Border Run...

Haha border runs sound funny. But unfortunately for us, the borderrun we took was anything but fun.

Let me explain what a borderrun is. Here in Thailand, Farang/foreigners, are required to leave the country every once in a while. I don't know why, but we are. So depending on your visa that you obtain before coming to thailand, you may have to go every month or every three months, to renew your visa (sort of). So you travel to a surrounding country. There are 3 that you can get to by car, bus, bike or if you're insane foot. Cambodia, Laos or Myanmar (formerly Burma). You can of course just fly back to your own country or go to another country, but these are the closests neighboring ones.

So once your visa is up you have to make a run for the border to renew it. The consequences could get pretty severe if you get caught with an out of date passport stamp. So in order to do that you have to get on a bus or take a minibus to the border, unless you're crazy and drive yourself or a stupid hippie backpacker and walk yourself.

Well our experience began when we realized that we didn't look at Danny's passport right and ended up having to leave a few days before. It cost us in all to get to the border and back, 4000 baht. So we get on the bus at 9:30 in the morning. We make it to Mae Sai the border town at 2:30. We walked to the border where we were told we would have to pay another 500 baht per person to get across the border.

Now here is where we learned a very valuable lesson. If you can manage to con a thai girl into going with you to the border on your border run, make sure that you make it clear to them that its not going to be fun, you're not going to be doing any shopping, and its just going to be a waste of their time. Danny forgot to mention all this to mook. So as we stumbled onto the other side of the bridge separating the two countries, we exhaustingly turned to go back to the other side dreading the trip home. Mook, our thai girl friend, was sooooooo disappointed. She thought we would be there for at least a few hours and was in the mood to shop, or eat, or do anything to make the trip there worth while.

She wouldn't talk to us for an hour or so, but we eventually got on the last bus out of Mae Sai, which happened to be right before it started to rain. The bus also stopped every couple of minutes to pick up other people going to Chiang Rai, the city that was closest to Mae Sai that had a bus station. So it was driving in the rain, with all the doors open. Everyone's hair looked like they were in a wind tunnel, it was pretty funny. And wet... mmmmmmm street water. haha.

But we eventually made it to Chiang Rai and were able to get on the last bus to Chiang Mai. We got back into town at about 10:00 that night. So 12 and a half hours later we had our stupid stamps and we were safe at home, miserable and ready for a shower.

But hopefully when we do our next border run we'll have a more pleasant experience. Not to say this one was bad, but maybe we'll stumble across a couple million dollars and can just take a plane by then. Haha....