The Golden Triangle

Abandoned Bunkers, Drunk Policemen, and the World's Worst SEZ

After some locally-grown coffee, we rode up the ridge that was visible from Doi Tung Villa. The road was unbelievably steep, but our trusty Hondas got us up to the former military outpost at Chiang Moob in one piece. This was the Burmese border once again, and the Thai military used to be highly active in the area in an effort to intercept opium trafficking. The outpost we were at is now a beautiful viewpoint over a Burmese mountain range, in stark contrast with the sandbags, trenches, and bunkers that are still there. Strangely enough, there was a small café at the top run by active-duty soldiers who make very good green tea lattes.

We rode along the ridge, passing several military checkpoints that mostly waved us through with a cursory look. Our passports only got checked once, after riding a section that visibly crossed the border on Google Maps several times. We also passed one Burmese base, with a fence so close I could touch it while riding. The base showed no signs of activity – perhaps the soldiers were too busy murdering civilians that day. Further along the road, the light traffic was replaced with dozens of road bikers and joggers, who were enjoying the mountain air and steep curves.

The road let us out on Highway 1, which runs from Bangkok to Mae Sai, Thailand's northernmost town. The road ends in a large archway leading across the border to Myanmar, and there was lots of activity despite the crossing being firmly closed. I always find border towns fascinating, and the dynamics here were very clear – the people who would normally come through the gate seemed to generally be Chinese tourists and Burmese workers, based on the Chinese signs on hotels and restaurants, and ads in Burmese for Thai mobile operators and banks. There was a street market in full swing, with women vendors wearing the same face paint that we had seen in the tribal villages that morning. Just to the side of the gate was a smaller arch bearing the title “the northern most in Thailand,” and behind it some barbed wire, the muddy Ruak River, and the Burmese town of Tachileik.

Mekong Madness

By now, the light was starting to turn golden, and we rode through beautiful rice paddies until we hit the Mekong River at the town of Chiang Saen. We checked into the Pak-Ping-Rim-Khong B&B (dashes original), where nobody spoke a word of English but we managed to secure a room. It was a Saturday night, but we didn’t have high hopes for nightlife in a small border town. Boy, were those some famous last words. We walked down the river bank, gazing at the much-darker Laotian bank several hundred meters away. The waterfront was lined with food carts that set up mats with small tables and occasionally plastic stools, where couples and families were having dinner in the warm evening air.

We got some beers at a liquor store, where the attendant asked for a selfie but refused to send it to me. Outside the store, a DJ was playing Thai music from YouTube and asked us to sing a song. A few sips of beer were enough for a bad rendition of Africa, which one man in particular seemed to enjoy. We joined him for a while, and he introduced himself as Jo (real name: Wuthi), a 63-year-old music professor at a Bangkok university. The DJ changed the music to Thai covers of American pop music in our honor, and Jo cracked himself up when he thought my name was Alien after failing to pronounce the R. The contrast between this jovial middle-aged man and the indifferent teenagers drinking beer on the rocks (?!) behind him was hilarious.

The beers here came in 20-oz bottles, and after two of them it was time for some food. The only open restaurant somehow only sold papaya salad, so we sat down at one of the waterfront restaurants and tried to make sense of the menu. This cart served up such treats as "The Fish from Mae Khong River cooks whore dust”, "Hawk horse stomach frame egg”, "Orchestia agilis”. We somehow ended up with water buffalo curry and fried rice, so we were quite happy.

Ready to call it a night, we were maybe 50 feet from our hotel when we passed a bar and got called off the street. We were invited to join a group of men with one woman, all in their thirties. At the head of the table was a very drunk military officer who introduced himself as “A” and ordered us more beer. The woman spoke decent English, and took on the role of simultaneous translator after giving my beer a big thumbs-up. “A” made sure to ask us every few minutes whether we were happy in Thailand, which was about the same frequency with which the orbiting waitress would pour him another whiskey soda.

By the time we got started on our fourth 20-oz beers, the men were insisting that we perform a song with the guitarist who was playing inside. I pulled up some chords for him, and we belted out New York, New York to the cheers of our new friends. There was lots of toasting, and later lots of goodbyes as the group piled into a van and headed home.

Ready to go home again, we were approached by a man who was sitting at a nearby table who asked us whether we wanted to come to a party with him and a friend. We never got his name, but he was definitely a police officer – not that that did anything to deter him from driving across town with a beer literally in his hand and another rolling around the back seat which he offered to us. The first bar didn’t meet his standards because it wasn’t playing live music, but the next was blasting Thai folk music. After 2.5 liters of beer, we ordered lemon sodas, but the waitress kept trying to mix beer into them. We managed to stop her, but the policeman succeeded where she had failed.

After a drink, we walked around the corner to what I can only describe as a karaoke shed, with several empty tables surrounding a stage where a young man was singing in Thai. The table next to us rapidly filled up with 8 or so women, and I spotted another woman from the first bar at another table perhaps 30 feet to my left. The cop asked me “do you want girl to sleep with you,” and most of the women disappeared when I said I didn’t. We got up and sang Don’t Stop Me Now, after which most of the women returned to walk around in a single-file column and one joined our table to serve us beer on ice. The situation became profoundly uncomfortable as the cop kept offering us prostitution, but we managed to return home in one piece and unaccompanied.

Hill-Tribe Spider-Man

After having consumed more beer than water the previous day, we downed several liters of water and rode a short distance up the river to reach an enormous golden Buddha. This was the famous Golden Triangle, the point at which Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet and formerly an infamous hub of opium smuggling. The Burmese side was just a thickly-forested island, but the Laotian side had big signs in Chinese advertising the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. I initially thought this was just another component of China's Belt and Road Initiative, but the truth is far worse: the SEZ is basically a front for a casino complex where Chinese companies engage in heinous criminal activity, including human and drug trafficking and trade in endangered animal products (see this article in the SCMP). A Western business analysis firm has gone so far as to recently label it “the worst SEZ in the world”. The huge casino buildings stand out quite a bit on the river bank, and I wished we could have extended the trip into Laos as planned, but the COVID restrictions were still too strict.

A nearby museum showcases the history of opium in the region, which made its way here centuries ago by way of Arab and Chinese traders. Hill-tribes fleeing Chinese persecution planted the crop in the Golden Triangle, though there were a number of bizarrely sexually explicit local legends about its origin. The exhibits showcased lots of equipment used in opium production and consumption – including weights, scales, and pipes – and included a diorama of a villager smoking his pipe with the caption "Heel against buttocks - the best position for smoking opium.” The next room was a model of the 1967 Opium War that involved drug lords, Burmese militias, the Laotian military, and local elements of the Kuomintang. The Laotian forces won and were able to forward the opium to its intended customers – the US military in Vietnam, even as American forces were bombing communist targets in Laos. This insane story was a major turning point in the local drug trade, prompting the Thai government to launch a major crackdown and expel the KMT from the country.

We left Chiang Saen and followed the road up and down the many steep hills lining the Mekong. We stopped for lunch in the border town of Chiang Khong, where we found a place selling chicken and rice with no menu and nobody who could speak English. Climbing up Doi Pha Thang mountain, the temperature blissfully dropped a good 8º C and it briefly rained as we entered the clouds. We were followed by a scooter carrying 3 kids, operated by the oldest kid who was maybe 13 or 14.

Reaching the top of the mountain, we were greeted by cartoonish figures of local hill tribes, and climbed up a hill for a spectacular view. Below us stretched thick Laotian jungle, with the brown Mekong visible through the mist. The path technically crossed into Laos at multiple points, but the hill was so steep that it was only accessible from Thailand. Each peak along the ridge had a shrine built on it, putting Alpine crosses to shame in terms of construction effort.

We climbed back down and bought some dried fruit and nuts from local tribeswomen. The storm had passed and water was evaporating off the road all around us as we rode along the spectacular ridge, slowing to dodge chickens at multiple points. None of the conventional accommodation sites showed any options in the area, but we stopped at a tiny mountainside hamlet where Google Maps was showing a highly-rated homestay. There we encountered a pregnant woman and three young children, and with the help of hand signals and a translation app managed to secure a room one level down the mountain. The room had no power, and the woman tried giving us a router after I tried explaining the situation, but a little circuit breaker was eventually found to restore power. The other problem we faced was the 6-foot doorways, which became prime targets for our heads any time we walked in or out of the room.

Here, like other remote and underdeveloped places I’ve been, I was struck by how it was easier to communicate with young children who had grown up with the internet than with their parents who had little exposure to the wider world. We literally had no way to communicate with the mother without a translation app, but the youngest son was wearing a Spider-Man costume and he and his older brother Tung started singing the theme song with us. Tung then materialized outside our room playing the Star-Spangled Banner on his phone, cracking up when we started singing along.

The hamlet had maybe 8 houses in it, but Google Maps said that one of them was a restaurant. We set off down the road in our flip-flops, and I took mine off after the toe thong kept popping out. We must have been quite the sight for the man sitting in the house who informed us through hand signals that there was no food to be found, and pointed us towards the next village. We started walking there, but gave up when we saw it was quite a walk away. We eventually got on our bikes and rode 10 kilometers to another village, where we got delicious pad thai and stir-fried basil curry.

With the sun down at 1,500 meters of elevation, I felt something I hadn’t felt since before finals period in New Haven: cold. It was mostly refreshing, but enough of a reminder that as bad as it was being hot on a bike, being cold on a bike was so much worse. The sun was setting behind the haze, painting a beautiful sunset as we rode back. That beauty came at a price, though, as every insect in Thailand seemed to be flying around us. The repeated thwacks coming from my helmet were bad enough, but I kept feeling impacts on my arms and chest. At one point, I felt something move on my shirt and looked down to see a hideous brown bug the size of a cockroach crawling around my shirt. I literally yelped as I stopped on a dime and practically dove headfirst off my bike as I shook the thing off me.