Travels with rarecat: Chiang Rai and beyond (The Golden Triangle)

After we left Sukhothai, we drove through the northern highlands on winding roads to get to Chiang Rai. Just before Chiang Rai, we stopped at the white temple Wat Rong Khun for photos. It was a stunning artistic creation although a bit of a theme park, with the vibes more of an art installation than a place of worship. With that in mind, you would not be surprised to see popular cult figures popping up throughout the temple.

It seems that the Golden Triangle is a big part of tourism in Chiang Rai although I'm sure there are a lot more to the place if we could stay a bit longer. As it was, we spent the whole of the following day at the Golden Triangle. In the morning, we headed straight for the border town of Mae Sai where we waited at a hotel for our guide to process our papers so we could cross the border to the Myanmar side. The process was a little sketchy - our guide just took our passports and our fees and came back half an hour later to take us across the border. The border officers just let us through as a group as we passed the gate.

In Tachileik, the border town on the Myanmar side, we boarded a convoy of tuk tuks, the busload of us. Some of the drivers were a little aggressive and were trying to pass each other. I had to speak to the guide as I felt this to be unsafe and the last thing we would want was an accident in Myanmar. It was a good thing they behaved themselves after this episode.

We visited the Tachileik Shwedagon Pagoda with the golden dome, a replica of the one at the Yangon Shwedagon Pagoda, the most sacred Buddhist pagoda in Myanmar. We went through some ritual that was supposed to bring good fortune during the visit to the pagoda. It was all very touristy. Our next stop was a nunnery where we enjoyed some chanting by a group of young novices. They have interesting expressions on their faces, making me wonder what they were thinking of as they performed for tourists - what kind of options they had apart from life at the nunnery. It made me sad looking at these young faces.

It was a day of adventure in transportation. After the tuk tuks, we returned to Thailand and rode on open farm trucks to a farm for a delicious lunch of grilled fish and chicken. The interesting first for us was seeing actual grains of rice on a rice plant growing in the fields.

We then took a boat cruise to a border town in Laos - the only thing there were tourist shops and the most interesting merchandise were bottles of wine with snakes in them, with guaranteed medicinal properties...;-) We got back to the Thai side where we visited the House of Opium, a museum on the history of opium. It was a long day.