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I arrived in Mae Sai early one afternoon to find a town more full of beggars than any I had seen in Thailand, all plying their craft among startling arrays of lapis and jade souvenirs. After dawdling for fifteen minutes and seeing I had paid twice as much in Chiang Mai for a few trinkets as I might have here, I consulted my guidebook and set out to secure lodging for the night.
A medium-sized road took me west past a guest home with half of its units on tall stilts, the margin of the swollen Sai eddying calmly beneath them as the heart of the river rushed past. All the elevated rooms were taken, so I tramped through the water to check out a couple of others, which were cheap, simple, and imminently at risk of flooding or theft. Continuing upriver, the road diminished to a narrow gravel lane, rolling over some gentle hills and leading to a wide, flat bank on which were a number of bungalows. I took one whose front door was fifty feet from the river and considered that I could probably hit Myanmar with a baseball from my new digs.
In fact, it was easy enough to cross over. One paid five dollars to pass the bridge, and then, by all accounts, one could help oneself to an even graver poverty and all the desperation so many border towns have to offer. It seemed the only reason people went was to tick Myanmar off the list. That didn't interest me. I had already seen the only thing I knew of Mae Sai — its proximity to Myanmar — and it occurred to me that I had no plan at all for my remaining time here.
I watched the brown river on my left as I strolled back toward town in the dimming afternoon. At the crest of one of the low hills, something on the road caught my eye, and I turned with a start. Perhaps two strides in front of me was a small, slender snake, bright green with touches of yellow and crimson on its head. It was fully straight across the gravel, serene, its fangs clamped into the hind end of a large frog, who took its impending death stoically. I watched for a few seconds, unable to move. Then the snake withdrew its fangs and slithered inland, up a short slope, and into a hole. The frog lingered several beats before proceeding with great effort into the grass on the river side. I returned to the bungalow to get my flashlight.
Before I got to town, I stopped at the restaurant of the Northern Guest House, the place I'd elected not to stay. In the corner was a well-fed dog missing the back half of its fur, bare skin covered in sores. There were three other customers that night, all sharing one table — a Frenchman, a forlorn young New Zealander, and a Burmese refugee named Lyat who had earlier tried to persuade me to visit Myanmar with him as guide. The Frenchman, I would later learn, fancied himself a writer and was penning a travelogue in a day planner, with clippings and receipts pasted amid his ungainly scrawl. Though he would prove eager to talk about this in time, for now he sat aloof. I acknowledged the New Zealander and offered to buy Liyat dinner in exchange for some of the many stories he had promised if I were to take him with me across the Sai. He declined and engaged the Frenchman.
The New Zealander, it developed, had been a computer specialist in Australia, recently made redundant and milling about Thailand without agenda. He mentioned casually that he had been bitten by a bat in Khao Yai National Park but had not visited the hospital for fear of the cost. He also told me how he had been taken with an Akha tribeswoman who was strung out on amphetamines, didn't sleep for the week they stayed together in Chiang Mai, and once spent a whole night plucking hairs from her armpits. When she started keeping scissors under her pillow, the New Zealander kicked her out, giving her 200 baht from his meager supply.
Meanwhile, Lyat was addressing the nodding Frenchman in increasingly angry tones. Noting that he had caught my attention and clearly enjoying having an audience, he turned to me and launched into a stream of stories, most about how Myanmar planned and executed all of the border skirmishes with the aid of the Chinese, despite Thailand's best efforts at peace. He gave detailed accounts of the ways the Burmese government kept its people immobile and undereducated and told of his own separation from his wife and kids and the struggles he had gone through since.
The most unusual of his tales, however, was about a serial rapist known as the Black Hand. The Hand would write to his next victim, informing her of the date and time she was to be raped. Doors opened automatically when the Hand knocked, and he would employ black magic to disable all of a woman's would-be protectors before raping her in plain view. The citizens of Lyat's village distributed bells they could use to alert others to the Hand's arrival, in hopes of capturing him. In their first attempt, they chased the Hand into a tree, but he quickly disappeared. The second time, they again forced him into a tree and were able to knock him out with stones before he could vanish. Soon after he was imprisoned, though, the Burmese Army demanded his release. The Black Hand was one of their officers. Lyat insisted that this was entirely factual. And in the calm after this anecdotal crescendo, he permitted me to buy him dinner at last.
Mae Sai proper was something of a letdown after such company, and I soon returned to my bungalow. As I lay down, the rain commenced, hammering my plastic-covered roof, and it continued through a night of disturbed sleep. I woke early because of the ants crawling on my arms and face. They were everywhere, covering the floor and all of my things. I managed a shower then spent the hour or so surrounding daybreak brushing ants away and attempting to pack, the rain outside now gentle. The river was perhaps a dozen feet from my door when I stepped out, my last clear image of this bizarre estate before the day took me back to Chiang Mai. |
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