Goodbye Jacques

Jacques  and I took a couple of buses to Mae Sot, near the border with Burma. We travelled through straggly forest, much of it singed by the incessant fires the people light along the roadside. As we went up into the mountains the smoke grew so dense that we could not see far beyond the road. This smog continued all the way to Mae Sot. “I don’t like this smoke” I said. “Oh well” said Jacques “There’s smoke all the way to the northern border. It’s always like this.” “It wasn’t like this in January” I said. “I’m leaving”. We walked around the enormous market in Mae Sot, noticing the Burmese women with sandalwood paste smeared on their faces, who had come across the border to do their shopping. Even some of the shop notices were written in Burmese.

So we celebrated our last evening together with three bottles of beer and sushi, consumed in our air-conditioned hotel room (the first air conditioned room I have experienced in Thailand) and next day I caught two buses back to Sukothai. By the time I got to Sukothai, the smoke had reached there too. Maybe it’s time to leave the mainland.