A few hours in Burma

(Most of this was written in the evening after I arrived back from Burma, but I didn't get a chance to finish and post until now)

I headed over to Burma for a few hours today to look around and re-enter thailand for a new visa. I had read that travellers to burma tend to have a bit more of an intense experience of "Old Asia" (whatever that is) though obviously that ambience is not present for entirely good reasons.

The boat ride involved two immigration offices, both thai and burmese, that were out over the water. It was pretty cool to pull up to immigration on a longtail boat--though it was pretty scary to hand my passport to one of the small children who help on the longtails and watch him skitter across the crowd of boats with it and into the office for my stamp. Arriving in Burma my bags were immediately checked (for drugs I think, there was a big sign about narcotics nearby) and we were stamped both in and out, but permitted to hang around for a few hours.

We were followed by three boys who wanted to guide us and identified themselves as "tsunami boys" but they left us after they realized we were following none of their directions as to what to go. We attempted to get food, but it seemed that all that was available early in the day were various cakes to go with tea. I tried a couple funky semi-dry fruit cakes, and Joel (a guy I met) found some chicken filled bao zi (steamed bread). Communication was exceedingly difficult as we pretty much had nothing but pointing to go on.

After we had gotten out food in the little restaurant a man who identified himself as a physicist and former translator came over and talked to us. The man went on and on about the relative prosperity of North America which could well have been an instance of the subtle hinting at discontent that I've heard of from other tourists who have visited the country.

Given that it was a few hours I don't really have any overall themes to go on, just a few quick impressions. Obviously, Burma was much poorer than Thailand. There was a great deal of trash everywhere including a market that was basically a boardwalk over a small nasty dump. I saw a guy sorting his lettuce on the garbage which was kind of appalling, I insisted he sort my salad on the walkway (no, I didn't actually buy lettuce there). Most of what was being sold/handled in the area was food which was rendered entirely unnappealing by the setting.

There were also a lot of rickety boardwalks over the ocean (really it's an estuary area). Which were pretty cool and there was a smal fishing dock full of cool looking boats.

One of the final things we saw was both sad and little creepy. A shop had a stuffed tiger (which was not entirely preserved, it was decaying in a number of places) with its mouth stuffed with money. Some stuffed (again still decaying) monkeys sat on a shelf and all sorts of teeth bones and a skull or two were on a tarp spilling onto the front step. The woman wouldn't let us take pictures but I snapped a dim one before she came in and tried to sell us what I believe were tiger teeth as she pointed to the tiger we were gaping at before pulling out the bag of them.

That was about it for what we saw in Burma. I'll get to more updates soon.