Thailand - Chiang Mai & Sukhothai

Another week, another bowl of word salad in your inbox!

We're now into our last week in Mae Sot, and I'm just starting to get unpacked... We've spent the last two weekends trying to see some of the nearby towns, namely Chiang Mai (which is hardly a town as much as it is a city larger than Adelaide) and Sukhothai.

Chiang Mai

The weekend before last saw us in Chiang Mai, where we went with a couple of British medical students. We'd been out the night before seeing off John Melino (a fellow FMC student), and two of the poms (Pete and Mike) drank into the morning as if they weren't taking a bus ride through a mountain range the next day. Unfortunately for them, reality hit with a jackhammer to the brain and stomach a few hours later. I have to say I was very impressed with their fortitude to have survived the journey without using the vomit bags in front of them, though they did make full use of the toilet breaks!

Our first night in Chiang Mai consisted of Pete, Mike and myself heading out to see some muay thai kickboxing, while Kelly and Iris explored the night markets. I hadn't expected the chance to see any Thai kickboxing, so I was pretty stoked when the opportunity presented itself. I wasn't disappointed in it at all; although I didn't see any really amazing acrobatics it was a thoroughly entertaining evening punctuated by an appropriate number of cringe-worthy moments. The greatest of these was probably when they blindfolded four fighters and set them free in the ring to hit whatever moved. The referee seemed perfectly happy with this, even while they were getting king-hit repeatedly in the back of the head. Not that the referee got away unscathed himself...

Our second day there was spent at an elephant nature park, which was one of those amazing experiences I don't ever quite seem able to enjoy as much as I know I ought to. It was lucky I had Kelly next to me, delirious in a manic joy that only a girl surrounded by giant, tusked, trunked mammals could ever know. It was a beautiful day, where we fed, swam with, washed and hung out with 31 huge Asian elephants in a valley topped with mist so that the whole time it seemed like it wasn't quite real. And Kelly rested well that night, despite sleeping on a slab of uneven concrete masquerading as a mattress.

That was basically our experience of Chiang Mai, we'll be seeing Pete and Mike again in Kathmandu, as by some freak of circumstance they are making their way there for an elective at the same time that we do.

Sukhothai

A longer journey but a shorter story. After a chaotic but successful attempt to secure some seats in a packed minibus bound for Sukhothai, we were nearly smeared on the bitumen like canned sardines on toast by our maniacal driver. He seemed intent upon making up time lost on the up-slopes by flooring it on the down-slopes, irrespective of the camber of the road, the lane he happened to be in, or the presence of opposing traffic. Somehow the speedometer readings which I took at regular intervals were no consolation, since the arrow mocked me by bouncing limply between 0 and 5km/hr when we were clearly in excess of 100 and gaining rapidly on a fully laden truck.

Fortunately, the destination was a nice hotel run by a pleasantly dementing Italian and his wife. The weather was very hot due to a lack of rain and cloud cover, and we spent a proportion of our time lounging in or by the pool at the hotel during the middle of the day.

For historical understanding - Sukhothai itself was the first capital of what could be recognised as modern day Thailand (though it was known then as the Sukhothai Kingdom). Before 1238, Sukhothai was a part of the Khmer Empire, if you remember them, and it formed as the Khmer Empire crumbled under its own weight. The new empire expanded by aligning itself with nearby kingdoms... using Theravada Buddhism as the state religion in order to gain the impetus required to do this. The ruins at Old Sukhothai show the importance of this religion in the time of this kingdom, and they are in a much better state of repair than those at Angkor (even if they are tiny in comparison, and lack the same character on the whole). Anyway, we explored them by day and night and enjoyed ourselves mostly.

The next day, I ventured off to a nearby waterfall and cave with some of the others we went with, but Kelly wasn't game to come along, as we went by motorbike. Neither were overly spectacular, but it was fun to practice motorbiking on some almost deserted roads. Viewing the countryside at our own pace, and stopping for pictures when we desired, was nice.

I guess that's that. We leave in a few days, and it'll be sad to go. We've met lots of really nice people, and done a lot of really awesome stuff. But Nepal awaits... I just hope the flooding up there stops sometime soon!

Many thanks to all who have contributed to Kelly's unofficial "Stock The Karen Kids' School" fund! We did some shopping today and bought them a much needed CD player, as well as some CDs, new toys, soap, stationary, and a pump for the soccer balls that one of the guys staying here decided he wanted to donate.

I hope to have internet access in Nepal, but who knows what things will be like. I'm sure we won't have wireless broadband, that's for sure. Don't forget to look at our photos again, there are some great photos of the elephants and the ruins at Sukhothai.

Thailand - Mae Sot

Mae Sot has little in common with the place Kelly and I imagined when we thought of going to a small, rural, border town in Thailand. Its actually quite cosmopolitan in many ways, due in large part to the number of foreigners that come here to either help with the political situation, or report on it. As seems to be standard around here, we have wireless broadband access in our room (that we're paying a massive $13 a night for - and that's including the optional extra of daily laundry). Our food options are pretty diverse, with lots of restaurants nearby. Our favourites have become 'Aiya' (which serves the best Burmese food we can find), and 'Casa Mia' (which simultaneously has great Italian and Thai food, and is on the way to our respective jobs for breakfast), but we've braved (and survived) the street stalls, and some of them also make really awesome pad thai, curry, and khao soey (which is a Northern Thailand dish that is a lot like the most awesome 2-minute noodles ever, only quite a bit better). Eating around here is dirt cheap, and my daily lunch near the clinic rarely costs me more than a dollar.

But enough about the food, although I could go on happily (see our pictures!). I know the burning question is "what are we doing?". I'm obviously doing a medical elective, at the Mae Tao Clinic. Kel is teaching at a school for the refugee kids, which is a long story that she really ought to tell. Both places are a little out of town (Kel's further than mine), and we bought bikes to get around (thanks Nan!).

The Clinic is pretty interesting; it's basically a small, poorly-funded hospital. So far I've worked in the 'medical out-patient', 'surgical', and 'medical in-patient' departments, and this week I'm in 'paediatric in-patients'. Each of these departments is pretty unique. In Med OPD I mostly saw relatively mild ailments, such as stomach aches, headaches, mild pneumonias, that sort of thing. In Med IPD there are serious diarrhoea cases, lots of malaria and TB, which combined would make up about 2/3 of all Med IPD beds. In Surg I saw mostly things that needed draining (like abscesses and haematomas) and trauma cases (traffic accidents, and a surprising number of lost fingers and toes). Also, there's this really weird spate of self-induced penis problems going around the Burmese population in Mae Sot which require surgical intervention. Apparently lots of men around here don't feel that their package is up to snuff, and resort to backyard "enhancements". Most of the cases involve injecting 1-2ml of coconut oil just under the skin of the penis, this causes some serious scarring under the skin, and over the course of a few years worth of injections they end up with a massively enlarged appendage. Unfortunately, pain and poor erectile function are some of the side effects, and these guys come to Mae Tao to get it fixed. Our solution? We remove all the skin between the head and the base and give them a skin graft. I posted a couple of pictures on the web (In the 'Mae Tao Clinic' album, not in the 'Highlights' album!).

Paeds IPD has been interesting so far. A lot of tragic cases of HIV, malnutrition and meningitis. I haven't had anyone die on me so far, but another med student (from my uni) told me the horrible story of how he rocked up to the clinic to find all the staff huddled around a new baby that was comatose and severely dehydrated. Over the course of the next 1/2hr the baby deteriorated, and nobody could get any vein access, and he ended up having to do his first real life resuscitation on a 4 month old kid with a hysterical mother pleading with him incomprehensibly. The kid died, and he was pretty upset for quite a while. I'm hoping I don't have to do anything like that... There are a couple of kids in there right now that are going to die in there though, which is pretty sad.

To change the subject (which I think its about time I did), I'm going to try to explain why there are refugees in Mae Sot. Burma has a nasty government that is brutal in trying to hold together the country. Originally, Burma (aka Myanmar) was just a collection of disparate ethnic groups, and it just had a line of convenience drawn around it when the British colonised the area. After gaining its independence from Britain, Burma has undergone a change for the worse, with a military dictatorship giving way to the aptly-named SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), which itself is now called SPDC (State Peace and Development Council). Despite the changes, all of these governments have viciously guarded their power. The full story is long, even if it isn't that complicated, and you can read about it (with a slightly Karen biased flavour) here. Although its a pretty stock-standard military regime, a couple of things that make it stand out are:

1. It very publicly got completely flogged in the last elections, winning only 2% of parliamentary seats, compared to 82% won by the National League for Democracy (Aung San Suu Kyi's party, who was subsequently put under house arrest, where she remains to this day)!
2. The SPDC has essentially no ideology at all, and is probably the best example of a purely militaristic government in the world today (from what I understand). It exists solely to protect its own power, and all of its energy goes into this. They don't even put on an international front, so far as I can tell; this is their official website, and it definitely doesn't suggest any kind of ideology!

In the end, the problem with it is that they are punishing villagers in Karen state as part of their "four cuts" policy, which aims to cut food, funds, recruits and information to insurgency groups by "systematically terrorising the civilian population in ethnic minority areas". In real terms this means all of: torture/interrogation, rape, summary execution, burning farms and villages then laying landmines to prevent villagers rebuilding, and forced labour/portering for the Tatmadaw (Burmese military) - i.e. slave labour. Because of all this, there are thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in the jungle, getting malaria, and having practically no access to clean water, healthcare or an education. Below is a story from a report ("State of Terror") written by the Karen Women's Organisation. I think its a translation, and its imperfect, but you get the gist of it:

Case #955
Name: Naw Win Shwe
Age: 35
Date of Incident: 13/03/2006
Place of Incident: Nwar Lay Koh, Mone Township Kler Lwee Htoo District
Perpetrator: SPDC troops

Human Rights abuse: Torture and Murder, Forced displacement

"I was born in Aw Law Si village and stayed there until I was 25 years. Then I married in 1997 and went to Nwar Lay Koh Mone Township Kler Lwee Htoo District because of the military attacks. I had 4 children and the eldest one was 9 years old and the youngest was 5. We had to flee because we could not survive our life. We were faced with many problems like the SPDC taking away our belongings and burning down our house, our farm, our food and our grain. As we are farmers my husband worked hard to have food for our family. We were always moving. 2006 is an unlucky year for our family. We fled from our place because we
heard that the SPDC troops made a heavy operation upon our Karen State and so we hid in the forest.

On 13th March 2006, my husband was arrested by the Burmese troops while he was coming back from the hill farm. We heard the gunshot and dared not go back to look for him. The Burmese soldiers brutally killed him by taking out his eyes, cutting his ears off and cutting out his mouth from his body. We heard his screams loudly because it was not too far from us. But we dared not go to that place. If we went then the SPDC would do the same to us as they did to my husband. So we fled from our house and we went outside our village and hid in the deep forest. Then the next day we went to Teh Na Hta village then to Pa Ta Hta so that we would be far from our village. My husband was 30 years old and he was only a villager not a Karen soldier. The SPDC troops shot him as a Karen soldier and killed him brutally.

As we went out from our village we also went far from our farm, because the SPDC troops went around our field and if they saw one of us they would have killed us or forced us to labour for them. This situation was in March 13th 2006 and so from the relocation side, from our hiding place we then moved from place to place and then came to the new camp. We were wandering for a month to reach the new place because the SPDC troops shot their guns and so we tried to escape from them and it took a long time. On our way it was rainy season and it was really hard for the children to walk or climb up the mountains. We didn't have enough food and so we had to share with each other. Sometimes the children were crying because they were afraid of the SPDC troops and sometimes they were thirsty and hungry and so they cried. But the elders stopped them crying because we were very close to the SPDC and if they cried loudly there would be a danger for others, so when there was some food they gave it to the children first.

I have four children, the oldest one is nine years old and the youngest is five years old. When they were in the village they attended school. After their father was killed by the SPDC the youngest son told me that when he becomes a young man he will join the Karen soldiers and take revenge on the SPDC for his father. I tried to explain him to go to school but he just told me that he wants to be a soldier. When we started our journey my husband was at the farm and worked for the whole day while we were in a hiding place and so after he was killed, I went on the journey with my 4 children. It is very dangerous and difficult for they were too small to walk or carry things. In the jungle they got sick and had diarrhoea. There were no medicines and no clean water. In our group there were about 14 families. Because of the
situation, being left alone with small children I cried at night. I didn't want my children to see me while I was crying. Now we are in the camp and I feel that it is better than living in the village because we get many things from the camp. I hope that my children will have a chance to study in the camp."

The whole report is really long, but the intro is worth reading if you're interested in what's happening to the Karen and other minorities in Burma. You can understand why these people want to escape to Thailand though... Unfortunately, the Thais aren't recognising them, and they are pretty restricted in what they can do ( i.e. they are mostly stuck in refugee camps outside of town, and can't legally work or earn any money). The police apparently have a racket going where they take refugees to gaol and then expect a bribe (consisting of everything in their pocket) before taking them right to the border, letting them go and turning around a driving off. Then the refugees just walk back into Thailand and try to avoid being taken to gaol again! So basically, the Thai authorities are just trying to make as much money off the refugees as they can. I suppose its better than letting them die in Burma!

You might be wondering how the Burmese government funds its operations. Burma is actually very rich in natural resources, at should be a well-off country. The government sells gems, drugs (unofficially) and natural gas to whoever is willing to buy it. Of these three, the natural gas the most feasible source of funds for the junta, and they just recently finalised a deal with China to build a gas pipeline between the two countries and to exclusively supply China with there natural gas. Fucking China! Where practically the entire world has sanctions against the Burmese, China is capitalising. And they have UN veto power so there's not much the UN can do...

Anyway, Kel and I are going to Chiang Mai on Saturday (i.e. tomorrow), to go swimming with elephants! It should be good! We've met a couple of poms that we're going with (and they're also going to be in Kathmandu when we're there so we're going to try to catch up with them then too!). Tonight is the both the birthday of a girl that's staying at Ban Thai, and the last night that John (another Flinders Med. Student) and a couple of others are in town, so the Ban Thai crew are partying hard tonight!

I finally, yesterday, got my new credit card. Thanks mum for sorting that out for me, I know it was a royal pain! We're going shopping for stuff for the kids at Kel's school today.

Thailand - Bangkok (Voglee Saga)

We'd just got to the hotel and dropped off our bags and decided that we'd spend the rest of the afternoon in Chinatown (where we were staying) looking at the Golden Buddha and nearby sites. We didn't have a very good map, and while we were trying to figure out where we were a man came up and asked us if we needed any help. He was obviously trying to get us into one of the tuk-tuks nearby, but we figured he'd be useful to point us on our way. He pointed out where we were and where we needed to go, but said that there were a few other nice places to go, and also suggested "a very good, cheap tailor" that was just out of Chinatown which he called "International Export Tailors". We gave him our map, and he plotted a couple of spots, including a nearby temple that was "nicer than any others around here". He convinced us to hop in a tuk-tuk by saying that we could have the tuk-tuk for 30 baht/hr (about $1), and we figured that was pretty cheap, and since we kept getting lost and didn't have much time it was a pretty good idea to have a tuk-tuk guide!

First we went to the Golden Buddha, which was really kind of tacky. It was an impressive hunk of solid gold (5 tons), but they haven't housed it in a temple yet so it was just sitting in a really inappropriate building. Anyway, that's not the point. After that we thought we may as well go just around the corner and see this other temple the nice tuk-tuk organiser guy suggested. Didn't think much of it, since the temple was already marked on our tourist map so we figured it was just another cool Thai temple. When we got there, it was a reasonably nice temple - nothing spectacular, but then neither was the Golden Buddha so we thought these Thais just over-estimated the coolness of their Buddhist monuments... While we were there (and we were the only ones there) a really nice man came in and prayed and then showed us how to pray properly. Then he asked us a bit about what we were doing in town and where we were from (stock standard questions that we've answered 8 thousand times since leaving home). He also said we should visit a bunch of places and marked them on our map. When he saw that someone had marked the "International Export Tailors" he said "who told you to go there", and we replied that it was our tuk-tuk driver (a slight untruth to save a full explanation). He told us he was very impressed with how honest our tuk-tuk driver was because most tailors give tuk-tuk drivers big commissions for taking tourists to their stores, but these guys didn't have any commissions and were the best tailors nearby. He said their trading name was "Voglee Tailors". They made some of the suits sold by Armani and Hugo Boss and others, and that if we wanted suits they were the best value place to go.

Awesome (we thought), two nice people had independently said this was a good tailor. My family had suggested that Thailand would be the best place to get a suit, I needed a suit for graduation and beyond, and since we were only in town for 3 days we should probably go somewhere that day to make sure we had time for a couple of re-fittings.

We asked our tuk-tuk driver to take us there. When we got there it was a normal, large tailor, with the name "Voglee Export Tailors". We were ushered into a private room and were shown a few brochures outlining some of the "suit styles" available. There was an Armani catalogue there and the man spontaneously explained that they were not able to put any other brand name on the suit other than their own (due to licensing restrictions, was the unstated reason), but reaffirmed that they did in fact supply a number of European companies including the ones the guy at the temple mentioned. We started talking price, in US dollars initially, but then he started jumping back and forth from baht to dollar and using the calculator to figure it all out. I was unsure of the exchange rate (and asked to confirm that it was 40 baht to the dollar), but he was confident that was right and judging by the other customers in the store he clearly dealt with white people all the time. He said they only dealt with wool/cashmere blends and all their suits were lined with Thai silk. The rolls of material did all say "cashmere + wool" on them and it felt pretty soft (I still don't know if it really is cashmere/wool, I don't know enough about cashmere!).

In the end, we decided to get 2 suits (one a mid-grey, one nearly black with pinstripes), both with a 2nd pair of pants (since I'd been complaining all year about only having 2 pairs of pants I could wear to uni), 3 fitted shirts, and 2 blouses (for Kelly, not me). The total: $US765. At 86USc to the $AU1, that would be about $870. In a pinch, I could afford that, and it was pretty good for 2 Armani-quality suits with all the trimmings. I paid upfront, like a good little tourist, 30,800 baht on my card. I thought I'd decide about home delivery later (an option they were pushing), after I'd got the suits.

When I got back to the hotel, I thought I'd look up Voglee's on the internet and see what people thought of their suits. Up came 20 stories of the Voglee scam: the nice guy on the side of the road suggesting some good tourist places (including a temple), the guy in the temple doing the same. Elsewhere, I found out that Voglee does in fact offer a large commission to tuk-tuk or taxi drivers who takes a tourist to their store (and that our tip to our nice, cheap tuk-tuk driver must have been accepted with an inner giggle on his part). Most people said they'd paid for suits for home delivery and never saw them. Others said they got suits that didn't fit at all right. Some couldn't believe how much they'd paid compared with other places.

I decided to check my bank account after that, and found that $1076 was pending removal by Visa and panicked that they may have done more than simply over-charge me (like steal my identity or something); I also thought it might not go through if I cancelled it straight away and told BankSA I'd lost the card.

In the end, we spend a large part of our time in Bangkok sitting in Voglee's, and most of the rest stressing out about never getting any products out of them. I tried to negotiate a refund of the amount they overcharged me, but they said it was my fault for not knowing the exchange rate, since they dealt exclusively in baht and could not be expected to know the exchange rate (an infuriating lie). After working hard to keep my cool (and not cause anyone to lose face, which I hear is the best way to get what you want around here) for an hour, I was offered free delivery to Adelaide... "No thankyou, I thought I'd use the pants and shirts during my travels" was my rather curt reply. After another hour, they'd offered me a partial refund (of about $50), which they said would take at least 2 weeks to get to me. Finally, they offered me a 3rd suit, which I really didn't need. It was this final offer that I accepted, because I was definitely going to make sure they gave me something, and the other options required too much of a waiting period before I saw results (and to be honest I didn't trust them at all!)...

I needed three fittings, and I'm still not entirely happy, particularly with my shirts (they just could not get my neck size right!). The suits don't look half-bad, and if they really are wool/cashmere with Thai silk, I definitely still paid less than I would have in Australia. Unfortunately, I had to cart them all the way to Mae Sot, and now I'll have to decide what to do with them here.