Thailand's North Boarder; The river was wide and slow. The Kok River's still water did not run deep, the banks were shallow and our bamboo raft kept running aground and sticking in the mud. The journey was a slow dirty one, and just the one we had traveled to the northern boarder of Thailand to take. My sister Katie, three Brits, two Thai raft experts, and I, cooked, slept, lived, and smoked a little, for four days, on a 30 bamboo poles--all strung together.
Sitting single file on the bamboo we floated on down the river. At sunset the oarsmen stuck the raft in the mud and got out, so the five of us got out too. We walked through a drained rice patty to a village. It became clear that we were going to be spending the night in the bamboo hut next to the cows so we put our bags down there. For dinner we had noodles and too much rice wine. We went to bed.
In the middle of the cold night the hut was really warm, half awake I was surprised how cozy this hut was compared to the others I had sojourned in recently. I opened my eyes and over Katie's shoulder, through the slats in the bamboo there was a fire. I tried to wake her up but she ignored me, there was a squeal that she couldn't ignore and she was awake. In our sleeping bags we shuffled to the door, the hut where the pigs and cows were next to us was on fire and the pigs were being carried away. There was shouting and squealing, and then it seemed like the ordeal was over. Katie and I didn't sleep, or talk, we were ready to run if we needed to: we didn't know where to go.
The sun was hot in the morning and the hut where the animals had been was much closer then it had seemed, Myanmar was much closer than we had known. The fire in the middle of the night was set by a Burmese ethnic group that had been all but exterminated by the government and frequently burned and stole from villages across the boarder. We were closer to danger than we thought.
Our journey began because we had a few extra days. Our journey ended in the same way it began, in the mud on the river banks of a city that we didn't know, with a few days to kill. In the meantime we lived for a bit in a hut--and on a raft, in the golden triangle. We booked two tickets to Cambodia.
