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Published: July 20th 2011
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We left Chiang Mai by a nice tourist bus and headed to Chiang Rai (note: Chiang Mai is pronounced Chee ang May and Chiang Rai is pronounced Chee ang Rye).
The bus station in Chiang Rai is near the guesthouses, but do you think we could find any of them? We walked around for almost two hours, with our heavy packs, but NOTHING. I was even reading the map (as it turns out, upside down). Eventually we found the backpackers area, and wouldn't you know it, we were on that same street further down, and beside it, and next to it ... just not on the right part of it!
All was well - we found a nice guest house with a cute orange tabby named Leo, (named after Leo Beer - which made Peter like him even more). He just loved coming to us for attention, so that helped alleviate some of our cat withdrawel symptoms.
Chiang Rai's bars and restaurants looked great, and we enjoyed some good Thai food, minus the rice, which we are getting so sick of at this point - I mean, how can one eat white rice EVERY day, twice a day?
Then we found out, that no beer would be served after 6 p.m. because of the beginning of Buddhist Lent. All weekend, beer and any alcohol would be, well, forbidden. We did find one Canadian business owner (from Petawawa) who was running a massage parlour who offered us some beer, in a back room. We just couldn't refuse. It is SO hot here, that the beer, that is, COLD beer, is the only thing to really quench a weary traveler's thirst.
Since most places were closed for the holiday in Chiang Rai, we decided some temple hopping was in order. We by-passed the tour companies, who like to overcharge, and took the public bus to the White Temple. This was easy and cost us only 20 Baht each. The temple was more of a work of art than any we had seen. This was a contemporary temple, and was still under construction - even after ten years of being built by an eccentric Buddhist artist and his group of disciples. The artwork was amazing and the temple well worth seeing. When we were done, we just walked back out to the road and flagged the bus down, and we
Downtown Chiang Rai
The Clock Tower (in background) were back at the bus station in a few minutes. The temple itself was free, so the whole trip cost us only 80 Baht (that's less than $3 CDN). The tuk-tuk drivers were trying to charge around 500 Baht to take us there.
From the bus station we walked to another Wat in Chiang Rai. Again, the tuk-tul drivers were trying to sell us tickets to go there, but it was only a ten minute walk and I knew how to read the upside down map now. The Wat Phra Kaew was where the Emerald Buddha was rediscovered - covered in cement, until a bolt of lightening struck in the mid fourteenth century, and cracked the cement, revealing the green shade, once thought to be emerald, but actually jade. This was the same Emerald Buddha that now sits in the Grand Palace Wat in Bangkok mentioned in an earlier blog.
From Chiang Rai, we took a local bus to Mae Sai (pronounced May Sigh). Mae Sigh is the most northern point in Thailand, on the border with Myanmar (Burma). We went there so we could cross into Myanmar, which we did, for a morning. If Mae Sai was
On the River Mae Sai
Outside our bamboo hut drinking Leo Beer - Myanmar across the river. a dirty border town with thousands of street stalls selling junk, then Tachileik, Myanmar was a cesspool of much the same, except there they pedalled suspicious cigarettes, viagara and opium, not to mention oodles of porn DVDs. Sorry, my friends, I did not purchase your souvenirs there ...LOL. The highlight of Tachileik was when a particularly persistant tout approached Peter trying to get him to buy cigarettes, and when Peter said, "No Smoke" he tried selling him viagara. So Peter replied, "No Sex" and the guy was incredulous and tried pushing porn DVDs on him. That's when I put my arm around Peter and looked at the tout and said, "He's not allowed to buy any." The tout nodded to me with a thin smile and quickly disappeared. I'll have to keep that trick in mind for next time!
The guesthouse in Mae Sai was definitely a high point of our trip. It was a little out of the way, but it was so worth the walk. We had a private bamboo hut right on the Mae Sai River, a stone's throw from Myanmar. Like all rivers in this area, the Mae Sai is brown, and because it's the
Thailand on left, Myanmar on right
Our bamboo hut is on the river on the Thailand (left) side. rainy season, fast flowing. We had dinner and beer on a deck OVER the river, and we could see and feel the water under our chairs on the bamboo deck.
We left Mae Sai as we arrived, via a local bus which returned us to Chiang Rai where we changed buses for one heading to Chiang Khong - on the Mekong River on the Laos border. The bus ride to Chiang Khong was stunningly beautiful, through mountains and valleys abound with rice paddies and corn fields among palm trees of various hues of green.
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