Burmese Visa Run

After our liveaboard trip, we realised we had been in Amazing Thailand(tm) for nearly 30 days (doesn't time fly when you are having fun?) and we would have to do a visa run to restart the 30 day timer. From Lanta, where we were, the most easily accessible other country was Myanmar (Burma). We booked an all-in-one visa run which picked us up at 08.00 in an air conditioned minibus, fed us, drove us to the port, put us on a boat, showed us where to line up to get ourselves stamped in and then straight out of Myanmar (we had about 10 mins to look around, take a few photos and be offered viagra, opium, cigarettes, booze and early 90s mobile phones) back on the boat, back in the air conditioned coach, fed us again, then drove us back to where we started. If you have seen Snatch, it is a bit like the scene where cousin Avi and crew come on Concord from New York, then back. It was not exactly in the backpacking spirit of independent travel, but it probably worked out cheaper and took about 3 days less than it would have!

It would have been nice to explore Myanmar... But things are not great there at the moment and there are two schools of thought whether you should travel there: One view is that you are putting money in the pocket of (and condoning) a military junta with a diabolical human rights record, but on the other hand people visiting raises awareness in the outside world of the internal repression, and if money is wisely spent can put money in the pockets of the people who need and deserve it... A big scruple... And this was before the cyclone hit... In any case we decided not to venture into Myanmar even though it is meant to be an amazing place.

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