A week ago my girlfriend, Mac, arrived in Chiang Mai.
As to missing last week’s post, now that you know about Mac’s arrival I’ll leave you to fill in whatever excuse you feel comfortable with here:_____________________________________________________.
Moving on.
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Mac is the reason I know about the trouble in Burma as well as the plight of the Karen and other ethnicities. In the summer of 2006 she lived in the border town of Mae Sot, a place known as much for it’s black market and the characters it attracts as it is for it’s ethnic and religious diversity. There she stayed in a house with a fluctuating number of illegal Karen refugees. All of the guys were her students, and many of them became her friends. As Mac worked to help improve her housemates’ English, they worked on the other side of the border to document human rights abuses inside.
Mac flew into Chiang Mai on the 26th. After a couple of days of jet lag recovery and introducing her to my friends and co-workers, we made out for Mae Sot. Mac was in touch with a couple of her old students, and I had never been to the seediest of the border towns.
When we discussed the best way to travel we had joked about making the trip on my little Honda Dream. The joke quickly became an actual option and, after considering our economic restraints (larger bikes, cars, and trucks are much more expensive to rent per month) and safety concerns (bus drivers in Thailand are notorious amphetamine abusers), the logical choice.
Most of my co-workers looked at us as if we were crazy, which we expected. When we took the bike out for a test run (our bags attached with bungee cords) though, we found that most Thai people looked at us the same way. This was worrisome, as we had both assumed that it would only be white people thinking we’d lost it. On top of that Mac was also concerned about a clicking sound coming from the Dream’s back wheel, but I was sure it was nothing.
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On Monday, despite unseasonal “mango” rains, we took to the highways. The bike rode low, with my pack strapped to the front and Mac’s strapped between my knees. After we had been driving for only 5 kilometers the rain intensified, and we pulled over to wrap ourselves, our gear, and the Dream in trash bags. At a slow and steady pace of 40 kilometers an hour we headed south, our thin plastic covers noisily flapping in the wind.
Maybe it was when we pulled over the first time to stretch our soaking legs, or maybe it was when we followed signs and our curiosity to a roadside elephant hospital, but somewhere outside of Lampang we noticed that the small clicking noise was no longer small or clicking. It was better described as a loud and clanking.
We decided that we would go no further than Lampang. The rain wasn’t giving up and the day’s light didn’t look like it would last long. Neither, we feared, would the Dream. At a gas station I checked the oil hoping for an easy fix. No dice. The head attendant knew foreigners in trouble when he saw them pointed us in the direction of a garage.
The shop was small, as was the mechanic who owned it. As he stared at us it quickly became evident that English wasn’t an option. I pointed at the Dream’s back tire and did my best impression of the horrible noise. The man instantly swooped on the bike.
Despite his small stature the mechanic made the bike seem like it didn’t weigh a thing. With our bags still strapped to the Dream he rolled it onto a lift and quickly had the back tire at eye level. After rotating the tire a few times, which seemed more a show for us than a necessity for him, he deftly freed the tire from the body of the machine. But there the finesse ended. Tire in hand the man walked out into the rain and started slamming it against the pavement of the road. Metal scraps and ball bearings fell into the street.
Back inside the mechanic used a ball-peen hammer and a long metal screw to knock out the rest of the metal residue. Wincing at his effective but rough methods I went to the restroom. When I returned the man had put the tire back on the bike and was changing our oil. Judging that we were on a trip and probably thinking we were somewhat insane he seemed to be making sure everything else was in tip top shape, as our minds obviously weren’t. I was so touched by his concern that I decided not to make a big deal of the fact that while I was in the bathroom Mac had witnessed him stuffing rolled up pieces of paper in with the new ball bearing.
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The next day we had better luck. After a breakfast of coconut yogurt and red peanuts we headed toward Mae Sot. The ride was beautiful, and with the rain gone and the roads dry we made much better time.
Since reaching the border town we have met with many of Mac’s old students, gone inside with friends of mine to celebrate a Karen holiday, walked across (another) “Friendship Bridge” into Burma to renew our visas, and heard the stories of a charming ex-special forces Vietnam vet who now volunteers as a jungle dentist. Tomorrow we will meet Dr. Cynthia, an illegal Karen immigrant who has been offering free health care at her clinic on the Thai side of the border since 1989. Dr. Cynthia is an extremely busy woman, but the magazine that Mac works for is interested in doing a piece on her and her good work and she has agreed to sit down with Mac for a quick interview. After the meeting we will make our way out of town and head further south. Mae Sot has lived up to it’s reputation as a border town in more than a physical sense. And the Dream, in fine form, is just getting started.