Golden Triangle

The last day of our trip we made a side journey to the "Golden Triangle" - the area where Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos meet. I sort of thought you'd be able to stand in all three countries at the same time, but there's actually a river separating the countries. SO it's more of a tourist trap, but at we can now say we've been to the exotic "Golden Triangle." It was so exotic, we had a choice of at least 20 t-shirt stands to get our memorabilia from. The Golden Triangle actually refers to the much larger region that used to be one of the main opium trading zones, before Thailand made it illegal, turned all the opium growers into coffee bean growers and forced the industry into neighboring countries.

We took a songtaew out from Mae Sai at around 10am from trucks that had "Golden Triangle" painted on the sides as one of their destinations. The ride took about an hour. We weren't expecting much, just about an hour's worth of walking around before taking a songtaew back. Little did we know it's impossible to get a ride back to Mae Sai...

After a couple songtaews passed by that either refused to take us or just didn't stop, we started to freak out a little. We stopped into three different "taxi" offices but none of them were even open. We only had an hour and a half to catch our bus from Mae Sai and we were an hour away with no ride! As we grew more desperate I stopped into one of the boutique hotels and asked them if they could give us a ride. They said yes, but for 800 baht! (FYI the ride there was only 30 baht). We had no choice - we had to either accept the ride or be stuck in the Golden Triangle overnight, 7 hours from Chiang Mai, missing work the next day. Yikes!

We accepted the ride. Thinking we'd get a deluxe hotel taxi ride, we were a little surprised to see that our ride was a beat up pickup truck that belonged to one of the hotel's employees. During the ride back in this guy's pickup, we saw a snake crossing the road which was interesting. We finally arrived in Chiang Mai at around 8pm. It was raining, we were tired.



Look in the background, that's Laos! Or maybe Myanmar.... it doesn't really matter.



Here's a map of the Golden Triangle







Not to be confused with an actual house of opium, this is just a (museum).



It's not every day that you see signs for an opium museum.











Big buddha!




Goodbye GT (golden triangle)!!!