Burma Burgers

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"Appropriate Information Technologies, Practical Strategies"
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This is not exactly literature but it is mildly amusing if you are bored and
it is slightly related to Burma.  The author is a noted misanthrope and bane
of soc.culture.thai, among other newsgroups.

Enjoy.

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                              Burma Burgers
                           by Laurence Godfrey

     I barely recall my first visit to Maesai in 1987, so unmemorable
was it.  I have an indistinct image of several encounters with
persistent salesmen offering to sell me piles of Burmese rubies, all of
whom neglected to mention that the merchandise was made of glass.  I
dimly remember drinking whisky with some Thais (perhaps the glass
salesmen) and waking the next morning in a bungalow by the river to find
that my right arm was paralysed, having being trapped under my immense
bulk while I slept.

Could the motorbike be driven 60 km back to Chiang Rai using only my
left hand?  Difficult, because the accelerator is on the right handle,
but probably not impossible to steer the bike by leaning well over the
handlebars and grasping the right side with the left hand.  As luck
would have it, sensation returned to my arm while I attempted to dress
one-handed, and I was able to make a dignified and uncontorted exit from
Maesai.

If I had bought any of the rubies I would probably have found it
difficult not to return and confront the dealers, but as I had resisted
the temptation to make a killing on the gem market I never had any cause
to go back to Maesai.  Well, not until last week while vacationing in
Thailand with my wife, when we decided to take advantage of the open
border and visit Burma.

I was in an unusually belligerent mood on the morning of our proposed
border crossing, having spent an uncomfortable night in a dirty 200 baht
Maesai hotel room, following a day of biking through constant rain and
hordes of dragonflies.  My temper did not improve when the Thai
immigration official insisted that along with our passports we also
provide copies of most of the passport pages.  It deteriorated still
further when it emerged that all the copying shops in the vicinity of
the border are predictably much more expensive than anywhere else in
Thailand.

Finally we crossed the Thai border headed in the direction of Burma,
armed with our day passes from Thai immigration and the $US10 per person
required by the Burmese for entry.  The latter had been purchased
several days beforehand in Chiang Mai, after we were warned that all the
foreign exchange dealers in Maesai suffer from an acute and inexplicable
shortage of $1, $5 and $10 bills.

We went over the bridge and stopped at the Burmese immigration post. 
Now my wife looks Thai, but isn't.  When we visit Thailand she is
constantly mistaken for a Thai.  Sometimes it's amusing but more often
it's irritating, so much so that we have thought of equipping her with a
t-shirt to avert the usual misunderstandings : 'I am NOT a Thai, I DON'T
speak Thai, I am NOT a bargirl, my husband is NOT a sex-tourist (though
he may once have been) etc.'  On the occasion of our Burmese safari we
had hoped to take advantage of her Thai-ness by evading one of the two
$10 entry fees and paying only the 5 baht demanded of the Thais.  It
didn't work and my humour degenerated further.  Then there was $5 for
being allowed to take in the motorbike.  We handed over the dosh.

$25 is a lot to pay to help out an inhumane and malevolent military
dictatorship with their shortage of hard currency, just for the sake of
a few hours confinement inside a trading zone on the Burmese border. 
Twenty-five bucks for the opportunity to spend still more cash in a
market that looked remarkably like any I might find on the Thai side -
at least I wanted a receipt.

A receipt!  No Burmese had ever heard a stranger request.  You mean you
want us to pay you $25 and you don't give us a visa or a receipt, only a
piece of paper that we have to surrender when we leave?  I wanted proof
of payment.

The Burmese are said to speak remarkably good English, indeed an ex-pat
I know in Chiang Mai tells that he was once approached by an indigent in
Rangoon and asked, in the poshest of accents, 'where are you putting up,
old chap?'  Our immigration official was no exception, and a jolly
eloquent argument ensued.  If we didn't like it we could have our money
back and turn around.  The invitation was like a red rag to a bull. 
Yes, I would take back the money if they couldn't give a receipt.  Can I
have it back now please?  He wasn't expecting that - they had already
issued the pieces of paper, our names had already been entered in the
book, it just wasn't possible.

Switzerland is another country where almost everything you want to do
'eez not possible', and I have spent many an entertaining hour arguing
with uniformed Swiss people about why manifestly possible things are
somehow not possible in Switzerland.  Frankly the only authentic
impossibility in Switzerland is that of finding a Swiss with the guts,
conviction and selflessness to fight for the rights and freedoms of
others, but that is another story.  Anyway, I knew how to argue about
impossibilities.

Okay, the Burmese relented, we could have a receipt, but only a hand-
written piece of blank paper, not an official one.  I wanted an official
receipt.  Was it not, after all, an official entry fee paid to an
official of the Burmese government?  If not, we wanted our money back. 
He got angry.  We got our money back.  It was a short but enjoyable trip
to Burma and it had cost us nothing.  We hadn't even had to buy anything
we didn't want in the trading zone.

At last I come to the point of this piece.  On the way back, drenched
with rain and pitted by 30 mph dragonfly impacts, we stopped over at
boring old Chiang Rai (a town that literally stands on a mountain of
heroin money) and encountered that most rare of phenomena - a good Thai
hamburger joint.

Having recently returned from the Philippines I am very wary of ordering
hamburgers from untried establishments.  In Manila one is frequently
served the Bohr-model burger, one in which the relationship of bun to
beef is like that of atom to nucleus, or tennis court to pinhead.  As a
result, I now ask to see the goods before cooking commences.

When, in this particular Chiang Rai enterprise, the waitress showed me a
gigantic bun no less than 9 inches in diameter and claimed it to be the
receptacle for the regular 35 baht burger, my suspicions were mightily
aroused.  I envisaged being served a microscopic disc of flattened beef
marooned at the centre of a vast universe of starch.  But I was wrong. 
When it arrived the burger filled the entire area of the huge bun, and
the meat had not been beaten down to the thickness of gold leaf.  Bloody
good value at 35 baht, as was the chicken sandwich on a very large piece
of french-style bread which we had the next day.

The place is in the street which houses Chiang Rai's farang bars (a few
minutes from the bus station, the Wiang Inn Hotel and the clock tower)
and it's the only burger place there.  At front it looks like a take-
away stall and behind it turns into a decent-sized restaurant.  Prices
are the same front and back.  On glancing at the menu I think I detected
an unfortunate germanic bias, but no Germans were in evidence to disrupt
the digestive process.  I know I should have asked for a receipt, but 
didn't.   (ENDS 1300, 15 pars)  Copyright 1993

Laurence