To get to Mae Sot from Sukhothai, we took a bus to Tak (the capitol of Tak Province), and from there grabbed a ride on a minivan making runs to Mae Sot. We left Sukhothai at 8:40am, and got to Mae Sot at noon.
The bus from Tak had a blue theme – blue bus; blue seats; blue curtains. Our previous bus from Phitsanulok to Sukhothai had a red theme.
The bus had small drop-down television screens and a robust sound system, which were used to pump Thai music and associated karaoke videos throughout the bus at an obnoxiously loud level.
Thai music videos are fairly entertaining. About half the melodies are drawn from American country music, complete with guitars and harmonicas. The visuals portray two-timing men, girls crying over a broken heart, and memories of a love lost. Trey Adkins would have been at home singing to this stuff.
They also show what is, perhaps, Thai methods for dealing with heartache, given that actors in the videos did them over and over again: men shake offending women, women face-slap offending men, women threatening suicide, everyone chucking old photos of the former couple onto the ground.
The other half are bubble-gum, pop music things – girls standing around dancing stiffly from the waist down; pink and read heart symbols popping up everywhere.
The bus to Tak was in good shape. The minibus to Mae Sot was worn out, barely making the steep inclines. The driver would gun it down hills as fast as he 
could to get as much momentum as possible for the next hill. There were seven passengers on the minibus, plus baggage and some packages the driver was delivering.
The road between Tak an Mae Sat has hilly, in contrast to the flat lands we had experienced before.
Having arrived at Mae Sot, we put our packs on our backs and started walking to the Ban Thai Guest House about a kilometer away (read about the hotel by clicking here). Along the way, we stopped at the Bhai Fern Restaurant for lunch (read about the restaurant by clicking here).
Some initial observations about Mae Sot versus Sukhothai…
– Unlike Sukhothai and everywhere else, we were not accosted by touts at the Mae Sot bus station – or anywhere else in Mae Sot. Kind of refreshing.
– The only taxis we’ve seen in Mae Sot are mopeds with drivers in colored and numbered vests. Sure, they still think they can carry two passengers with baggage, but they are still just mopeds.
– There is a larger ethnic mix in Mae Sot. We can see differences – facial structure, clothing, skin color, a sort of light-colored face paint on some folks – but 
are not knowledgeable enough to know what we are looking at. There is also a Muslim population, evidenced by women wearing a range of associated attire, from head scarves to full coverings.
– Mae Sot is more condensed: narrower roads, more people per square meter, thicker traffic.
– Mae Sot has way-better food.
After getting a bungalow at Ban Thai Guest House, we walked into the town. The market area was very crowded and busy. Lots of fun things for sale, like toads with their bellies facing upward, and slit open to expose their innards (Jen thinks this is done to show customers what they are buying); live river eels; and large cockroaches. There were lots and lots of fish for sale, along with chicken and other meats. Nothing was on ice, of course.
Tasty stuff, I reckon.
For dinner, we hit the Bai Fern restaurant again. The spicy salads here are crazy good.
We finished the night off with a game of gin (I kicked ass).
Yes…we are an old, married couple.
The next morning started with tolerable instant coffee at the hotel, followed by a quest into town for a vegetarian breakfast. The first stop was Khrua Canadian restaurant. We met the owner, a heavy Canadian guy sitting outside the joint, who said he had no vegetarian options. He did, however, accurately point us to a vegetarian food stall a couple blocks away.
This place is located on Th Prasat Withi street, a block and a half east of the street on which Khrua Canadian is located. Can’t tell you what it’s called, but the signs say vegetarian food. It was fairly good stuff, costing only 100 baht for the both of us. The lady who runs it does not speak English, and we were striking out on the communications front until a young local guy pulled up on a motor bike. He spoke a fair amount of English, and was able to verify that everything was vegan-friendly.
Two side notes here…
First, I feel like a knucklehead when I encounter someone in the middle of nowhere, who probably hasn’t completed a secondary education, but speaks two, three, or four languages to some reasonable degree. Here I am with a masters degree, and I can barely communicate in my native tongue.
Second, we received directions to Khrua Canadian restaurant from a guy in a jewelry shop. After we had walked about a block away, we turned to see that he had raced after us to make sure he hadn’t given us inaccurate directions. How often does that happen in the States?
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a 7/11 store (that’s right…an air conditioned and US-sterile 7/11 in the middle of a Thai-Burma border town). We thought we’d pick up some beer at a savings over restaurant costs. Well, it was 9:00am, and they told us they couldn’t sell it until 11:00am. The cashier pointed at a sign behind the counter that posted the ordinance. Who would have thunk it…a blue law in this town to rival blue laws in the bible belt of the American Deep South?
Well, we did manage to buy a couple beers a hundred meters later at a furniture store, so there is still hope for secularism.
After that – and not having opened the beer at this early hour, for those wondering – we rented a bicycle at the hotel and peddled the seven kilometers west to the Friendship Bridge that spans the river between Thailand and Burma. The road here is a six lane, divided affair; with shops and official-looking buildings and lodging and houses of a sort sprinkled here and there along it’s sides.
The bridge itself is just that – a bridge. It’s an unremarkable, white, concrete thing. On the Thai side, there’s a market and people milling about. Not really all that interesting.
From there, it was back to town for lunch at Aiya restaurant (you can read about it by clicking here).
We stayed around our bungalow and the hotel for a while after that, Jen working on photos and me working on writing this great stuff you are reading right now.
After dark, we walked into town, first having dinner at…yet again…Bai Fern Restaurant. Jen ordered the spicy kale salad for a third time, asking if they could make it less spicy (it is a fantastically spicy dish, along the lines of a very hot papaya salad).
Well, we thought we had conveyed the idea of a less spicy salad; but it appears we conveyed the opposite. It came out crazy hot, although Jen still downed half of it. The stuff is just that good.
I jumped in on the remaining half of Jen’s salad, which caused my head to release such vast quantities of sweat that it looked like a sprinkler system had been turned on. I grew up in Louisiana for the most part, and use Tabasco sauce on everything short of ice cream, and this kale salad was spanking me.
Jen has become a spicy food studette.
From the restaurant, we wandered through the downtown area to see what night life existed in Mae Sot. We couldn’t find any such thing. It was 8:30pm, and all the shops were closed or closing. We had read that there are a couple bars to the west of our hotel (the opposite direction of downtown), but we weren’t really interested and headed to our bungalow for a game of gin and some sleep.
I kicked ass on gin.
The next morning, we ate at Bai Fern again, and went back to the market so that Jen could have another go at photos there.
The market was a barrage of smells. Jen called it an olfactory assault. There were micro-environments of odors: rotting meat here, bad fish there, 
fermenting garbage, flowers, etc. All these smells happened within a few meters of each other, and it was a bit overwhelming at times, to the point that we purchased some cilantro to smell as an antidote.
For me, the worst area was the one that had the toads and eels and roaches for sale.
After the market, we went back to the hotel, where Jen finally kicked my ass in gin.
From there, it was off to the Khao-Mao Khao-Fang restaurant. This was a three kilometer walk in the mid-day heat, but we needed to stretch our legs. (To read a review of the restaurant, click here.)
Then back to the hotel. The sky was boiling with low, black clouds, and everyone was getting ready for rain; so, we grabbed a taxi of sort. He asked for 100 baht, I bartered down to 60 baht; and on arrival he bartered back to 80 baht. I guess I suck at bartering.
As I write, it is raining slightly, after a bit of thunder.
Tomorrow, we will try to head north into more rural areas.
