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February 17, 2005
Burma border crossing
Last Friday we visited Burma. We needed to go for our monthly ‘Visa Run’ so we went down to a town called Mae Sot on the Thai/Burma border. The population’s officially forty thousand, but unofficially a lot more. Renewing your visa is a bit of an ordeal - first you have to leave Thailand, cross no-mans land in the form of “The Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge”, then you reach the Burma border. Once you have handed over your passport they check your name in their books. Like borders in Africa, everything’s manual, no computers in sight and to be honest, it’s a lot easier. They have books for each country it seems with lists of names in them. They’re supposedly looking for any threat to Burma i.e. journalists, human rights workers, people working with refugees that kind of thing - basically anyone who doesn’t agree with the regime, anyone who’s a free thinker. ‘Fortunately’ in this case we don’t’ qualify so we just handed over our $20 and were offered the chance to look around Myawadi (the Burmese side of the bridge). We declined.
That was us done, another month in Thailand. Crossing the bridge, looking over the side you can spot people casually strolling across the river. One guy had what looked like an antique cabinet strapped to his back which seemed a bit odd. However, after looking round the stalls in Mae Sot you find they are filled with the most amazing artifacts. Abby spotted a field telephone from 1941 that we would have loved to have brought back but the thing was so heavy, we could never have got it home.
Posted by jon jack at 4:02 PM | Comments (1)
February 9, 2005
Muay Thai (Thai Boxing)
Friday night and it was off to the Thai boxing taking place in a nearby village. Shoichi, one of our friends here, trains at the local Thai boxing school. There were people everywhere when we arrived, it was more of a festival than purely boxing; there were food stalls, singing and, bizarrely ‘Techo Bingo’ - bingo which seemed to be accompanied with very loud techno music, very strange.
“No one trained in any other martial art has been able to defeat a ranking Thai nak mauy (fighter trained in muay thai) and many martial art aficionados consider the Thai style the ultimate in hand-to-hand fighting. On one famous occasion, Hong Kong’s top five kung fu masters were all dispatched by knockout in less than 6 ½ minutes.” (Lonely Planet, Chang Mai and Northern Thailand)
The ring was pretty crazy - it was constructed out of oil drums and sheets of wood with household light bulbs suspended above. So every time fighters were on the ropes the whole thing looked like it was going to collapse. The first couple of fights we watched were pretty tame; the first one was a couple of young kids. The second one started better with ram muay (boxing dance) a series of gestures and movements performed in rhythm to the ringside musical accompaniment of Thai oboe (pii), and percussion.
As the night progressed the fighters level increased, with knockouts the order of the night. Shoichi keeps asking if I would like to train, but the full contact sparring kind of puts me off. I’d end up with a broken nose on my first day.
Related links
Muay Thai News
World Muay Thai Council
Fairtex site - lots of good info
Thai boxing update
Posted by jon jack at 11:46 AM | Comments (3)
February 2, 2005
A Karen wedding
“70mph. No, maybe 80” said the guy next to me when I asked him how fast we were going. We were sitting in the back of a pickup hurtling past banana trees, rice fields and blurred little villages. Just to make us feel more at ease we were told “we had a crash with this driver a month ago, and almost died.” Fantastic. We’re never sure how much of what we’re told is true – sometimes we’ll look horrified at something and then people will be pointing and laughing at us and finding it hysterical that we fell for it. Other times we’ll look disbelieving (“I was shot and the bullet just went right through”) and then realize that it’s been said in all seriousness.
It took about thirty minutes huddled in the back until we reached our destination. Abby and I had been invited to the wedding for the daughter of a prominent member of the Karen community.
The bride and best man were dressed exactly the same, and the bride and maid of honour were identical also. Kind of weird; we thought it was a double wedding of some sort. I’ve never seen such a nervous couple of people, they looked terrified. Happiest day of your life and all that. It was a cool ceremony with a jovial priest, and all their friends and family singing and passing guitars round. It ended with a meal of rice and curried dishes with the odd chicken foot or two. Karen weddings only last the morning; I think they maybe have a party at the parents of the bride that evening.
The journey back was worse, instead of six in the back of the pick up there were nine of us being flung around like sacks of tatties. Then it was back to work for Abby and I. Our typical day just now is: get up, have breakfast, lounge around for a few hours, email, do some lesson plans, marking, that kind of thing. Then it’s teaching from one till three. Then we come home and chill out during the hottest part of the day, read, sleep. Then before you know it it’s dinner time. We go out almost every night for food – it makes sense - £1.50 gets you a good meal for two and it’s much nicer than things that we try to make ourselves. We’ve noticed a distinct absence of the Thai fishcakes so prevalent at home – ‘a taste of Thailand’ should really mean a plate of boiled rice. Friends come over or we visit friends, watch a film maybe. It’s a nice way of life for people working here.
Posted by jon jack at 10:19 AM | Comments (3)