With some huge percentage of Thailand's income coming from tourism, they turn quite the blind eye to the big business of “VISA RUNS”, in which tourists who are on the verge of overstaying their 30 day holiday visa get transported to the border of their choice to get their passports re-stamped with a fresh 30 day visa.
My visa was due to expire on the 22nd of August, but with lots of homework and the memorising of grammar and phonetic forms and structures required for the final test on the 25th I really didn't want to have to do the visa run that far into the course. My friend Paul and I decided to do our visa runs yesterday, and we decided on the Myanmar border crossing because we had heard it involved crossing a big river...
Technorati Tags: photography, myanmar, thailand, travel, travelphotography
We met the mini-van at a local petrol station here in Phuket at 6.40 am, and joined a (highly verbose) middle-aged Italian couple and a German man for the 12 hour round trip. The actual travel time was only about 4 hours each way, but the merry dance they led us on at the border took a couple of hours and involved lots of getting in and out of buses, the Thai Immigration office, a boat and a big lunch hall where we met up with about another 20 or so westerners who were all doing the same thing. It was quite the adventure and the actual river crossing was really interesting - it offered a great window into a whole other culture - in which the river was the way of life. It was a massive river, more like a coastal delta system than a river. Big and muddy and with just a little pollution floating around the surface. Lots of eagles. Lots and lots of boats.
Traveling there was really cool too, we passed lots of great scenes - elephants working to clear a small block, a boat washed up on the other side of the highway in the tsunami, roadside stalls in the middle of nowhere, massive waterfalls coming down mountains, water buffalo's, dogs, cats, cows, thatched huts, slums, resorts, houses on stilts over rivers, creeks and swamps... very very cool.
I took a truckload of pic's but haven't really started editing them yet - he's a few just to get an idea and because my brother is waiting to see them.... (Happy Birthday bro)
Ciao for now