Beautiful Mae Sot

Mae Sot how we love thee! Having travelled to Mae Sot in 2006 I fell in love with this amazing township even then and it was important to me to bring Gary here hoping that he might feel the same way. Did he..............? Our first impressions were not that great as we arrived at our prebooked destination slightly stressed after the journey to find we had booked a little hut, next to a small rubbish dump, with insufficient room to even open our packs. Incidentally Mae Sot is extremely hot and this hut was red hot. A few gesticulations, phone calls, scratching of heads and of course unintelligible words we paid extra for a much bigger, cooler room in the main house up a steep flight of stairs. It was an old style Thai house, lots of wood and heavy dark furniture but it had just been refurbished and was all we needed. At 700baht a night it was a steal and with breakfast too. So our unpack starts and we make ourselves comfortable. Oh the bathroom calls............open the door which rockets off it's hinges, one hinge and all it's screws crashed onto the new tile floor and I was left holding this really heavy teak door. OMG this is typical Thailand - absolutely no maintenance and no way Gary can fix it. Just be quiet, push the screws back through the hinge, balance the door and under no circumstances close it!!!!!!! OK. Long story short we did find another hotel that night, much closer to the township, and broke the news to our current hosts on our return. From our new hotel we hired two pushbikes, those too were badly in need of maintenance, and went in search of the Ban Thai, the questhouse I had stayed in on my previous visit. Mae Sot has grown a lot but there were some landmarks I remembered and low and behold I found it - squished between numerous new buildings. Thanh the manager was still there and it was nice to sit down and have a chat with him and for him to meet Gary. On our bikes again and it was then we discovered iced coffee which is made with strong coffee and carnation condensed milk poured over ice. No sugar but a little evaporated milk on the top - heaven. A Thai massage was our next treat for an hour. Firstly we had to change into our judo shirt and trousers though and we were then taken up all these stairs to the very top story where our muscles were almost pulled from our bones! I loved it but Gary..............still not as good as Eleni's was his answer. Gee Eleni you have set a high bench mark! The fresh food market is a must to visit in Mae Sot. There are bugs, crickets, frogs, birds, maggots, baby turtles, lIve fish, worms, grubs, fresh fruit and vegetables all waiting to be taken home and eaten. We settled for a nice juicy pineapple, which the lady kindly cut up for us, parked our bikes, sat on a step eating it and watching the world of Mae Sot go by. It is such a relaxing place to be. Whizzing round town which now has a one way system we invariably got lost but that was good. We would find ourselves in all different areas of the town, seeing things and interacting with people which would otherwise not have happened. If you are a Facebook friend of ours you will have seen photos of Gary with all his fans and friends taken in Mae Sot. Wots of course are in abundance in Mae Sot but alas we did not visit too many there were more important things to do. Such as a trip to the border between Mae Sot and Myanmar. We wanted to include Burma in our trip but it is still a very hard country to enter and stay in. Going in overland for more than a visa run is not allowed and the border guards can be very edgy upholding the rules as Gary found out. Now his lack of hearing in one ear and loss of sight in one eye definitely didn't help but when one unwittingly walks through the security booths and does not respond when being yelled at by several male and female border guards there is extreme reason to worry - especially when they are carrying machine guns!!!!!! The international IncIdent was thankfully averted when Gary finally heard my screams or their commands and casually strolled back as though nothing was amiss. "Naughty Mr Gary" was the comment. As a little aside I do need to mention here that when I visited this border in 2006 machine gun fire was actually heard. This is a border with no man's land in between where the dIsplaced Burmese have built shacks to live in on the river bed, where they have built high platforms behind coIled, razor wire to sell cigarettes, viagra and steroids duty free to the Thais through the fenceline. This is where soldiers with machine guns patrol. This is a sad, sad place. We took a tuk tuk here and he waited whilst we viewed this god forsaken area, where there is also a thriving market on the Thai side, then he took us home to our aIr conditioned room and our comfortable bed. We bought most of our food from street stalls here as there was an amazing gathering of hawkers not 2 mins walk away which was sufficient and delicious. Fried chicken, noodles, rice sausages, stuffed roti, onion rings just for starters. One thing for sure is that we are not starving. Next stop the Gibbon sanctuary one and a half hours out of Mae Sot by red Songtauw. Dropped in the middle of nowhere, literally, we started up this hill eventually coming to the gate with a big CLOSED sign on it. Looking at each other we both said "bugger that" opened the gate and marched on in. Locating a very hostile lady who was in the middle of her housework, we explained we had come all the way from Mae Sot and would it be possible to look around please. Very reluctantly she agreed and after a while she rematerialised and started what was obviously going to be a very, very hasty routemarch tour of the sanctuary. Stopping to ask interesting and knowledgeable questions of her she quickly thawed, became more animated and the day turned out to be one of our best experiences. The gibbons have all been saved in one way or another - a small baby whose mother has been hunted and killed; once cute home kept baby gibbons who have grown up and are no longer cute; injured gibbons whose human owners discard them and so on and so on. These gIbbons are really well looked after here but the sanctuary is not supported financially and relies on donations to survive. It is growing rapidly and new cages need to be built as more and more gibbons and now 2 bears are brought to them to be looked after. In the end we spent hours there, helping to prepare the gibbons food, chopping up fruit and veges for them and then helping to feed them too. It was so close up and personal and after leaving a healthy donation ourselves we left the sanctuary to wait on the side of the road in the blazing heat for a return red songtauw. We felt good and happy that in a small way we had contributed something. Our last day in Mae Sot we decided to explore by foot. Walking along a riverbank we came across a man fishing with a rifle????? Ingenious. Underneath this rifle was a bicycle pump and inside was a nail attached to fishing line which then was attached to the barrel. Get it? Yes......ingenious eh? Well.....here we go.......Gary being Gary he had to have a go!  "over there, over there" came the cry from the fisherman, BANG goes the gun. The line goes taut, the fisherman pulls and Gary has "nailed" a rather large branch. Big laughs all round as the fisherman tries and finally succeeds in getting his nail and line back, hops on his bike and rides off into the sunset. Oops. So do you think Gary loves Mae Sot as much as I do? Yes of course he does. No one can come to Mae Sot and not be spellbound. It is not a tourist town at all, in fact we saw no other Europeans here. It is a place to kick back and smell the roses and we did just that. We also had lots of fun and of course that is what this trip is all about and.......we dIscovered Iced coffee ThaI style. Cheers everyone. Love to all, think of everyone heaps. Xx