Choose another map, showing:

• China
• South East Asia
• Asia
• Eurasia
• Eurasia, Africa & Pacific
• The World

Other entries in Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai & Mae Sot, Thailand

We flew out of Myanmar on a beautiful afternoon with few problems besides the fact that it was supposed to be a morning flight. Even though it was a short flight, the difference between the two countries is pretty significant. There's about a 30 year development gap between the two countries which means that while there's one on every street corner in Thailand, there isn't a single 7-11 convenience store in Myanmar.

We landed in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand, to look for volunteer work on the border with Myanmar, having decided against volunteering in Sri Lanka for the tsunami relief effort due to political instability in the area. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Burmese that have fled Myanmar into Thailand to escape the current government regime. Some of those people live in refugee camps set up by the Thai government, but the vast majority live near the border either in Thai towns or villages that don't legally exist according to the Thai government. These towns have no access to things such as water, electricity, hospitals or police protection. Those Burmese refugees living in Thai towns can't use the hospitals or call the police for fear of being deported, and unlike say, Mexican immigrants in the U.S., deportation means certain imprisonment and possibly execution by the Myanmar authorities.

Since Chiang Mai is the largest major city in Thailand near the border with Myanmar, we figured that would be an easy place to find aid organizations to speak with about volunteering. The problem with our logic was that because of strained relations between the two governments, Thailand lets very few authorized aid organizations work with the Burmese refugees. In reality, there is an incredible amount of money and aid going to the area, but very few organizations have established an official presence there, so basically we just started asking around. We eventually hooked up with a person who knew a person who knew a person who worked at the largest refugee medical clinic in Thailand in a town named Mae Sot, about seven hours away where we had heard there was a lot of volunteer work needed, so we hopped on a bus for the border for a meeting.

We are happy to report that a VIP air-conditioned bus in Thailand is actually air conditioned. Not only that, but instead of filling the aisles with bags of rice with people on top of them carrying chickens, the aisles were gloriously empty. We even had a movie on board regardless of the fact that whoever made it was apparently a sex-starved surrealist. We may not have understood the language, but here, apparently was the plot:

A guy gets thrown out of his girlfriends place, gets drunk and ends up at his uncle's. He convinces his uncle to finance a movie he wants to make and after auditioning several friends, the crew sets off in a bus to the islands to begin filming. The guy secretly likes the lead actress, and the male lead is, uh, sort of in a constant state of arousal, running around mounting all sorts of inanimate objects, like palm trees, etc. They begin filming a shipwreck scene, and discover that whenever the lead actress sees a sweaty guy the reggae tune "Ghost Town" by The Specials begins to play and she slips into a semi-erotic trance, writhing around, each time breaking free of the trance by sneezing seconds before the male lead attempts to take advantage of the situation. Shenanigans ensue. Eventually they all get back on the bus to go home, but late at night the bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere. They find their way to an imposing abandoned mansion on a hill and begin to play cards. As each of them goes to the bathroom they discover there is a spooky looking lady with a painted face under the toilet seat who is perhaps a ghost, but then again, if you lived in a toilet you'd have a face like that too. Each person neglects to tell the others and this scene is repeated for each character as they go to the bathroom. The end.

Despite the confusing movie, or perhaps because of it, the bus ride went by pretty fast while we discussed the merits of something even David Lynch would have trouble understanding. When we arrived in Mae Sot, we rented a room at a guest house popular with aid workers, which was nice because aid workers seem to gossip a lot, and it's harder to be gossiped about when you're hanging around together. One of the many funny things about Mae Sot is that since it's not exactly a tourist destination, as a westerner you're looked upon suspiciously as a potential sex tourist if someone doesn't know you. It helped that we were introduced right away to a bunch of aid workers, and probably the fact that we are married helped too, I don't know how many women travel to Thailand for sex tourism, and as far as I know, Andrea wasn't quietly slipping out while I was asleep.

The next day we made it to the clinic for our meeting. The clinic itself is a large conglomeration of buildings about two miles from the border of Myanmar, situated in a large field between rice paddies. The clinic is very rough and it look a little time for us to compose ourselves after being guided though the facilities. However, it is well funded in aid from countries in the west and the woman who started it, a Burmese refugee herself, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since the clinic doesn't legally exist according to Thai authorities, the patients and Burmese medics can be deported at any time and the clinic doors closed for good. Luckily, the Thai government ignores the clinic as long as it or its residents don't cause problems. The clinic is well connected with several other organizations in the area, so we were able to find volunteer work that suited our capabilities pretty easily: Andrea writing grants and helping organizations position themselves better for funding and me helping to create a program for survivors of domestic violence at a local woman's clinic.

The town of Mae Sot has a pretty interesting energy to it. There are very few legal border crossings from Thailand to Myanmar, so trucks pass through constantly on the way to or from the border. It's also apparently a huge gateway for both drug and human trafficking into Thailand, and there is an incredible disparity of wealth from destitute illegal immigrants, to some very, very rich people with very, very fancy cars. The police don't seem to get involved in much, and all aid workers know to do their jobs and not to stick their noses where they don't belong. A couple of times a day military helicopters fly imposingly overhead as the Thai army flexes a little muscle along the border and occasionally military vehicles pass through town as well.

It bears mentioning here that while Thai military personnel wear standard camouflage outfits, etc., basically making them look like army guys, the Thai police uniform consists of tight fitting brown polyester pants and shirts, making them all look like members of the Village People. This appears to be the case countrywide, making it really hard to take these guys seriously when they all look like miniature versions of Ponch & John from CHiP's. It's even more bizarre when they put life sized cardboard cutouts of themselves at busy intersections to control traffic, perhaps while they're home trying desperately to button up their uniforms.

Considering the issues most aid workers deal with, it wasn't surprising to see that most of them liked to let off a little steam at a local pub. Maybe it was because we were there over the holidays, but we didn't exactly see anyone drinking any less by the end of January. On Christmas eve we set out with a bunch of aid workers and ended up at a bizarre night club with a Thai band playing popular western hits about three times faster than normal while girls in hot pants gyrated hyperactively on stage with the band. I can't speak for Andrea, but I personally preferred it to midnight mass.

The Karen hill tribe of Myanmar, of which the majority of the refugee population consists, celebrate their new year one day earlier than we do. It would have been fortunate if we had known that before the actual celebrations began, which consisted of a lot of explosions and screaming, not the sort of thing you like to hear in a heavily armed province two miles from the border of two countries at odds with each other. Kind of like if you lived in Oakland and you didn't know the Raiders had just won the superbowl, but everybody lives. The nice thing about it was that half the population of Mae Sot was too hung over to celebrate New Year's on December 31st, breaking the holiday into two much more manageable celebrations, which was good considering we never saw any police around on either days, Maybe they were all out showing off their disco moves.

One of the many great things about Thailand is you can get fresh fruit shakes at almost any restaurant, made with actual fresh fruit. While peering at the menu of one such restaurant, Andrea decided to mix things up a little by asking the owner if he would mix a pineapple and coconut shake, combining two shakes on the menu. It took about 5 seconds for someone at our table to realize that those were two of the essential ingredients for a killer pina colada, so back we came on New Year's eve with a bottle of what-might-have-been-toxic local rum to fulfill our new drink's destiny. The night went straight downhill from there, us eventually progressing to a local pub where, in the interest of a pub with only one pool table, we were introduced to "speed pool." The rules are simple:

When it is your shot you must run.
You have only one second to aim.
You can sink any ball, the goal is to sink a majority.
The first person to sink 8 balls wins.

Each game takes about two minutes. As you might guess, this is a great game when alcohol is involved because:

1) You don't have to remember if you're stripes or solids
2) All that running around makes you thirsty.

It might be good to mention here that a good portion of the volunteers in Mae Sot are Australian. The issue here is that Australians don't stop drinking until they can't make their glass to go up to their lips anymore. There is also a rather strange rule involving a game of pool that Australians have, that is if the loser has not sunk a single ball by the end of the game, he must walk around the table with his pants around his ankles. This rule apparently applies to speed pool, which kept Andrea, despite repeated requests, from playing, and me in a constant state of panic, especially since I was wearing my Spiderman underpants. We got home some time before dawn, pants firmly buckled above the waist. Since no one we know had a camera that evening that's all we have to say about that.

On the days we were working, we rented a motor scooter to get around, and on days off we got to do a little exploring. Scooters, as you may know, are an important form of transportation pretty much everywhere in S.E. Asia. It is not uncommon to see dangerous amounts of stuff loaded onto the things flying down the street. We've seen full computer systems, sacks of grain, refrigerators, and even enough produce to completely obscure the actual scooter careening around. Anyway, the most important thing we found while driving around was the traditional Thai massage school which gave two hour massages for the equivalent of four dollars. After Andrea made it clear despite my pleas that we were not moving to Mae Sot, we did our best to help the students learn their craft every chance we got. Needless to say, all our muscles that had atrophied from cramped, long bus rides were as limber as a gymnast's at the end of our stay.

Since we had a scooter and there are only two traffic lights in Mae Sot, it was inevitable that we would eventually get caught up in the local practice of scooter drag racing. Each time while stopped at a red light, everyone pushed toward the front, jockeying for position. When the light turned green the tepid roar of several very small motors filled the intersection as we all slowly surged forward. Maybe some of these guys saw one of those street racing movies, because it seemed like they were taking it very seriously, which of course, somehow made us take it seriously too, but instead of souped up cars with fancy looking paint jobs, we were all on 50 cc scooters in flip flops. There was a contingent of young men who clearly practiced at this stuff, leaving most of us sputtering slowly forward at the green light. The first time we did it, we were cursing the fact that we had two people on our scooter, although we thought we were doing pretty well until a family of four went flying by, the mother talking on her cell phone while sitting sidesaddle on the back seat with one child and an infant on the fathers lap apparently steering. We never did get any good at it, but considering the sounds our rent-a-wreck scooter was making, it's probably good we didn't try too hard.

Although the Thai government has graciously decided to ignore the immense number of refugees and aid organizations in the area, the government of Myanmar has not. It was made clear to us by the aid organizations that there is a significant number of Myanmar intelligence people in the area keeping tabs on what's being done by who in and around Mae Sot. This has been demonstrated in several ways, the most tragic being a reckless young volunteer boasting about the fact that he was joining a team of Burmese on a journey into Myanmar bringing medical supplies and ending up dead. Despite the tragedy, it was a stark reminder that the government of Myanmar knows more about what's going on with the refugees than the aid organizations do.

One convenient way for Myanmar to know exactly who is in the area is unwittingly provided free by the Thai government. When a foreigner's visa is set to expire, he has two choices: head to the immigration office in one of the major cities and pay a substantial sum for an extension, or cross the border of any country, turn around and re-enter Thailand and be granted a brand new visa for free. Since Mae Sot is hours away from the nearest large city, virtually everybody crosses the border into Myanmar every 30 days, even if it's only for a few minutes. This gives the Myanmar authorities the opportunity to document practically every foreigner who stays in the area for more than a month. Add to the fact that a Myanmar intelligence officer, dressed as a civilian and saying he's a volunteer, will accompany you the whole way across the long bridge between the Thai border checkpoint and the Myanmar border checkpoint asking you questions he already knows the answers to. The weird part is, we've been told, is that they pretend they don't know you no matter how many times you cross.

Some of the longer term volunteers say that they've managed to find the right non-specific, non-threatening dialogue for their monthly questioning to have no problems, and have learned to pretend right along with the guy who has accompanied them over the bridge for the last 20 times that they've never met. You have to remember that once you are in their immigration office, you are in Myanmar and they can do pretty much anything they want to, including arrest you. One volunteer who speaks both Thai and Burmese but doesn't let on that she does, told us she listens to how much they know about her as they go through her passport each month. Another made the mistake of joking with her "volunteer" as they crossed the bridge by asking why he wanted to know where she was from when he knew anyway, then incorrectly saying she was from Uzbekistan, which got her held at the border for four hours as a warning.

We had been well warned when it was our time to cross the border to get our visas renewed, and we politely discussed absolutely nothing to the nice man who wanted to "practice his English" as we crossed the bridge to the Myanmar checkpoint. After the expectable dialogue about how despite what we might hear about Myanmar is absolutely untrue, and our replies that we know nothing about the country and it seems very nice, we had little difficulty at the checkpoint. We wandered around the little border town for an hour and headed back into Thailand before dusk, glad to get back.

We eventually finished the volunteer projects we had taken on and got ready to leave Mae Sot. It was a most amazing experience and we feel so lucky to have been able to offer something to the people of a country that we found so heart wrenchingly beautiful. We experienced more than we could ever write about on so many levels working with volunteers and refugees, and just living in a town of such amazing disparities, from culture, to wealth, religion, and education. After another absolutely pleasant bus ride back to Chiang Mai, where we took a few days to prepare for our trip to Laos.

Add to del.icio.us Add to reddit

Photos / videos of "Chiang Mai & Mae Sot, Thailand":