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Chiang Rai
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Chiang Rai - Because of the extra days that I had due to the speed of getting the Myanmar visa, I decided to spend a few days in Northern Thailand. I flew up to Chiang Rai, which is quite close to the Laos / Myanmar borders. The area is well know for its hill tribe villages. I met an English guy and Dutch couple, and decided to organise a couple of tours in the area.
The first day was to see some of the hill tribe villages near Chiang Rai. We started out early on our boat trip up the river, so we thought we would miss the other tourists. Even though, the tour buses beat us there, and we were shocked by the number and impact that tourism had had. We did a small hike into the surrounding hills, but all of us came away quite unimpressed.
The next day we hired scooters so we could drive around and see some other sights. The first was a village where a number of different tribes had been brought together. The most famous people are the long necked Karen, who are mostly based in Myanmar, but are fleeing into Thailand because of persecution. The women of this tribe wear rings around their necks, so over the years their necks become longer. Picture is below, but again not for me, felt like a human zoo.
We also drove upto Tham Luang cave and Had a bit of an explore (about 1km into the cave) and went upto the Golden Triangle. This is the area where the three borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet and is given the name because of the drug production in the area. These days most of it has been pushed out of Thailand. All that's here is a sign and lots of tacky souvenir sellers. As you can see Northern Thailand won't be one of the trip highlights.
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