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.