visa run to myanmar

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unfortunately, i was scheduled to be in thailand juuuust over a month, so i had a choice between a day trip to myanmar or an 8000 baht fine. i chose to have a nice day long vacation to the nice neighboring country.

it was pretty uneventful. pick-up at 6:30am from the camp in a nice little airconditioned van with 5 other people in similar visa-needing situations. 5 hour drive north. occasional napping and waking with cramped neck.

at the border, thailand looks like a different country. poorer. buildings are in worse condition. they made a copy of our passports and suddenly, with eagle talons, they took all our passports away. i may make this sound dramatic, and i was feeling a bit dramatic, but i have become very uncomfortable with anyone having my passport. they require it if you rent a motorbike, but i flatly refuse, and eventually they let me rent it anyway. and so, to suddenly lose control of it here made me feel very on edge.

then, i went to the toilet. and as i was walking to the toilet, this random man says, "3 baht!" and i said, "why?" and he said, "toilet! 3 baht!" and this just infuriated me. because the guy wasn't even really near the toilet, and i know that people are going to target me because i am a woman travelling alone, and i HATE that, i hate the principle of it, and so i didn't want to give in. so i refused. i said, "i don't see any sign." he repeated: "3 baht! toilet!" and he showed me the way to the toilet. "no," i said. "i won't pay. there is no sign. i just use the toilet." and he yelled at me in thai, and i refused again, and he finally just waved me away, disgusted, and left. i went to the toilet, but then he started yelling at me from outside the door. then another man came and they were both yelling at me from outside the door. at this point (and stupidly not before), i thought about the fact that 3 baht is about 10 cents, and i didn't want to die in this stupid toilet on the thailand/burma border, so i took out 3 baht, flushed the toilet, opened the door, shoved 3 baht into the man's hand, said "make a sign" and pretty much ran away.

in short, i survived.

after this, we got on a boat to burma! a little dinky motorboat. first we stopped at a tiny island and thai military got on board and checked our passports (the boat driver had them all in his bag). then to myanmar. at a glance, the place was visibly poorer than its thai neighbor. everything was seedy looking. very drab and brown and concrete. we were greeted by burmese people who were all smiling too much, offering everything from morphine to viagra. some showed us their crippled limbs, in an attempt to wield some pity, and offered burmese currency (almost worthless) as a souvenier, and then asked for a 'souvenier' of thai money. we got to the passport control area, and even the bossman at his desk with a fan blowing on him was dressed in only a white undershirt tanktop and cotton shorts. we had the option to "go shopping", i don't really know where, but i was only too glad that no one wanted to buy anything, and we were all back on the boat within 10 minutes. on the way back, we stopped again at that military checkpoint, and they patted us down and dumped the contents of my bag into my lap, as a routine check for drugs and such. but after this, we were back to thailand, straight past that toilet and into the van, passport-in-grateful-hand, and 5 hours later, back in unbelievably safe-feeling phuket!

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Photos

thai/burma border
this is the dock where we left thailand to myanmar for the visa run.