Last month I took a 5 hour bus trip to a town on the Thai-Burma border called Mae Sot. I had some business to tend to, so afterwards I decided to head 25 minutes west in to Burma for a few hours. My gf (now ex) came with, she has never been outside of Thailand, so she was game too.
Well as we got through customs I had my passport stamped & the ex had her ID stamped we walked along the Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge. As we were walking along this bridge we were greeted by a Burmese man in his mid 50's (he's the cat w/ the green hat in the 2nd picture), who smelled of whiskey & had rotten teeth from chewing that red seed crap. He spoke pretty good English & didn't seem overly-mad.
He was telling us to be careful of the government & what to & not to take pictures of. As soon as we got in to Burma we thought he was going to bounce, but we were wrong, he kept on following us! We would dip into stores, walked in zig zags, & he was still on our tails. So I offered him some money to go away, around 40 baht, & he refused. He said we'd be safer if he stayed with us. Well my friend was getting really scared, then all of the sudden a guy from the Burmese Customs office came along & grabbed him & took him off to god knows where! Well to say the least we kept on seeing that government official through out the day.
I thought there would be a lot of foreigners in this area of Burma, but I was WRONG. For the 4 hours we spent there, we only saw 1 older English couple. The ex, who's Thai was getting a lot of stares, because it was obvious she wasn't Burmese, so I was getting CRAZY stares for being a westerner!
Some of the people were really aggressive & weirded out by our presence, my friend wanted to leave after the 1st 30 minutes.
I was able to buy a few hours out of her to stay in Burma, so in that time I took pictures even more furious than usual, because I knew time was limited. As you can tell most of the pictures are in 3 separate locations: along a busy street, in a market, & along Friendship Bridge. Burma was such a interesting place, that even in that small section of Earth I was able to point the camera @ some incredible/interesting stuff.
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