Breakfast in Burma

There were very few details available about getting from Thaton to Mae Sai, but we had at least ascertained that there was at least one scheduled minibus going that way from Fang everyday. Our French host made some calls for us and was told that indeed there was a bus at 1430, stopping at the military police station down the hill.   So, at about two, we said our goodbyes and he gave us a lift down to the stop. After he left us. the chap there in attendance gave the bus firm a call to see where they were and, through his non-existent English and whatever I could get Google Translate to display for me to point at, we discovered that the bus was coming but also full.  Bugger.

I left Chan there with the bags, like a gentleman, and bounded back up that hill to see who, if anyone, the French guy knew with a vehicle who might want money.  He phoned a lady who was plainly his local 'fixer' who got hold of a guy with a minibus.  So, denied the public minibus, we chartered our own.
While I was gone, Chan saw the minibus drive by, absolutely packed and with luggage strapped to its roof.  We later overtook it as the police had pulled everyone out and were going through their things.

So we ended up in Mae Sai, the northernmost town in Thailand, and, to be completely fair to the place, a bit of a shit hole. The hotel was pleasant enough but had an air about it that I would best describe as East German chic.  We looked about for somewhere to eat, somewhat more carefully as this is not a tourist town.  We found a cafe-restaurant down a back-alley which Chantelle had found via comments on Thai Facebook which was renowned for its coffee.  I don't take much persuading.

This is coffee and green tea, which isn't as awful as it sounds.

Mae Sai lives on the border with Myanmar and is connected to the nearest Burmese town, Tachileik, by way of the ''Friendship Bridge" over the river Ruak.  For the life of us, we can't remember why we wanted to come here, but since we were here, we decided to go to Myanmar.

In the morning, we got up early and walked up to the border control.  We'd read all manner of stories about the kerfuffle required to get past the Thai and Burmese authorities, mainly involving leaving your passport with the Thai office and taking a photocopy of it though for their Burmese counterparts to stamp, picking it back up on the way back in.  In reality, we walked across the border, paid the Burmese immigration 500 baht each for a day visa, they stamped our passport and we sauntered on through. No real fuss, but you have go back inside the day and not leave Tachileik.

We wouldn't say Tachileik is the prettiest place on Earth, but it was a change in scenery.

Or else

We got to the other side just in time to catch the morning markets.  They were a wonder of Chinese clothes, counterfeit goods and opportunities for appalling cross-contamination.  The veg looked pretty good though.  While Chan was browsing through some knock-off sunglasses, a bloke came over to sell me cigarettes, or failing that, Viagra.  While I'm positive that it was only the finest product and not amphetamines and blue chalk, I politely declined.

Yep, this is about the right distance from Old Trafford

Seems legit

Chan wanted to do something for the local economy, so she ended up buying some woolly things for our upcoming trip to Bhutan.

I've got nothing to say

Wandering back over was just as simple, we just had to fill out another immigration card to put in our passport.  I did notice that the vehicle traffic congestion over the border was done no favours by the fact that each country drives on opposite sides of the road, meaning that each side had to change over in the middle of the bridge.

Alse these men had a gong.

We then bimbled back to our hotel and, with a lot less hassle than it took getting here, we caught the bus back to Chiang Rai. In fact, as soon as the staff from the hotel dropped us off at the station, a fearsome but slight bus conductor lady was interrogating me as to my intended destination.  We did have several options for our journey but apparently I was getting on her bus.  It was one of those cattle-class sheds I mentioned yesterday.  While I was ascertaining where to put the body bag amongst the piles of household goods and blankets, the bus started reversing out, leaving Chan outside.  She realised her plight and jumped on before we left her on the frontier.  Actually, no she didn't: I had to shout for her to jump on.  The doors remained open throughout.

We were stopped by the police a few times.  They went through everyone's identification papers, checking for illegal workers who've skulked across the border.  They ignored my held out passport as I don't think we ring many of their alarm bells.

Chan told me later that for the whole journey there appeared to be a bucket of fish in jelly behind my seat.  Ho hum.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir fuhren (schließlich) nach Mae Sai, die eine gemeinsame Grenze mit Myanmar hat. Es ist ein ziemlich schmutzig Stadt, und unser Hotel erinnerte mich an Ost-Berlin. Wir gingen auf der Freundschaftsbrücke nach Myanmar und wir besuchten die Märkte. Chantelle kaufte eine Wollmütze. Ein Mann hat versucht, mich Viagra zu verkaufen.

Over the Andes

This post is liberally and randomly dotted with pretty pictures in dubious chronological order, as I can't remember which is from where.

We got from Mendoza to Santiago by way of coach, taking the winding road over the Andes mountains.  The terminal in Mendoza is a bit demented - 40 bus ranks, countless offices for bus and tour firms, money changers, water and empanada sellers etc..  More alarmingly, our bus wasn't on the departure schedule.  The bod in the ticket office helpfully drew a circle around the departure time on my printed-off voucher, which did little to assuage my doubts about the coach's actual existence.   Ultimately a bus did turn up, and we handed our bags over to the porter loading the luggage bay - along with half my surplus pesos for his trouble. They don't work for the bus companies, they just work for tips.  Anyone handling the bodybags when they've not been calibrated for domestic flight deserves my groats.

We had booked our seats ahead of time and had managed to reserve two at the top and front.  If you're making a trip as dramatic as this one, you want the view.  Our compatriots in the other two front seats were a friendly and chatty Irish bloke who was resident in Buenos Aires and therefore spoke a helpful amount of Spanish, and a middle-aged American guy who was pleasant enough but was also perhaps not entirely there.  He had the perpetual open-mouthed grin of the recently sedated or of serial killers. I think perhaps that the wheel was turning but the hamster was likely dead. 

The border is an adventure in endurance bureaucracy.  It looks even worse if you're doing it by car -we saw tailbacks for an easy three miles.  We had it easy by comparison in that the buses just drove around the cars and queue up outside a large hanger.  Bus by bus we disembarked and joined a spider of lines leading to desks variously staffed by Argentine and Chilean immigration staff.  The idea was that you got signed out by the Argies and stamped in by the Chileans.  It worked after a fashion.

Then we were paraded into another room with sinister looking metal table and a massive x-ray machine.  There we laid out any carry-on bags and waited while they dragged off our luggage from the bus and ran it through the machine.  We were in attendance in case they wanted to look inside.  Meanwhile, they go over the bus with a fine toothed comb and a team of very distractable dogs.  The point of all of this is partially to look for the normal contraband, but mainly to stop the import of biological matter like diary, meat, plants and untreated wood.  They're serious about it too.  Non of the various paramilitary-looking constabularies and government agents we've encountered in South America look half as geared up for war as the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture.

After a modest hour and a bit (the bus companies allow something like 1-3 hours for the border crossing on their schedule), we were back on our way.  At this point they passed around a hat for tips for the guys who handled our bags at border control.  I was prepped for this, so they got got the other half of my Argie monopoly money.  It's best to lose that benighted currency before you reach civilisation.

You have one job and you suck at it

On the other side,  the road winds perilously around sheer drops a dozen or so times.  This is made all the more fun by being on a duble-decker coach.  The scenery is spectacular on the way through; white peaks and rivers of snow melt all around.

As the scenery gets a bit more conventional once you've reached the bottom, they play a couple of films on the bus TV screens.  They played that new National Lampoon's film, which I'm pretty sure isn't on general release.  Their copy had Spanish subtitles overlaid on top of Chinese subtitles, which meant one of the staff had plainly Bittorrented it on his down time.  

The bus terminal in Santiago was another level of ridiculous. It was 20 coaches crammed into the space of 8, all of whom apparently on a mission to be the biggest possible obstacle. I'll talk more about Santiago in a bit because we're coming back here after a brief stint in the Atacama desert.   

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir überquerten die Anden mit dem Bus. Der Kerl, der neben mir saß, war vielleicht ein bisschen dumm.
Die Aussicht war wunderschön, aber die Grenze Bürokratie war lächerlich.

Ice Ice Baby

Patagonia for the uninitiated

We disembarked from the cruise in Punta Arenas - a town that has seen better days.  It was once a thriving port, conveniently placed for traffic making its way around the Cape, back when that was the only way to navigate the Americas.  The Panama Canal buggered that right up when it opened in 1914.  Tourism is a big focus these days, it being one of the main staging points for expeditions to Antarctica - in competition with Ushuaia and Christchurch, New Zealand.

The 'panoramic view' from a restaurant we ate in was less than stunning:

Although it was completely accurate in that it was a 'view'

They do make sure that the lampposts are kept nice and warm though:

God only knows

The next day, we caught the coach to Puerto Natales, which was a change of conveyance.  We slummed it with the backpackers this time: staying in a hostel - albeit in a private room with a private en-suite bathroom, we're not savages. It's a small Chilean town, again with a focus on tourism (it's lousy with backpackers, hikers and mountain climbers of every possible international stripe), but is sleepily pleasant and has a nice shoreline.

We took another (6 hour -for £15 each) coach across the border, back into Argentina.  There's a fair bit of rigmarole with this, as each country is keen on generating carbon-copies and stamping my passport as many times as their ink will allow.  The half-mile frontier between the two checkpoints is marked by a road that turns quickly to gravel.  Plainly, it's a "Bollocks, you pave it" situation.

The bus was filled with German and Russian backpackers and smelled very...organic.  The buses were a change from flying though.

One travels to El Calafate to get access to Los Glaciares National Park or as a hub for further travel in Patagonia. Specifically the big draw is the Perito Moreno Glacier - one of only three Patagonian glaciers that are still advancing.  Take a packed lunch though (we rolled the dice by pointing and ended up buying a garlicky breaded beef sandwich in town before we went) as the park cafe follows the "'How much does this cost?' -'How much do you and all your companions have, señor?'" business model. The park is apparently also guarded by Quentin Tarantino.

Anyway, the glacier - it is stunning.

It constantly creaks and cracks and periodically you'll hear the roar of a shelf breaking free. If you're patient, you can see it happen:

By this point in the trip I thought I was desensitized to scale and spectacle, but you peer over the top of the glacier and see millions of tonnes of prehistoric icy momentum advancing imperceptibly but definitely toward you, and you are acutely aware of your insignificance.  In a good way.

Best take a selfie, finite creatures

Our hotel was a great place out of town, overlooking Argentino lake and next to a nature reserve that we took in on our final day in the area.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben zwischen Chile und Argentinien in einem stinkenden Bus gereist. In El Calafate haben wir den Perito Moreno Gletscher gesehen. Es ist atemberaubend.