Burma Border Run 6d - Tachileik Back Streets

Coming out of the Thai-Yai village we passed a Chinese Buddhist temple that had a small forest of beautiful trees still on the back of the grounds.

And there's garbage piles here and there.

I have no idea what the sign says. But it's to the left.

This guy knows how to pack his bike with vegies. It was ok to take a picture of the bike, but not to take his picture. Compare these vegies on the back street with the fruit stand on the main street.

Two monks walking onto a backstreet from the main street. You can see J in the background in the new shorts she got at the Textile Fair while we were waiting for the bus back in Chiang Mai.

The back streets are a real contrast to the main street that you see as you come across from Thailand. When we were in Burma at Mae Sot our guide said that rich people own the shops in town and the land prices have been going up very fast as they expect lots of traffic when the road from Thailand opens and you can drive from Hanoi to Yangoon.

But Mae Sot was a backwater town 40 years ago. Gems and other goods got smuggled over the border, but I suspect the Burmese border village was just as much of a backwater as Maesod. I'm guessing that Tachileik has been a much more important town for centuries. While it's not on the Mekong and its river was certainly not navigable while we were there, nevertheless it is very close to Yunan province in China and it certainly looked much more prosperous than Myawaddi, the town across from Mae Sot. But I'm just conjecturing, I need to look this up. But our guide then did say that a few Burmese get rich and the rest of the people are poor. The contrast between all the Chinese goods for sale - next post will have a little of that - and the unpaved back streets and tiny shops would be consistent with that.

While I was trying to find more on Tachileik, I came across this discussion of opium in the region. The post is a year old, but the comments are clearly by people who know about Burma.