Taksin Maharat National Park

... must look seedy with a lot of suspicious characters walking around. In fact this place is clean with broad streets and normal looking people. There is some wats in town and a waterfall or two not far away, plus trekking, but I don’t have time: I need to take a night bus to Bangkok, be there tomorrow morning and fly to Yangon, Myanmar. The fact that I cannot go from here to Yangon overland shows how messed up that country is.

... Within an hour, I was on the back of a motorcycle en route to a Burmese migrant school half an hour out of town. It just so happened that their summer semester was about to begin the following day, and I was asked to be their English teacher. Having taught English in Japan for 18 months (albeit 36 years ago), I readily agreed to take up this new challenge. It couldn’t be that different, could it??

I arrived at the school ...

After a 10 min tuktuk ride we arrived at the Burmese border and friendship bridge. Our tuktuk driver agreed to wait for us while we renewed our visa....without knowing what exactly we were supposed to do we headed to the immigration office and handed over our passports...we got stamped out of Thailand and were instructed to cross the bridge into Myanmar (Burma)... Some happy ...

... on anything interesting...there were quite a few gold and jewellery shops with lots of people standing outside and after looking in the guidebook we discovered that the Burmese travel over the border 3 miles away to sell and buy gold.... and thats all that basically happens in this town. Its a stop off point for travellers and a place to deal gold !!

... is delicious. Its similar to Thai food but less fussy and less sweet. Particularly good was the tea leaf salad; fresh tea leaves, fried peas and peanuts, chinese cabbage and dressing we can't work out. Maybe tamarind, lime, sugar and chilli but who knows!? After a few days we made a trip out to Umphang the mountains for a little trek. The journey there was a memorable one, breakneck speeds ...

... of the dump so they can quickly access plastics as they are dumped for resale to recyclers, the worst living conditions I have ever seen, watching one of our Monk students getting his paperwork telling him he will be going to the USA, by himself, in two weeks - pure joy, relief and fear at the same time as the reality set in, sneaking into the free clinic for illegal's and seeing the surgery unit and the absolute deplorable conditions the ...

... anxious kids waiting, there is little time to feel much other than terror, trying to figure out how to turn, when to steer and when to lean, and how to ensure braking and accelerating are separate actions. By the time I made it to school the first day, I was exhausted and just wanted time to savor my accomplishment at having just learned to ride in extreme circumstances. What I found at the school( I hadn't even given any thought about what I might see there ...

... long absence. I would have to hurry up and get a bike before dark because it was Sunday night and we needed to teach Monday morning. Not teaching was not an option as they were despearate for help. Sharon had showed up at the Migrant school a month prior and was given 75 students, aged 7 to 21 in one outdoor class: no books, no materials, a white board and a marker. The Burmese teachers were also sitting in the class as students. Still I cannot imagine how ...

... that he was a bit wacko and probably not much of a threat really. Neither am I. His actions were assault. Mine were self-defense. Back in the room later, I caught Tang crying in the bathroom. Things like this don’t happen in Chiang Rai. Worse than that, my old watering hole in Mae Sot is long gone, it and the Karen rebels who used to congregate there, giving the place an air of intrigue and mystery. I guess it’s time to move on.

... Karen girl who's learning English sits next to me. When I get into the bus station, a tuk-tuk takes me into town and drops me off in front of his friend's hotel. I decide to look at my options. I walk around town with its barrage of images. All along the main roads of Tak are shops set up like markets. There are so many things to look at, it is easy to lose a building from 2 feet away. A lady on a motorcycle gapes at me on ...