This day started early as usual and I booked another tour. They picked me up with some other people as well. The tourguides name Gong but we could call her Gongster and the driver, her brother was Jack and we could call him Jack Sparrow. We drove about an hour to our first stop, the hot springs. I would have expected hot springs to swim in but nope! These were geysers. I have seen some before on the Azores islands but these ones were different, these were the exploding ones! Some weren't that high and locals used them to cook eggs in it. Quite interesting to see, on Azores they filled cups to make tea with the hot water. One of these was very big and exploded all the time. I always wanted to see this so this was a nice surprise! We spend about 20 minutes here and we continued.
We drove about an hour again to stop at a location I saw on internet a long time ago and was on my to do list for a long time. The White Temple in Chiang Rai. This temple is a masterpiece. Not an old ruined one as I like but a complete new one, all in white just as the name. Apart from being a stunning view with a big pond around and dragon heads who spray water, if you want to enter the temple you need to pass hell. This is a small walking path surrounded by hands who seem like they want to grab you. Such a cool view. The idea behind it is, you have to pass hell to enter heaven. The other part from the path is also decorated with beautiful, sometimes angry looking statues until you reach the entrance. The inside of the temple was less special for me but for local people probably very special. I heard the colors of the temple have meanings as well, white is for the king, yellow or gold is for the religion. Its keeps being special to visit places I dreamed of for a long time. To see them in real is awesome! I think we spend around an hour here before we left again. Since a massive bus of korean people was right behind us we chose to go for food first. We drove again for around an hour to arrive at a massive local restaurant. Here I got my first experience with Myanmar food. This was yellow rice and spicey chicken and weird vegetables. I'm not a fan of spicey food but this tasted good, combined with a lot of water.
This restaurant was on a special place, the infamous Golden Triangle. This used to be a notorious drug dealing gangster place 40 years ago. The borders of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos are meeting here, divided by the Mekong river and in the middle an island thats noman's land. The Thai side of the border is decorated with beautiful buddhist statues. Big angry looking elephants, a massive golden statue of Buddha standing on a building that looks like a boat. This is a very beautiful place. This is also the place where the Mekong river and some other river connect. I forgot the name of the second river. The cool part is that the water from the Mekong is blue and the other river is brown/red and the water meets but doesn't mix, which gives a beautiful combination and view. I saw this on tv before but never expected to see one in real life, another bonus added to the list! We turned in out passports and went on a Mekong cruise, not as spectacular as it sounds, on a big, but small tourist boat. It showed some nice views and gave information. The Laos and Myanmar sides host some large casinos. In Thailand, budhism forbids gambling so they are decorated with budhist things. The chinese also "rented" an island there for 90 years and put a massive casino on it, on the Laos side that is. Its unbelievable to see the poor wooden fishermen houses on one side and the big luxerous casinos on the other side. How nice for them to see that difference every day. Anyway we stopped at the Laos side, which means another country visit to my list. We were only temponary allowed and all I got to see was a cheap market. For some reason they allowed people there without visa for 30 baht. The most special thing they sell there is whiskey with animals added in the bottles, like scorpions, snakes, lizards and a tiger penis. I could get a free taste but I gently passed. I didn't buy a single thing in there since I travel with one backpack and anyway most looked like crap.
So we cruised back to the Thailand side and continued our trip. Our last stop was the Karen Long Neck tribe, which we should have visited earlier but since that korean bus we changed plan. The first views of this place were very interesting. Wooden, bamboo huts, it really looked like visiting tribes. They live there with 4 tribes but I only noticed 4. My interest went out to the Karen Long Neck tribe since they have the special tradition to put rings around the womens necks to enlarge them. The older the woman gets the more rings she got and the larger the neck becomes. If they remove the rings they will die of a broken neck. The first girl I meet there was very cute. I got a picture with her. Sadly enough they have their own language and I couldn't speak with them, only the little kids speak english and they try to sell you things. Even the thai people cant talk to them. This was the first tribe I visited in my life and even if they are adjusted to modern life and most of this seems like a tourist show, the necks are real. One girl dropped something when I was near and helped her by picking this up and return it to her since it looked like a hard mission to her. She thanked me without words and thats the closest to real contact I got to them. What I didn't know when I visited them is that those tribes are refugees from Myanmar, the army banned them from the country and Thailand accepted them. You have ton pay 300 baht to visit them but I do hear stories that that money does not go to them and they are very badly treated, which seems sad in my eyes. Since Myanmar has a new female president now, she wants to allow them back in her country and they might move soon out of Thailand. I do hope this brings them a better future then what they have now. Apart from the sad background about them I was happy I got to meet a special tribe in real.
This was our last stop and we drove back to Chiang Mai where I decided to get out to get a Mc Donalds. Thai food is great but after 2 weeks some different kind of meal tastes like heaven. The next day I was ment to book some other tour or do things but being this active all the time was getting to me I guess and I decided to take a day off to sleep, eat and do some paperwork.
Up to the next episode of my 15 weeks of freedom!
