luke and i have one year visas for thailand. logic would say that that means we are allowed to stay in thailand for 365 days. not the case. every three months you must leave and get a new stamp. why? i have no idea. the thai government does not make any money off of us because we do not have to pay an exit or entry fee on these trips. bizarre, yes. but welcome to thailand.
so, on our trip to laos with chris, we got the necessary stamp. but that stamp was going to run out on february 1st, so we needed to leave again. the shortest and easiest trip to do this is to go to the burmese border 4 hours north of here. this trip can be done in one day, but i do not recommend it! we did some proofreading (for our booming business!) for a tour company's website, so we got a deal on a minibus through them. this is where the story begins.
friday morning we go downstairs at 7:20 to get picked up by the minibus. but the minibus gets lost and arrives at 7:55, and in the meanwhile we have been freezing in the morning mountain air waiting. the minibus is a 15 passenger van, and, lucky us, we are the last ones to be picked up! so that means that luke and i got to sit on the back bench 4-seater, in the middle! the "bitch" seats, if you will. oh joy. 4 hours. now for you erie people, imagine the road that goes down to the yacht club. twisty and turny and hilly. now imagine this for 4 hours, at high speeds around every corner, with nothing to hold onto and no seat belts! yes, very fun. luke and i had packed a whole bag of things to read, etc, and my ipod. of course, due to the wonderful twisty road we did not read a thing! but we had music. ok.
so when we first got on the bus, luke said that he could smell beer. i smelled it too. maybe someone had some dirty clothes that had beer spilled on them the night before? umm, no actually. at 9 am we discovered the answer. in the row in front of us was a rather greasy, skinny, scruffy, old european man. and he was drinking a liter bottle of chang beer, wrapped in some ads from the newspaper at 9 AM! of course that was where the beer smell was coming from! i tried hard not to crack up at the sight of this.
so one rest stop and four hours later we arrive. our driver lets us out and tells us to come back to the bus in one hour! yes, not much time for our lovely little trip into burma! so the place is pretty packed. there are lots of shops lining the street on the thai side (mae sai) with the border crossing right in the middle of the road. we walk up, get our stamp to exit thailand and then cross a little river that is no mans land. we go into the little room on the burmese immigration side that is packed with people. first we are supposed to pay the visa fee for entering the town. no matter how long you stay, the fee is $10 US or 500 Baht. 500 Baht = $15 US, so logic would say to pay in US$ to get a better deal. and that was our plan. i had a $5 and some 1's with me from home, which wasn't enough, so before we came we changed our money in chiang mai for a $20 US. well all money is not created equal, apparently. luke tried to give the guy our $20 in exchange for the forms we needed. he was not interested and was pointing at it. at first we did not know why he didn't want it and tried explaining to him that is was for 2 of us and we didn't need change. then i finally figured out what he was saying. he was pointing at a small spot of black marker in the upper left hand corner of the bill and saying "dirty"...aka he didn't want to take it. what!?!?! it's money! that was outrageous, but luke had to pay in baht (luckily we had enough with us!). then i tried to pay with my $5 and 5 $1's. well the $5 had a dog-ear crease in one corner and one of my $1's was too wrinkley and another had a tear. so much for that. i paid in baht too. ugh. then they take your passport (because the military junta does not want you wandering anywhere outside of the one town you are allowed into) and give you a card for your receipt.
this is the "dirty" $20, can you spy the marker above the 0?
so yay, we made it into burma. ugh. this poor little town exists because of people doing visa runs. it is basically a huge market. the one thing they have that you can't get in thailand is cheap dvd's of everything. we had plans to buy planet earth, but of course we had to pay in baht to get in so now we only have 73 baht, which is barely enough for lunch. so no shopping, unless we wanted to try and use our dirty $20 and get ripped off! so we cross over and are bombarded by begging children and a whole clan of guys with laminated sheets of paper with pictures of the town's "sights" that they want to show us. no thank you, people. plus luke has to pee and there are no bathrooms in burma. so finally i ask one of these guys (who had really gross teeth) if there was a toilet. he told us to go down the stairs and walk to the chinese temple, where it costs 5 baht to use the wonderful facilities (where this money is going, i have no idea - it is not like the bathrooms - in thailand too - are ever clean or provide toliet paper!). when we got to a place that had some dragons on the roof and looked a little chinese, we stopped to see if we could find the bathroom. but we didn't have to look hard because the creeper with bad teeth followed us there and assured us it was the right place! luckily he was gone when we came out.
ok, time to go back to thailand! yes, we were in burma long enough to go pee. the immigraton line magically got longer right before we got our papers filled out, but luckily our minibus mates made up half the line, so no worries if we are a bit late back to the bus. in the meantime though we have not had any lunch! and now we have 63 baht. once we made it through the line (mo troubles other than being followed by small, poor children after we left the office), i tried to scope out lunch but all that was near us was some fruit vendors. we had some of our own snacks with us, but i went into 7-11 and bought all i could for 60 baht! which was not much by the way, and definitely not a proper lunch! so once the stragglers finally returned (no surprise it was the 9 am beer guy and his friend who were last!), we hopped back in the van for another 4 hours - yay!
the best part of the trip was the last rest stop, which had real toilets, a sprayer, and soap! luxurious! of course we couldn't buy anything here because we had some useless american money and about 3 baht, so we watched everyone eat ice cream and the beer guy bought another cold one for the ride home.
of course we were the last ones dropped off. after grabbing some more money we got ourselves some beers and went out for pizza! hooray, food! luckily we don't have to do another border run.
oh and that night at the market i bought a wool sweater. yes, it's true. thailand is freezing! haha, and by freezing i mean 50 at night - which is really cold when no one has heat or insulation!
