife trade in Mong La by Karl Ammann (who does completely awesome work). Stay tuned!
From Flickr user SoggyDan
From Flickr user SoggyDan
From Flickr user isafrancesca
Category: Adventures
Tags: burma, china, mong la, myanmar
No Due Date: A Practical Guide to Traveling in College
I managed to escape college and travel way more than you’re supposed to, but I wouldn’t give a second of it back for anything. I’ve gotten some questions about how I managed to do that, so I wrote this little e-book.
If you have a burning desire to travel but currently find yourself in the midst of four years of book-learnin’, this is for you. I’m giving it away for free, but if you enjoyed it a donation would be mightily appreciated. Click here for the download and more info.
Category: etc
CHIANG MAI, THAILAND
I liked this piece of graffiti, so I watched it for a few minutes.
Category: etc
Tags: chiang mai, graffiti, thailand
I haven’t had many worthy adventures lately, as you may have noticed. Not to worry – I’ve booked a one-way ticket to Calcutta and this whole thing’s about to get serious.
In the meantime, enjoy a preview of my ongoing photo project, “Bathrooms of Asia.”
Category: Adventures
