August 6th, 2009
3 countries in one day???
OK…I know I said on Monday that it was the best day ever–but the days just keep getting better and better!! Tuesday was a quiet day…we just hung around the hotel and got massages…AHHHHH!!
As always, you will have to go to Troy’s blog for the photos as I do not know how to get them on my blog.
Wednesday was the second day we planned to spend with Riam and her husband going up north to the Golden Triangle, Chiang Rai and the hilltribes. She picked us up at 6:00am (ACK) as the drive is about 3.5-4 hours. We stopped at a hotspring about 1 hour into the trip. The water there was so hot is would scald your skin…but they had a place to dip your feet, so stuck our toes in for half a second at a time to say we did it. There was the opportunity to cook an egg in the water, but we passed. I bought a sapphire and diamond bracelet…we will see when I get home if it is any more than cut glass. She has a little tool there that she put on it to assure me it was real…but we will see. At the very least it is very pretty and she made some money for the day. That is sort of how I have come to look at these things. I have not paid more than I wanted to for anything and as we progress through our trip and find different markets, I see that I have overpaid for some things compared to the new prices I have found, but these folks need to make a living too right?
After the hotspring we drove another hour or 2 and then stopped for food. We ate at this road side diner that had Pad Thai for 25 baht (75 cents). The farther you get from the cities, the less English there is, so at this point Riam is doing all the talking for us. Across the street from the diner is an all white temple built for the king’s 60th birthday (21 years ago). It is all being built by hand, so they are still working on it…it is amazing and with the sun shining brightly, it is almost painful to look at due to the super bright reflection. It looks like a snow castle from a fairytale….
We make it to the Golden Triangle around noon and after a very scary stop in a “bathroom”, we get on a small boat big enough for the 5 of us and a driver and he takes us on the river to see Burma/Myanmar, and Laos. The driver takes us to a dock in Laos and tells us he will be back in 30 minutes. They ask us for 20 baht each just to step into their land, and then they allow us to look at the market there. Other than Laos and Golden Triangle T-shirts, we buy nothing as Riam told us to wait for Myanmar market where things are REALLY cheap. WOW! cheaper than this we ask?? That and she also told us to keep our back packs on the front of us for safekeeping. this is the first time we have been made aware that this is an issue, Thailand is such a safe friendly place…maybe Laos, not so much?? True to his word, the boat driver comes back for us and we load up and go back to Thailand.
Riam loads us back up and we drive up to the market n the Burma/Thailand border. Not seeing any English here now, so we are grateful to have our new friend Riam with us. Not only is she able to translate–she is a wicked haggler. made Ruby look like a pushover–and she is the most hardcore bargainer of all of us. She assured us we could get designer sunglasses for 40 baht–we were skeptical as the lowest we had seen was 79 baht so far and that was at the Saturday market. Most places so far have been 180 baht+ But we perservere and after about a dozen stands, we find the one that will give them to us for 40 baht–Holy COW!! So we buy lots as 40 baht is $1.21 USD. and at the rate that i go through sunglasses, that is probably all i should pay…
As always, Rachael finds lots to buy…she is the spendiest of all of us–thus her finely honed bargaining skills I guess!!
After our shopping adventures, we head to the hilltribes. This feels a little weird as it basically is a “people zoo”, but the 2500 baht we pay to the tribes to be able to go in and see them supposedly goes to their education fund…so with some amount of skepticism–we go ahead with the trip. There are 5 tribes living in the area totaling about 200 people. they are not Thai citizens as they actually come from Burma and Laos as refugees. The Thai gov’t lets them stay, but they have to be self sufficient. I can only say I saw 4 distinct tribes, the Karen long necks, the ones with the huge earrings, and 2 others that I could tell apart as their clothes were very different. It was a weird sensation wandering around looking at their houses and them just hanging out living their lives. The long neck girls were weaving silk scarves on small looms and Rachael and I both bought one, they are beautiful and very soft.
After this we started home. It was a very long day, we got home around 8:30pm, tired, but feeling like we had done and seen a tremendous amount.
