Adventures in South East Asia

13 ~ Politics

Khun Yuam to Mae Hong Son, Thailand

The sleep in the quiet guesthouse left me refreshed for another day. I grabbed a quick breakfast and ventured down the path leading down toward the private cabins. I wished my bus didn't leave in twenty minutes. The downward slope into the forest screamed 'explore me', and of course I did for however brief a time. The presence of flora and a few birds reminded me of the summers I spent camping in the Rocky Mountains. A fence cut my journey short, so I headed back up. I caught the tail end of a mystery parade as I secured my belongings to my back and took off to the station.

Once on the bus, I appreciated the drive in daylight hours. Green trees covered the slopes we rounded and a steep descent led to valleys below, rolling on for miles without much else in terms of civilization. The air from the open windows rushed by to alleviate some of dry season's heat.

When I arrived in Mae Hong Son, I realized that I should have known better last night. This looked like a bus station, not a stop, with a front desk to purchase tickets and different, numbered arrival points. I checked the time of the bus heading out two days from now and got my tuktuk driver to agree to shuttle me back at that time.

"Where you go, hotel?" the driver asked.

"No, cheaper."

"Oh okay, guesthouse. Very cheap. By the lake."

I wasn't aware there was a lake. All the better!

The driver, who was making enough money to soup up his ride with a loud, flashy engine, took me to a nearby guesthouse. The owner stumbled out of a room after the driver knocked and yelled that he had a customer for him. I began to wonder what type of place we were at if at eleven thirty a.m. the manager wasn't around. The owner, a fellow foreigner, stumbled out of a room in a housecoat. A Thai woman was still lying in the bed, visible from the doorway. I swallowed my urge to shake my head.

The guesthouse owner checked me in and had as minimal a conversation as possible with the enthusiastic driver who clearly thought more highly of this foreign man than the foreigner thought of him. The driver kept raving about how great his new engine while the British man looked like he'd rather be at the bottom of that supposed lake.

He handed me a key and I checked into my little lake-view room, complete with a creepy fur-like comforter sporting cigarette burn marks and an attaché bathroom that bordered on clean. Not too bad for ten dollars, if you focused on the view and lakefront balcony just outside.

I walked over to the temple built by the Shan people who used to live in this area as well as on the other side of the border in Myanmar. The temple displayed a historic collection of dolls along with other stories. It didn't take too long to walk around, so I kept venturing back to the quick 'lake' perimeter walk. The lake, small enough to be considered a pond, may have been a man made feature, but it was still nice to stand out on a gazebo to take pictures with the mountains and temples in the background.

I met a man also taking photos from Krabi, a Southern Thai island community with fantastic limestone scenery I highly recommend. He was journeying on to a nearby meditation camp, which housed Thais and foreigners. He encouraged me to check it out, and I on my next trip it could be a possibility. So many people I had met were partaking. I felt as if I was missing out even though I hadn't spent too much time contemplating the act, besides the first three weeks in Thailand when I was enamoured with Buddhism.

The highlight of my day, after an unfriendly lunch and semi-successful trek-booking expedition, was meeting a fellow Canadian from Vancouver. Greg had come to Thailand to retire and was just relaxing in Mae Hong Son for a brief stint before taking off again on those windy roads on his motorbike. He had been here about six years but had also travelled around Asia earlier in his life.

"In the 1980s, you could only get a one week visa to Burma, so that's what I did. Getting around was tricky. The buses and trains didn't always run and the tracks weren't always complete or functioning. I was waiting at a stop, and the train was hours late. The officials said we couldn't take it because the government was using it and not allowing passengers. It stopped at the station and the officials asked me to get on. The general Ne Win, you know who he is?" Greg asked.

"Yeah, he was a communist dictator." I answered, engrossed in his story. Good thing I was so adamant on brushing up on my Burmese history.

"He was on the train with his security personnel and wanted to meet a foreigner, so he invited me aboard. We sat and talked until I got to my destination. I knew who we was and what he had done. Even with that knowledge, he didn't seem like too bad a guy in terms of his personality. Clearly, he has not served his country or treated his people very well, but he seemed okay. I was happy to get off that train unharmed. It was quite the ride."

My eyes went wide. People had such crazy experiences and I was privileged just to sit here and listen to his previous adventures. Granted, Greg could have been making the whole thing up, but that would have been a strange action. I only told my Myanmar travel stories afterward and he had no way of knowing I even knew who Ne Win was. After all, I wasn't even born at the time he ruled Burma; although, I was familiar with his rise to power.

A few decades before Ne Win's rule, a group of young men, the thirty comrades, sought training to fight for independence from the British. Among them were Aung San and Ne Win. The Japanese trained them during the Second World War. Aung San went on to serve as prime minister and set the events in motion for Burma's independence and path to communism until his assassination.

Another man, U Nu, replaced him and was overthrown for ineffective leadership in a coup by the military dictator, Ne Win, who was also set on communism and fierce nationalism. He cut many international ties in the process and significantly lowered the quality of life in the country for its citizens. Not without his quirks, he also changed the side of the road people drove on, reprinted all the money in denominations divisible by nine, and made other questionable decisions based on the advice of astrologers.

As I continued to chat with the Vancouverite, we exchanged a bit of political banter based on our own country, Canada, and my distaste for our current prime minister came out a touch too strongly. I tended to avoid too many political discussions as I grew up with a few very opinionated uncles. The rest of us would fill our mouths with Christmas dinner instead of sharp, long-winded replies. I should have stuck to my previous logic, but at least my 'might be better off as Americans' comment set off an interesting discussion.

Neither of us had had the advantage of living in Canada in the past year (in his case, many years), but he kept up with the news more than I did. I guiltily admit that I would occasionally read articles that popped up on my Facebook newsfeed. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to do otherwise as I was both a full time teacher and full time student (the joy of condensed night classes after a full day at work with my rascals).  

One political issue that had caught my eye as an environmentally conscious individual was the Keystone pipeline, which would transport oil from Canada down into the rest of North America. In early 2013, Obama had shot down the idea of running this through the United States and insisted on a real look into alternative sources. While this was probably political talk, at least he had the guts to stand for something other than money. This was the basis for the 'rather be American' comment.

Greg countered with the perks of socialism like the healthcare that every citizen could access and strong social welfare programs. Knowing I was a teacher, he also brought up the fact that our public schools weren't suffering and that a teacher could actually earn a living in that system as well as acquire the resources to educate the children in question.

Globally, he had a point that throughout the years we'd set up a desirable place for most citizens, but the strong money over environment nature of our prime minister's motives still bothered me. However, the way our country supported most of our people, left me thankful I had been raised in a supportive environment. I could have grown up in a dictatorship with few rights, but for some arbitrary reason only the universe understood, I was born a Canadian whose rights weren't persecuted and whose middle class status along with some hard work left her with the means to explore the world in this way and contemplate such issues.  

With this realization, I let the soft glow of the lakeside lamps and white-lit temple and their reflections off the glassy lake fill me with their beauty. Music drifted over from a nearby market as the small city finally came to life.  I curled my toes under my feet on the wooden chair and a smile crossed my face.