Lost on Earth

Back from Chiang Mai and visa renewal trip. Chiang Mai is not a beautiful city, but it is what I had hoped Bangkok would be: cheap, not stinky, and it has good sidewalks for walking. It is a very low city because there is a ban on high-rise buildings, so it feels townish instead of cityish.

This was also where I said goodbye to Blaise, or tried to. There was a miscommunication and I said farewell over the phone while he was at the bus station. I am really sad about this. Blaise has been a very good friend for the last two months and things don’t’ seem the same around OPC without him.

On July 26 I boarded a bus to Mae Sot (pictured above). The only busses that go to Mae Sot are the luxurious Green Line busses that have reclining leather seats, air conditioning, leg room and large windows. I balked at the 237 baht price, but had no other choice. As it turns out, I really enjoy riding the Green Line. The bus was air conditioned to near freezing temperatures, so I shivered most of the way to Mae Sot…shivered while I slept. It had been days since I slept. The weather was lovely to behold from the large, clean windows. When not sleeping on the six hour bus ride I listened to This American Life episodes on my iPod and giggled to myself like an idiot in the nearly empty bus. Eventually the road took a downward town into some deep mountain ravines, and I felt a palpable change in the passengers on the bus and saw it in the landscape. Mountains and cliffs loomed close together, dark with foliage-heavy trees. A low ceiling of fat, gray clouds seemed to stick to the tops of the mountains and to the hillsides like gum. No more sun, no more heat. A persistent drizzle of rain slopped over the bus windows, and soon after we were in Mae Sot.

Although I was on the nearly empty bus by myself I took note of my few other travel companions. There was one old man who kept his hands folded patiently in his lap and stared silently out the windows. There were two girls near the front of the bus who also stared straight ahead. There was a sickeningly sweet Thai couple next to me. The woman dozed with her head on her husband’s chest, smiling. Occasionally she would sigh and open her eyes and smile at me. Last, there were two men who appeared to be Eastern European. They peeked at me from over the tops o their leather seats, but never spoke to me.

The bus pulled into a large, mostly deserted square that seemed to be actively in the business of falling down. Stains of mold spread over the three storey buildings and dripped into the littered, muddy streets. Rain wept from the dark gray sky, and not a soul was present in the square except some sodden and depressed looking tuk tuk drivers and motorbike taxis. The two men, Lithuanians, looked at me with wide eyes. The larger one asked “Do you know where we are?” “No”, I told him.

The three of us stepped, bewildered off the bus. The tuk tuk drivers started their ritual of clucking “tuktuktuktuk!” at us. The Lithuanians huddled under a tree. I considered setting out on my own to find a place to sleep, but thought better of it. Mae Sot did not have the easy, comfortable feel of Mae Hong Son, and was so deserted and dingy. So, I walked up to the Lithuanians and said “Shall we find a guest house together?” They nodded. They scoured their Lonely Planet guide and came up with Ban Thai guest house. By the time we arrived there the light (what little of it could be found) was failing and turning from dirty gray to dirty dark. Rain still leaked from the dirty sky. Two European young women, one elderly gentleman, and one Thai gentleman were sitting outside the guest house, and stared as I walked up, flanked by two hulking, hairy, 6’5 men. “We would like two rooms please”.

Ban Thai guest house felt like a clean, orderly island in a sea of muck. The building is made of teak, inside and out – polished rich reddish-brown wood on the floor, ceiling, walls, and furniture. It smelled pleasantly of teakish – somewhere between weathered lumber and barbeque sauce, I think. Nothing was dirty, nothing was out of place. My room was large, with a bed in one corner shrouded in clean, cotton sheets and a generous mattress. A low couch in the other corner next to a low table. Elegantly simple. Silk curtain rustled like paper in the three open windows. Outside the rain slipped down limp coconut palms.

In the evenings the guests congregated at the great table in the front of the building. The ceaseless rain pattered the leaves around us as we read, chatted, and played cards by the lamplight. I had to consciously remind myself that I was not an observer in some Agatha Christie short story. There were the two British nurses, who gossiped perpetually in the corner near the teapot. There was the older American gentleman who seemed to take a keen interest in the single, German thirty-something girl. There was the loud Australian, the quiet British man who rolled cigarettes pensively and smoked them while reading the newspaper. And there were the two Neolithic-looking Lithuanians who played dice and kept to themselves.

The next day I toured Mae Sot. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have done this. The only word that I can use to describe Mae Sot is “grimy”. Every surface seemed to be in a state of decay. Mold and mud, rust and holes. The air was chilly, nay, it was actually cold, and the rain never really stopped. Mae Sot is known for its activity in the jewel and gem trade, so on the main street there are many jewel malls, where a jewel seller has a small glass case in a large room with other jewel sellers. All the real jewel buying and selling, however, seemed to take place on the sidewalks, where men gather in tight knots of arms, legs, and short-sleeved button down shirts to haggle, inspect, and purchase jade, rubies, amethyst, and other stones. I thought about buying a stone or a bracelet, just as a keepsake of Mae Sot, but decided that I would rather just forget the place.

The Mae Sot market is large and more chaotic than the small, tidy Mae Hong Son market. The Mae Sot market sprawls across three city blocks and spills into the middle of the streets. Meat, vegetables, soap, clothing; everything is sold next to everything else, unlike MHS where the meat is sold in a screened off, room with stainless steel booths and is scrubbed every single evening by men with fire hoses. The Mae Sot market stank. Rubbish and meat scraps marinated together in puddles on the ground. People pushed and bustled around with a sharper edge than in MHS where shoppers mosey and giggle while they haggle with shopkeepers.
In Mae Sot I saw, for the first time since I arrived in Thailand, women and children begging in the streets for food and money. This is difficult for me. My time in Rome taught me that if I give so much as one baht to a child, seventeen others would come and mob me, so I had to tell every set of wide brown eyes “Mai dai”. I can’t.

I didn’t receive so many smiles. Maybe it is because there are many foreigners living here who work for the various NGOs – the IRC, the United nations. They like to drive around in their large, logoed trucks and talk loudly on their cell phones in restaurants. This is a massive generalization, but I felt that the inhabitants of this town carried a lot of sorrow and weariness with them. Oppressive clouds could be the culprit, but I think that the oppressive regime, mere kilometers away, is responsible.

An American expat cautioned me to get to the border as fast as I could and renew my visa straight away. The heavy rains have caused the Thailand-Myanmar Friendship bridge to crack and there was talk of closing it down. I headed straight for one of the blue Songtoews parked in front of the supermarket. These cheap pickup-truck taxis run a regular loop between Mae Sot and the Myanmar border. Once I arrived there I was unsure where to go, so I marched straight up to the bridge but was stopped by an unusually tall Thai guard who bore a startling resemblance to Samuel L. Jackson…or could that just be my overactive imagination? Silently he pointed to a small shack and motioned for me to stand in line. I chose the wrong line. No, No, he motioned with his hands, the other line. I chose the wrong other line. Frustrated, he grunted at me, put his hands on my shoulders and guided me to the proper line, and stomped back to his post.

When it was my turn to have my passport inspected there was a problem. My departure card had been destroyed during a wild dancing fiasco in front of the 7-11 in downtown Mae Hong Son during a torrential rain storm in a Buddhist lent parade. Calmly, I explained this to the soldier holding my passport, but he wasn’t buying it. “No, you cannot cross the bridge” was the answer. Blaise had taught me that when bargaining in the market always, always, always, smile, no matter what. Reluctantly I mustered my best grin, which really is not a pleasant sight at all, otherwise I would use it more often. As I expected, my horrific smile solidified his resolve not to let me cross the bridge. Then he started yelling at me “You GO! You go home now!”

“Go where?” I asked him, “I have no home.”

“Then you go to Bangkok, you not come here! GO!”

…Ok, smiling didn’t work, persuasion didn’t work, I decided to try yelling…

“NO! I will NOT go! You have to let me through!” To my right I could hear the Samuel L. Jackson guard giggling.

The Immigrations guards face turned red and he leaned closer to me “Go away! I do not want to see you any more! Go!”

“No!”

More yelling. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t berate a man holding a weapon. A new tactic was in order. I started crying. Real panic set in. I couldn’t afford to go all the way to Bangkok; it had already cost me so much to come to Mae Sot. My visa would expire soon and then I would be fined 500 baht for every day that I overstayed in Thailand. I sobbed as I told the guard this. The Samuel L. Jackson guard now began to look concerned. A different guard with a cul-de-sac bald patch replaced the angry guard. Solemnly he handed me a new departure card and told me to fill it out. “Ok?” He asked quietly. “Ok”, I sniffed. Then I walked up the bridge.

The bridge is very large and wide. Beneath it the brown river rushes past, full of silt and trash. Dirty grass grows on the banks of the Thai side, and steep muddy banks with men fishing are on the Myanmar side. Large trucks were parked on either end of the bridge, behind the border lines, and men were busy scurrying around unloading sacks of what appeared to be hay and also old, rusty canisters onto small carts with bicycles attached. Then the carts were peddled from one side of the bridge to the other. The men peddling the bicycle carts grinned red betel juice stained grins and yelled at me as I walked “Hello! Where do you go?” “Hello bay-beeee! I love yooooo!” Besides “where are you from” I think these are the only English words the men knew.
The Mywadi side of the river is in a more positive state of decay than the Mae Sot side. A mucky street leading away from the bridge lined with three storey buildings, most with gaping windows, rusting ironwork, and black lichen greeted me. In many of the doorways women sat with their children. People sat on the sidewalks, on cars, under trees, kids played with each other in muddy alleys. I knew that when I got to the Myanmar immigration office they would ask me if I wanted to stay in Mywadi for a day. I wanted to, desperately I wanted to explore, but the drippy rain was starting to concentrate on becoming torrential rain and my cheery red rain parka screamed “RICH TOURIST”. I would have to explore another time.

In the immigration office I was escorted to a chair by a man in a dirty t-shirt and longyi (sarong). He took my passport, took 505 baht from me, photocopied the passport and stamped it. A Myanmar soldier in an unmemorable uniform sat nearby at a decrepit desk and absently swung his bare feet and smiled at me. I walked back across the bridge, dreading my next encounter with the Thai guards. Samuel L. Jackson and the cul-de-sac hair guard were both standing outside to greet me. Samuel L. Jackson gave me a thumbs up and smiled. Cul-de-sac guard asked me if I paid the Myanmar guards, asked me if I was OK, stamped my passport, and sent me on my way.

I only had a 500 baht note left with me, and I needed this to get a ride home and a bus ticket back to Mae Hong Son. Knowing that a Songtoew driver would not have change for 500 baht, I walked to a small woodcarving shop nearby and bought a long wooden box with carved chopsticks inside. I call them my chopsticks of trauma.