TACHILEIK, BURMA
Well, Shan food technically. Snakehead curry, crazy-spicy side dishes and a pile of vegetables. All you can eat for about US$2.
TACHILEIK, BURMA
Mae Sai is a pretty average Northern Thai town, but just across the border is an entirely different world. The sidewalks are covered in brick-colored betel nut spit, old toothless women smoke green cheroots and, perhaps most strikingly, everybody looks completely different. Cosmopolitan Thailand is fairly homogeneous (mostly due to the success of Thaification), but the population of Tachileik is a bizarre mix of Shan, Bamar, Lahu, Akha, Muslim groups and Indians from all over the place.
Also, everything is in Burmese. That sounds obvious, but you’ll find some familiar script almost anywhere you go in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam. In Tachileik even the license plates are written in a language you’ve never seen before.
TACHILEIK, BURMA
We’ve visited Tachileik before, but the failed expedition to Mong La necessitated another three hours in the town. It’s much the same, but I did find out something interesting – the endangered animal parts they sell in the market are real. Being about two hundred meters from Thailand I always figured they were fake, but the general consensus is that Burma doesn’t have any problem with openly selling rhino assholes.
God help you if you bring that crap back into Thailand, though.
SHAN STATE, BURMA
Mong La is defintitely interesting, but Burma is hard to travel through. It’s not North Korea; visas are pretty easy to get and you can fly into Yangon or Mandalay without any trouble, but tourists aren’t welcome outside predominately Bamar areas. Every single one of Burma’s borders happens to be in a minority region, so it’s pretty much impossible to enter overland.
Luckily, for the past few years the Shan State has been the one place in Upper Burma where you can both enter by land and travel beyond the border. The crossing at Tachileik is usually just a day trip – Thais cross the border to buy cheap Chinese stuff and tourists who need to renew their visas can just hop over and back – but the $10 entry permit actually allows a stay of up to two weeks. There’s no damn way they would have ever let foreigners into the rest of the country from Tachileik, but the road to Kengtung and Mong La was fine if you were willing to stop at military checkpoints.
Fine until the Kokang Incident, anyway. In August of last year the Burmese raided “a gun factory suspected of being a drug front” about 250km north of Mong La, sparking a breakdown of decades-old cease-fires with every ethnic minority army in the area. By the end of the month about fifty people were dead and 37,000 refugees had run into Yunnan.
Refugees from Kokang in Yunnan province, from Flickr user treasuresthouhast
None of this happened anywhere near Mong La, but the Burmese cracked down anyway and stopped letting foreigners in. It may have opened up by now, but I didn’t get far enough to find out – Since the Kokang Incident, all foreigners traveling beyond Tachileik need to hire a “guide.”
“Guides”, who may or may not be minders, cost about US$30 a day plus all their food and lodging. If you’re traveling solo that effectively quadruples expenses and I only brought US$250. Nobody could tell me if Mong La was even open, either. The soldiers at the border said yes, the tourist office lady with a curious Victorian accent said no and every other English speaker in Tachileik didn’t understand why I’d ever want to go there.
I did find one guy who was willing to take me without a guide – he wanted to smuggle me through the checkpoints in the trunk of his Lada.
In one week, I’ll be in Calcutta.
SPECIAL REGION 4, BURMA
Here’s a story about trying to get to weird places no one wants you to be.
Mong La sounds awesome. “Special Region 4,” in the northeastern Shan State, was a major hub for opium production until the junta completely eradicated it in the mid 90s. The region’s only source of revenue was gone, but the ethnic generals who controlled it realized that Mong La’s position on the Chinese border and near complete lawlessness made it a prime destination for tourists. The town quickly turned into the “Las Vegas of the East,” with 600,000 Chinese a year coming for the swanky casinos and brothels full of Eastern European hookers. Rich Chinese people were gambling away untold sums of money and it wasn’t long before luxury hotels, fancy discos and an amusment park were slapped together.
You know where this is going.
The relative of a powerful Chinese bureaucrat pissed up US$100,000 in a casino, so somebody pulled some strings and the People’s Liberation Army was ordered to close the border crossing. Everything fell apart overnight and the town was left in ruins.
Desparate for another source of income, the ethnic armies that controlled the area began to rape the landscape of Special Region 4 and ship the spoils off to China. Now entire mountains are being stripped of trees and any wildlife in the way is shot, dried and sold to middle-class Chinese people who think tiger penises will cure erectile dysfunction.
Well, I gotta check that out. If you want more, Dark Appetites (PDF) is a fantastic report on the illegal wildlife trade in Mong La by Karl Ammann (who does completely awesome work). Stay tuned!
From Flickr user SoggyDan
From Flickr user SoggyDan
From Flickr user isafrancesca
MAE LA, THAILAND
Mae La is the largest refugee camp in Thailand, about three kilometers long and home to between forty and fifty thousand people (about a third of the refugee population in this area). Less than 5km from the Burmese border, Mae La’s inhabitants are a mix of Karen and other ethnic minorities who fled into Thailand to escape forced labor, murder and rape by the military of Burma.
There would probably be refugees here no matter what, but it might be 10,000 instead of 160,000 if not for the Yadana Pipeline. Built in the mid-90s by American and French gas companies, the Burmese military provided “security” and an unknown but undoubtedly massive number of people were killed or enslaved during its construction. Not only is it still happening, but the pipeline is the single largest source of income for the brutal Burmese junta.
Know who else has a stake? Chevron. I’ll write more about that eventually.
TACHILEIK, BURMA
I’m sure Tachileik isn’t at all representative of Burma – it really only exists as a market for Thais to buy cheap merchandise from China. Still, it’s a whole different world from the Land of Smiles and makes for a pretty interesting daytrip (especially since it’s mandatory).
After the Thai authorities check your departure card and stamp your passport, you’re herded across the Ruak River under the watch of dour Burmese soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms. The immigration office extends a warm welcome with peeling paint the color of vomit, a portrait of Than Shwe and clocks reminding you that, for some reason, Burma is half an hour behind Thailand (though I’d argue it’s more like three decades). Your passport is taken and replaced by an entry permit with your name misspelled.
The town of Tachileik is dominated by the area immediately across the river, a dingy marketplace selling counterfeit versions of pretty much everything (future post). The rest is a squat expanse of crumbling buildings and MacGyvered vehicles with absolutely nothing in Roman script (even the license plates have Burmese numbers), punctuated by a few impressive temples and Myanmar Rum advertisements.
It’s impossible to travel on to Burma proper from here, but you can continue further up to the Chinese border. Those entry permits are good for two weeks, so maybe I’ll stay a while on the next visa run.
by the way, if you’re wondering why I keep saying “Burma” instead of “Myanmar” it’s just because I think it sounds cooler. wikipedia uses “Burma” too, but if you look at the talk page apparently they’ve thought about it a lot more than I have.
CHIANG MAI, THAILAND -> TACHILEIK, BURMA
Thailand has tourism down to a science, but it isn’t really sure what to do about all these foreigners who want to live here. Most bring in a lot of money and have helped the country immensely, but some just do a ton of drugs and have sex with prostitutes. How in the world do you separate the two? Nobody’s quite figured it out yet, but the interim solution is hold them to insanely complicated and unpredictable visa regulations. So complicated and unpredictable, in fact, that there are entire websites devoted to keeping up with them.
I’ve been in Thailand over a month (though hopefully not much longer), so I needed to leave the country to get an extension on my visa. Through mechanisms too boring to explain I would have received sixty days if I’d gone to Laos, but it’s a four day trip and my friend norovirus made sure that wasn’t happening. Luckily the Union of Myanmar is only 200km away, and even though that trip’s only worth an extra two weeks it can be done in a single day.
These photos are from the way there. Tomorrow we’ll take a dip into Burma.
Looks like John Yettaw, the guy who broke into Aung San Suu Kyi’s house, made it back to America.
Suu Kyi intruder returned to US
“The man jailed for visiting Burma’s detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has returned home to the US.
John Yettaw arrived in Chicago from Bangkok, where he had been treated in hospital after being deported from Burma on Sunday.“
Suu Kyi, on the other hand, remains under house arrest.
Myanmar to release US prisoner
Poor Jim Webb, always living in Bill Clinton’s shadow. Clinton got to go to big bad North Korea and take home two hot Asian journalists, but Webb had to settle for a second-rate dictatorship like Myanmar and negotiate the release of some crazy old guy convicted of “illegal swimming.”
I’m sorry, what?
“[John] Yettaw, a diabetic and epileptic former military veteran, is being held at Yangon’s Insein prison. He was convicted along with Aung San Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy leader, after swimming uninvited to the Nobel laureate’s lakeside home.“
Unlike the women Clinton saved from North Korea and the hikers being held in Iran, who in both cases were jailed for illegal border crossings, John Yettaw was arrested for swimming across a lake in Rangoon and pretty much breaking into Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. She didn’t want anything to do with him, but the junta thought it’d be a great excuse to extend her house arrest.
John Yettaw, you have to understand, has had a hard life. Born in Detroit, his father abandoned him at age two and left him with his alcoholic mother and four siblings. He lost three of them to suicide, drowning and poor treatment in a mental hospital. He’s been married four times and had seven kids, one of whom died in 2007 after crashing a motorcycle. Yettaw has also diabetes, asthma and epilepsy, and his third wife Yvonne claims he’s an alcoholic with untreated bipolar disorder and PTSD.
Last year he spent six months backpacking through Asia (he had a travel blog here, but unfortunately there’s only one post), settling in a crappy little Thai border town called Mae Sot. He did what most fifty-something white guys in Thailand do – bought a motorcycle, picked up a Thai girlfriend and started receiving messages from God that he was a “champion of the downtrodden” and must save Aung San Suu Kyi. Sometime in October he skipped town without paying any of his bills, got a Burmese visa in Bangkok and went to Rangoon.
Somehow, Yettaw managed to avoid the dozens of MPs and patrol boats ‘guarding’ Suu Kyi’s house and sneak in to the compound through a culvert (nearest I can figure, this is the place). Suu Kyi, obviously, wanted nothing to do with him and told her assistants to send him away. He was caught by police and questioned at gunpoint, but apparently he managed to convince them that he was fishing and they let him go.
The visions kept coming and Yettaw became more and more convinced that he had to meet Suu Kyi. This time, he saw her assassinated by terrorists and knew that he had to return to her home in Rangoon to warn her. So, one year later, he did it again.
Suu Kyi agreed to meet Yettaw this time, but only to tell him to piss off in person. She let him stay in the basement for a while, owing to his illnesses, but when he’d gathered enough strength he once again left the compound. This time, though, the police were waiting for him and he was thrown in Insein prison on a litany of charges (“being crazy” isn’t in the Burmese legal code). Suu Kyi, on the other hand, was given another year and a half of house arrest that will keep her out of the running during elections the junta has scheduled for next year.
Now, the entire Burmese democracy movement is blaming this naive old man for derailing their efforts to create a free Burma. Kyi Win, Aung San Suu Kyi’s lawyer, said, “Everyone is very angry with this wretched American. He is the cause of all these problems. He’s a fool.” That’s all a bunch of BS, of course – the military would have found some way to keep her in prison for the elections either way – but the dire consequences of John Yettaw’s midnight swim make this story all the weirder. Jim Webb convinced the government to release him on Sunday morning, so he’s probably home already, but I’m curious to know what the Americans plan to do with him.
“I had a dream that Aung San Suu Kyi would be assassinated so I came to warn her, so I am not guilty [...] I can’t walk on the water so I swam.”
