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Description
Collecting gravel from the river bed of the Mae Ruak between the Thai town of Mae Sai and the Burmese town of Thakilek on the far bank.

Day 74 - Wednesday 8 April

Mae Sai

I enjoyed a really good night’s sleep in a surprisingly comfortable bed and got up shortly before eight o’clock. Naturally Domenico had already been up for at least an hour, writing his diary. After breakfast at the guest house we went out to do some walking, with the possible aim of getting to the Akha village about eight kilometres to the south-west of Mae Sai. We walked slowly along the path from the guest house, trying to determine whether any of the tracks branching off it were likely to lead us in the right direction, but none of them seemed to offer much hope.

When we reached a junction on the road we turned off to our right up the other fork and gradually began climbing between houses in the western part of town. After a few minutes we came to the foot of a temple built on the hillside, but from its location I could not see that this was the one mentioned in Lonely Planet. Nevertheless we began to ascend the naga staircase to take a look. Initially we arrived at a hall that was very attractive from the outside but very firmly closed, and a kind of patio area overlooking the hillside that we had just climbed, with a reclining Buddha at one end. On climbing further we came to a few statues standing on the slopes, of Buddha, Guanyin and various others that I didn’t recognise. And then, higher still, we reached the entrance to a cave, where we had to take our shoes off at the entrance that was guarded by a few more figures carved into the rock.

Inside the cave was a series of fairly high and wide corridors, the floors of which had either been concreted over or, in many places, tiled. We first encountered a large cavern that had been turned into a kind of shrine, with a small chedi, a statue of Buddha, several other small statues and all the trappings of a Buddhist altar. In another cavern was yet another Buddha figure which was, once my eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, very attractive. I took several photographs before moving back into the first section, where I took some more. All in all it was a very attractive wat and I was surprised that there was no mention of it at all in Lonely Planet.

We continued up the hillside along staircases and pathways that wound between monks’ cells until we had left the temple complex behind and found ourselves on a pathway amongst dry agricultural land overlooking Mae Sai and the Mae Ruak. Across the river in Burma the town of Thakhilek appeared to be far larger than I had imagined from the riverside, and we could see a white chedi amongst a stand of trees atop the highest of the hills beyond the town. We continued to follow whichever path appeared to be the most used until arriving at a much wider red dirt track. We had not thought to bring any water with us before setting out and so we were reluctant to press on towards the Akha village now, always assuming that we were on the right track anyway, but we agreed to follow the trail upwards for a little while longer to see where it would take us.

After a couple of switchbacks we arrived at a small plateau where a concrete wall, which ran back down the slope, terminated. Here there was a young lad armed with stacks of brownish grey paper bags which he was attaching to the scores of lychee bushes on the slopes, covering up the branches that contained the green fruits. I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be some kind of protection against the sun or a method of encouraging the fruits to ripen but, as we continued to ascend for a further fifteen minutes, we passed yet more ranks of these lychee bushes and could also see that many more lined the slopes of all the other hillsides that were visible. We also passed many large clumps of very young, feathery bamboo.

We finally came to a halt on a fairly level piece of ground with good views of the surrounding area. Way down below us, roughly to the north-west, we could just make out what must have been the river valley, at this point no longer forming the frontier but within the borders of neighbouring Burma. Beyond that were more of the now familiar red dirt trails that crossed the hillsides. The border itself was now running across the farmland below us, somewhere between the river and our current viewpoint, just an arbitrary line on the map that meant little, if anything, to the people of the area. Ahead of us the trail that we had been following could be seen ascending the next hill before, presumably, running along the ridge that we could see swinging away to the west. It was now growing extremely hot and, because of our lack of water, we decided to turn back. We retraced our route to the point where we had joined the main track and then continued along it until it brought us back to the top of the temple in a slightly different place to where we had left it earlier. We descended back down the hill through the temple complex and stopped at a small store at its foot for a much needed drink.

As was his wont, Domenico got talking to the woman and the girl in the shop, discovering that the temple was Wat Tham Pha Cham and definitely not the one mentioned in Lonely Planet. He also learned that there was another cave just below the one we had visited and, of course, he insisted that we go and take a look at that one too. The statuary outside the cave was a rather dismal collection, other than for what appeared to be the mould for one of the feet of the reclining Buddha, with patterns on the sole, à la Wat Po in Bangkok. Domenico removed his trainers at the entrance to go inside but I never bothered, which was just as well. Domenico called out that there was a light bulb near the entrance but could find no switch with which to turn it on, just a jumble of wires leading into some sort of junction box. He went in a little further but soon emerged to say that he couldn’t see a thing. We descended back down the hill again to a rough road opposite. This climbed another hillside through a fairly rambling and ramshackle residential area before starting to drop down again.

We emerged close to the road through Mae Sai at a car park full of tour buses and Thai tourists. This was the entrance to Wat Phra That Doi Wao, the one mentioned in Lonely Planet. There wasn’t a great deal of interest to see from the bottom but we climbed the naga staircase to the chedi at the top of the hill. It was a staircase designed for giants, at least in Thai terms, and even I could take each step in one stride only if I did so at a quicker than normal pace and with slightly too much effort for the conditions. The Thai tourists, who were taking two strides for each step on their descent, stopped to stare in amazement at the two farang bounding up the staircase one step at a time, but even I ran out of steam about two-thirds of the way to the top and had to pause to refill my lungs with massive gulps of air before completing the ascent at a more realistic pace. Once again the chedi was not much to look at in its own right, but there were some splendid views of Mae Sai, the river and Thakhilek. From here we could see that the latter really was quite a big town, far larger than its Thai neighbour across the river. After taking some photographs we descended the staircase, one step at a time all the way, such was the momentum that we generated, and by the time we approached the bottom we were practically running down them.

Domenico had been suffering some problems with his camera today, which I successfully diagnosed as a nearly flat battery. We walked along Phahonyothin Road, the main drag through the centre of Mae Sai, until we found a camera shop, which happened to be almost immediately. When he opened the camera to take the battery out I was astounded by its size; a huge six volt, twin cell lithium battery. It had only lasted for six weeks since he had bought the camera new in Bangkok, and a replacement cost him a whacking great B320. That represented eight pounds, or the cost of eight night’s accommodation in Mae Sai, or enough to live in reasonable, no make that good, comfort for two whole days!

It was now far too hot to consider going to the Akha village which, I had discovered during our drinks stop at the foot of Wat Tham Phra Chom, actually rated a mention in Lonely Planet. The Bible said that to get there you should walk four kilometres south on the main road and then another four kilometres west. From the map there appeared to be a path heading back across the hills from the village to Mae Sai, so it certainly seemed that the best plan would be to get there via the roads and then find our way back to town across the hills.

Once Domenico had been fleeced for his camera battery we continued along the main road towards the river. We paused on the way, he to buy some rather tasteless, woody fruits for five baht, I for a Coke in a plastic bag - the liquid American soft drink variety that is, and not the illegal white powder! Our stops over, we carried on as far as the international bridge. The Thai authorities, customs and immigration, didn’t bat an eyelid as we sauntered across the bridge towards Burma, or should I say the Union of Myanmar as the welcoming hoarding proudly proclaimed? Almost as soon as we had set foot on the bridge we were accosted by people trying to sell us cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, tigers’ teeth and genuine gold and ruby rings, the latter made from 100% pure plastic. We walked as far as the Burmese checkpoint and the signs proclaiming that no tourists were allowed beyond this point. We probably could have continued further, at least as far as the officials’ hut, if we had wanted to, but there seemed little point. If I really wanted to enter Burma all I had to do was to go walking in the nearby hills or wade across the river from the Mae Sai Guest House!

We sat down at the far end of the bridge and simply watched the non-stop flow of people between the two countries. At one stage a large crowd of Chinese tourists came along to pose for photographs in front of the barriers. They were followed by a big group of good-looking children of the hill tribes, beautifully dressed in gorgeous shades of black and purple. But in keeping with the traditional Han attitude towards the minorities within their borders, the very same hill tribes as were represented here, they treated these lovely children like shit, going so far as physically pushing them away and even hitting them when all the kids were trying to do was to persuade them to take their photographs in exchange for a few baht. It was truly disgusting to witness. After a while the Chinese thankfully departed for their tour bus and the children continued to mill around for some time. They never approached Domenico and I in the same manner although, had they done so, I would have been more than happy to give them a little money in exchange for a few photographs. As it was I took a few surreptitious photographs with the aid of my long lens, which they did not seem too keen on when they spotted me doing so, but they still did not approach further; perhaps they were just too shy around such obviously foreign faces, or they were just a little more wary after the appalling treatment they had received from the Chinese?

Not long after this episode I spotted the Italian and one of the Spanish guys we had met in Mae Hong Son, further back towards the Thai end of the bridge. I pointed them out to Domenico and we shouted across to attract their attention. They came over and we said our hellos, but after a little while I started to get that ominous rumbling in my stomach again, the first time for several days, and so I made my excuses and returned to the guest house, leaving Domenico to remain talking with his fellow Latins. My bowels purged I sat down in the restaurant to write my diary and take in another dose of riverside life. Domenico returned shortly afterwards but he went straight to our room and remained there. I got talking to another English visitor and his Scandinavian travelling companion for a while, and then a few Aussies who came along.

At half past five I went for a shower, over which I took a very long time, a process that also included a shave and the trimming of my hair where it was falling down below the tops of my ears into the bargain. After that I began to work on the chronicling of today’s events until six-thirty, when Domenico said he was going to walk into town to buy some postcards. We agreed to go out for dinner when he got back but in the meantime I continued with my writing. He didn’t return until a quarter past seven, saying that the shops had all been closed but that he had met the Pied Piper of the Kok River, who I had seen arriving earlier this afternoon, as well as the two Norwegians we had previously seen in Tha Ton and Chiang Rai. The Pied Piper, it turned out, was not from Germany as we had thought but Israel.

For dinner we went only as far as the Mai Sai Riverside Guest House, the next one along from us. There were already another five people there from our own guest house and I recognised another five who arrived as a group a little later. I had a coconut soup with chicken, which was very nice, but with way too much lemon grass, which I spent half the time picking out as I ate. It was still only eight o’clock when we left, I to return to our guest house for a Coca Cola and to continue with my diary, Domenico to walk into town once more to buy his habitual carton of milk. He returned after about twenty minutes, had a Coke and then retired to the hut. I stayed to finish my drink and my diary before following him. I was quite ready to go straight to sleep, my diary up to date for once and with no more books to read, but Domenico was still busy writing and so I had to amuse myself for an hour with my maps and China guide book.

Description
Collecting gravel from the river bed of the Mae Ruak between the Thai town of Mae Sai and the Burmese town of Thakilek on the far bank.

Day 74 - Wednesday 8 April

Mae Sai

I enjoyed a really good night’s sleep in a surprisingly comfortable bed and got up shortly before eight o’clock. Naturally Domenico had already been up for at least an hour, writing his diary. After breakfast at the guest house we went out to do some walking, with the possible aim of getting to the Akha village about eight kilometres to the south-west of Mae Sai. We walked slowly along the path from the guest house, trying to determine whether any of the tracks branching off it were likely to lead us in the right direction, but none of them seemed to offer much hope.

When we reached a junction on the road we turned off to our right up the other fork and gradually began climbing between houses in the western part of town. After a few minutes we came to the foot of a temple built on the hillside, but from its location I could not see that this was the one mentioned in Lonely Planet. Nevertheless we began to ascend the naga staircase to take a look. Initially we arrived at a hall that was very attractive from the outside but very firmly closed, and a kind of patio area overlooking the hillside that we had just climbed, with a reclining Buddha at one end. On climbing further we came to a few statues standing on the slopes, of Buddha, Guanyin and various others that I didn’t recognise. And then, higher still, we reached the entrance to a cave, where we had to take our shoes off at the entrance that was guarded by a few more figures carved into the rock.

Inside the cave was a series of fairly high and wide corridors, the floors of which had either been concreted over or, in many places, tiled. We first encountered a large cavern that had been turned into a kind of shrine, with a small chedi, a statue of Buddha, several other small statues and all the trappings of a Buddhist altar. In another cavern was yet another Buddha figure which was, once my eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, very attractive. I took several photographs before moving back into the first section, where I took some more. All in all it was a very attractive wat and I was surprised that there was no mention of it at all in Lonely Planet.

We continued up the hillside along staircases and pathways that wound between monks’ cells until we had left the temple complex behind and found ourselves on a pathway amongst dry agricultural land overlooking Mae Sai and the Mae Ruak. Across the river in Burma the town of Thakhilek appeared to be far larger than I had imagined from the riverside, and we could see a white chedi amongst a stand of trees atop the highest of the hills beyond the town. We continued to follow whichever path appeared to be the most used until arriving at a much wider red dirt track. We had not thought to bring any water with us before setting out and so we were reluctant to press on towards the Akha village now, always assuming that we were on the right track anyway, but we agreed to follow the trail upwards for a little while longer to see where it would take us.

After a couple of switchbacks we arrived at a small plateau where a concrete wall, which ran back down the slope, terminated. Here there was a young lad armed with stacks of brownish grey paper bags which he was attaching to the scores of lychee bushes on the slopes, covering up the branches that contained the green fruits. I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be some kind of protection against the sun or a method of encouraging the fruits to ripen but, as we continued to ascend for a further fifteen minutes, we passed yet more ranks of these lychee bushes and could also see that many more lined the slopes of all the other hillsides that were visible. We also passed many large clumps of very young, feathery bamboo.

We finally came to a halt on a fairly level piece of ground with good views of the surrounding area. Way down below us, roughly to the north-west, we could just make out what must have been the river valley, at this point no longer forming the frontier but within the borders of neighbouring Burma. Beyond that were more of the now familiar red dirt trails that crossed the hillsides. The border itself was now running across the farmland below us, somewhere between the river and our current viewpoint, just an arbitrary line on the map that meant little, if anything, to the people of the area. Ahead of us the trail that we had been following could be seen ascending the next hill before, presumably, running along the ridge that we could see swinging away to the west. It was now growing extremely hot and, because of our lack of water, we decided to turn back. We retraced our route to the point where we had joined the main track and then continued along it until it brought us back to the top of the temple in a slightly different place to where we had left it earlier. We descended back down the hill through the temple complex and stopped at a small store at its foot for a much needed drink.

As was his wont, Domenico got talking to the woman and the girl in the shop, discovering that the temple was Wat Tham Pha Cham and definitely not the one mentioned in Lonely Planet. He also learned that there was another cave just below the one we had visited and, of course, he insisted that we go and take a look at that one too. The statuary outside the cave was a rather dismal collection, other than for what appeared to be the mould for one of the feet of the reclining Buddha, with patterns on the sole, à la Wat Po in Bangkok. Domenico removed his trainers at the entrance to go inside but I never bothered, which was just as well. Domenico called out that there was a light bulb near the entrance but could find no switch with which to turn it on, just a jumble of wires leading into some sort of junction box. He went in a little further but soon emerged to say that he couldn’t see a thing. We descended back down the hill again to a rough road opposite. This climbed another hillside through a fairly rambling and ramshackle residential area before starting to drop down again.

We emerged close to the road through Mae Sai at a car park full of tour buses and Thai tourists. This was the entrance to Wat Phra That Doi Wao, the one mentioned in Lonely Planet. There wasn’t a great deal of interest to see from the bottom but we climbed the naga staircase to the chedi at the top of the hill. It was a staircase designed for giants, at least in Thai terms, and even I could take each step in one stride only if I did so at a quicker than normal pace and with slightly too much effort for the conditions. The Thai tourists, who were taking two strides for each step on their descent, stopped to stare in amazement at the two farang bounding up the staircase one step at a time, but even I ran out of steam about two-thirds of the way to the top and had to pause to refill my lungs with massive gulps of air before completing the ascent at a more realistic pace. Once again the chedi was not much to look at in its own right, but there were some splendid views of Mae Sai, the river and Thakhilek. From here we could see that the latter really was quite a big town, far larger than its Thai neighbour across the river. After taking some photographs we descended the staircase, one step at a time all the way, such was the momentum that we generated, and by the time we approached the bottom we were practically running down them.

Domenico had been suffering some problems with his camera today, which I successfully diagnosed as a nearly flat battery. We walked along Phahonyothin Road, the main drag through the centre of Mae Sai, until we found a camera shop, which happened to be almost immediately. When he opened the camera to take the battery out I was astounded by its size; a huge six volt, twin cell lithium battery. It had only lasted for six weeks since he had bought the camera new in Bangkok, and a replacement cost him a whacking great B320. That represented eight pounds, or the cost of eight night’s accommodation in Mae Sai, or enough to live in reasonable, no make that good, comfort for two whole days!

It was now far too hot to consider going to the Akha village which, I had discovered during our drinks stop at the foot of Wat Tham Phra Chom, actually rated a mention in Lonely Planet. The Bible said that to get there you should walk four kilometres south on the main road and then another four kilometres west. From the map there appeared to be a path heading back across the hills from the village to Mae Sai, so it certainly seemed that the best plan would be to get there via the roads and then find our way back to town across the hills.

Once Domenico had been fleeced for his camera battery we continued along the main road towards the river. We paused on the way, he to buy some rather tasteless, woody fruits for five baht, I for a Coke in a plastic bag - the liquid American soft drink variety that is, and not the illegal white powder! Our stops over, we carried on as far as the international bridge. The Thai authorities, customs and immigration, didn’t bat an eyelid as we sauntered across the bridge towards Burma, or should I say the Union of Myanmar as the welcoming hoarding proudly proclaimed? Almost as soon as we had set foot on the bridge we were accosted by people trying to sell us cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, tigers’ teeth and genuine gold and ruby rings, the latter made from 100% pure plastic. We walked as far as the Burmese checkpoint and the signs proclaiming that no tourists were allowed beyond this point. We probably could have continued further, at least as far as the officials’ hut, if we had wanted to, but there seemed little point. If I really wanted to enter Burma all I had to do was to go walking in the nearby hills or wade across the river from the Mae Sai Guest House!

We sat down at the far end of the bridge and simply watched the non-stop flow of people between the two countries. At one stage a large crowd of Chinese tourists came along to pose for photographs in front of the barriers. They were followed by a big group of good-looking children of the hill tribes, beautifully dressed in gorgeous shades of black and purple. But in keeping with the traditional Han attitude towards the minorities within their borders, the very same hill tribes as were represented here, they treated these lovely children like shit, going so far as physically pushing them away and even hitting them when all the kids were trying to do was to persuade them to take their photographs in exchange for a few baht. It was truly disgusting to witness. After a while the Chinese thankfully departed for their tour bus and the children continued to mill around for some time. They never approached Domenico and I in the same manner although, had they done so, I would have been more than happy to give them a little money in exchange for a few photographs. As it was I took a few surreptitious photographs with the aid of my long lens, which they did not seem too keen on when they spotted me doing so, but they still did not approach further; perhaps they were just too shy around such obviously foreign faces, or they were just a little more wary after the appalling treatment they had received from the Chinese?

Not long after this episode I spotted the Italian and one of the Spanish guys we had met in Mae Hong Son, further back towards the Thai end of the bridge. I pointed them out to Domenico and we shouted across to attract their attention. They came over and we said our hellos, but after a little while I started to get that ominous rumbling in my stomach again, the first time for several days, and so I made my excuses and returned to the guest house, leaving Domenico to remain talking with his fellow Latins. My bowels purged I sat down in the restaurant to write my diary and take in another dose of riverside life. Domenico returned shortly afterwards but he went straight to our room and remained there. I got talking to another English visitor and his Scandinavian travelling companion for a while, and then a few Aussies who came along.

At half past five I went for a shower, over which I took a very long time, a process that also included a shave and the trimming of my hair where it was falling down below the tops of my ears into the bargain. After that I began to work on the chronicling of today’s events until six-thirty, when Domenico said he was going to walk into town to buy some postcards. We agreed to go out for dinner when he got back but in the meantime I continued with my writing. He didn’t return until a quarter past seven, saying that the shops had all been closed but that he had met the Pied Piper of the Kok River, who I had seen arriving earlier this afternoon, as well as the two Norwegians we had previously seen in Tha Ton and Chiang Rai. The Pied Piper, it turned out, was not from Germany as we had thought but Israel.

For dinner we went only as far as the Mai Sai Riverside Guest House, the next one along from us. There were already another five people there from our own guest house and I recognised another five who arrived as a group a little later. I had a coconut soup with chicken, which was very nice, but with way too much lemon grass, which I spent half the time picking out as I ate. It was still only eight o’clock when we left, I to return to our guest house for a Coca Cola and to continue with my diary, Domenico to walk into town once more to buy his habitual carton of milk. He returned after about twenty minutes, had a Coke and then retired to the hut. I stayed to finish my drink and my diary before following him. I was quite ready to go straight to sleep, my diary up to date for once and with no more books to read, but Domenico was still busy writing and so I had to amuse myself for an hour with my maps and China guide book.