Chiang Rai tour part two.  See the previous blog for what we did in the morning.  The tea plantation, White Wat and Black House would have been a wonderful tour in itself, but wait….there’s more.  After the Black House we went to a Long Neck village.  The Long Necks are the tribe where the women put rings of metal on their necks.  They don’t know why this tradition started.  Two theories are to keep the women safe from tigers or to keep them safe from other villages men.  Neither make much sense to me.  In pictures it looks like their necks are very long, but they are not actually longer.  Their shoulders are lower from the weight of the metal.  They start at age 5 and rewrap the metal as they grow until 25 or 35 when they stop growing and then they wear those rings the rest of their life.  They are from Myanmar, Karen Tribes.  They are refugees allowed to stay in Thailand, but don’t have citizenship, or visas.  There was nothing about the men.  The village was mostly booths selling stuff and some houses behind them.  It was all show for tourists and I didn’t like it.  The only thing I could think of was, “well these houses make mine look awesome”.  Next to them was a village of Akah people.  They are a tribe from China.  Most of them have work permits and are in the country legally.  Their village is next door mainly to take advantage of the tourists going to see the Karen Tribe.

Next up was the Monkey Cave and Temple.  There’s a cave on the mountain and in typical Buddhist fashion, they built steep steps up to it and put a temple there.  And in typical Rraine fashion, I climbed all the steps wondering if today is day I get heat stroke.  It was not.  But there was a cave and they built a temple in it.  At the base of the mountain is a much bigger temple and a lot of monkeys.  Thus, Monkey Cave Temple.  There were no monkeys in the cave.  Monkeys are cool for about 5 minutes and then I want to move on.  Our guide had a toy wooden snake that if you hold it by the tail, it moves like a snake.  The monkeys hate it.  So, monkeys are as scared of snakes as I am.

We then went to Mai Sai which is the Thai border town with Myanmar.  We had to drive up a very steep hill that was lined with a market.  Our guide told us it was the border market and if we wanted anything we just needed to roll down the window and buy it.  I was impressed that our van made it up the steep road.  At the top was an overlook.  It looked like one town below, but he pointed out the river and told us the river is the border so we were looking at both Thailand and Myanmar at the same time.  Apparently China is not too far north of that.  There is a half hour time difference between Thailand and Myanmar.  How does that happen?  And of course, there was a temple here too.  We wandered around that a little.  There was a large statue of a scorpion.  Wau means Scorpion.  The scorpion was guarding all the gold.  I’m sure the story is better than that, but that’s all I remember so you can get the rest by either looking it up or making it up.  Up to you.

The next stop was the Golden Triangle.  Yes, this tour is still going and this isn’t the last stop.  I told you we saw ALL the things.  The Golden Triangle is the area that use produce large amounts of opium.  It was an area of 367,00 square miles.  Most of the world’s heroin came from this area until the early 21^st century.  It covers three countries (Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos) and use to be hidden.  There are two rivers which made it easy to trade and transport.  Opium use to be the same price as gold, which is part of how the area got its name.  Myanmar is still producing opium, but is second to Argentina in volume now.  Thailand has made the confluence of the two rivers a tourist attraction.

And what tour would be complete without a stop at the opium museum?  It told all about the history of the area and the opium business and how it’s harvested.  It also had an impressive display of harvesting tools, measurement weights, scales, pipes and pictures of people smoking opium.  I learned that morphine and heroin are both derivatives of opium.  I had no idea.  Upstairs was a section dedicated to the history of smoking tobacco, pictures of the long neck tribe, and information on the giant catfish.  I see the leap from opium to tobacco, but drugs to giant catfish?  Giant catfish is a real thing and not a hallucination from the opium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekong_giant_catfish

And last, but not least, we went to Chiang Saen.  This town in Thailand has a lot of ruins of old temples.  I’m sure there was more significance and history I could tell you about, but I was done and no information the guide gave us stuck with me.  I do remember that one temple we saw was being rebuilt since it was damaged in the 2014 earthquake.

That evening I went to dinner with girls I just met yesterday.  There was a Saturday night market.  I walked around that for a while after dinner.  I did a foot massage and it was the most useless foot massage ever.  So, two night, two bad massages – what’s up Chiang Rai?  Overall, it was great day being tourist!

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore