PREFACE
In April 2004, we went from our house in Bang Na to Bueng Chawaak in Supanburi Province and Mae Sot in Tak Province.
I am finally posting this in December 2019 to the website for the first time, almost 16 years after the trip.
This page is based from the old emails that I sent out after the trips, and the photos that I uploaded to photobucket dot com so long ago.
In those days I had not heard of HTML, nor had I known of any blogging spaces yet.
Bueng Chawaak in Supanburi is between the route from our house in Bang Na, Bangkok to Mae Sot in Tak. See photo on the right. The trip to Bueng Chawaak was a day trip.
We spent another few days going from Bangkok to Mae Sot, and then to Phop Phra, stopping by the entrance to Pha-Charoen (or written as Pa-Charoen) Water Fall, and Baan Wallei (Wale). The latter was located at the tip of the map on the left in the above.
Bueng Chawaak
Chawaak is in Supanburi, about 200 km from Bangkok. The place used to have nothing but a lake amidst green paddy fields. The word beung means lake. Mr. Ban-haan, the former Prime Minister of Thailand (nickname: the “Walking ATM”) managed to turn this place into an amusement park with lots of crocodiles and fish. There is an 8-meter long underwater tunnel for the visitors to observe many kinds of fish. The tunnel is shorter than those in Singapore and Pattaya, but the entrance fee to this amusement park is less than one third of them.
Richard Barrow had a very good review in 2009 at Thai Blogs dot com with excellent photos. (That was five years after our visit, and the place must have been more well-known by then.) The tunnel photo was from his blog.
In 2004 we took only a few photos outside the aquarium. Weather was hot as it was mid April, our summer.
After the trip we returned home and celebrated Ken's belated birthday:
View larger photos at my Google Album :
2004 Apr: Bueng Chawaak,
2004 Apr: Ken's Birthday
* Note added in Dec 2019:
In March 2008 we revisited Beung Chawaak with my visiting parents:
2008 Mar: Bueng Chawaak
←More photos.
Maesot
Mae Sot in Tak Province is by Moei River, facing Myawady, Myanmar.
The hotel we stayed was new and looked much better compared to other hotels in town.
Photo on the left was taken at Hotel lobby.
Baan Wallei
From there we turned south about 30 km and reached a very small village called Baan Wallei. This village belongs to Phop-Phra District, which is located to the south of Mae Sot District. The only reason we left the main street and made a turn to this rather unknown village was simply because the name sounded like the English word "valley". Else, we had not known anything about it.
Info in Dec 2019 : Google Map and Wikipedia has the spelling of the village in English as Wale, and it says there are 7 villages in Wale. But for the sake of pronunciation please allow me to spell it as Wallei in this blog. Obviously in 2019 Baan Wallei is no more a tiny village by Moei River at the Thai-Myanmar border.
Back to the past... Here are the photos of Baan Wallei in 2004:
It was peaceful and somewhat boringly quiet at Baan Wallei border when we visited in the afternoon of one of the Songkran holidays in 2004. Except for no more than 2-3 military-clad persons it did not look like a border town at all. This was very different from other big border checkpoints where there were long lines of of people.
Photos below: Thailand on this side of the river, and Myanmar on the other side. Moei River in this area looked no more wider than one of our canals in Bangkok! However, this part of Myanmar was controlled by Karen, a minority group that did not really want their land to be part of Myanmar. Disruptions on that side of the river might happen anytime.
The bridge over Moei River at Baan Wallei was so narrow, short, and extremely fragile!
Below: Left -- Me and Ken at the Thai side of the bridge.
Other photos showed Sompote and Ken with Karen controlled Myanmar in the far back.
From afar, we could see their flags and a photo of their leader.
That afternoon we saw naked Myanmar (Karen, actually) kids swimming happily in Moei River that was so narrow like a stream. Karen women were washing clothes at the river bank. The water looked clean and clear. I doubt if these people really needed any border passes to cross over.
The soldiers on the Thai side were very friendly to us. One of them told us the "border" had been re-opened only at the beginning of the month.
We could have simply walked across to the other side of the river without fuzzing with border-pass or whatever paper since this was not the place that tourists would likely visit, nor were there anyone to stop us. However, we just walked to the middle of that small bridge, took some pictures, and quickly turned back. The bridge looked too fragile for me to venture on. Oh well, maybe we will try the next time…
At Mae Sot we could crossed the new and big and sturdy Friendship Bridge over Moei River to Myawady in Myanmar, which was a lot larger town than the little village we saw on the other side of the river at Baan Wallei. But in order to cross the border we had to fill out the forms and pay, while there was no assurance of the security over there. We would never know when the next attack on the other side of the river would begin.
Better stay safe and stick to this side of the river!
Anyways, it was interesting seeing another country in such close distance.
Phop-Phra
We left Baan Wallei and soon arrived at a very exotic town gate.
The signs on the road said Phop-Phra, but the sign on the gate says "Pher-Pha", which was its ancient name. Phop-Phra literally means meeting Buddha. It was said that in the past, the place was so remote that whoever traveled through this place would surely be covered with mud because the road was terrible and there was heavy rain almost all year round.
According to Wikipedia,
Originally the area was named Pho Pha (เพอะพะ), which in the Karen language means 'swamp area', so the name was changed to have a more elevated meaning.
The place we took photo of the ancient gate had a nice waterfall nearby. It was called Pha-Charoen Waterfall. We did not spend much time exploring the waterfall as it was getting late in the afternoon.
View these photos at my Google Album :
2004 Apr : Mae Sot, etc
Excessive Cadmium
In 2004, Phop-Phra was in the news. The local people in the small villages in this region had been suffering from itai-itai symptom, which was the same as what the people in Toyama, Japan suffered. This was due to consuming local drinking water and rice that contained too much cadmium from the waste of nearby zinc mining companies.
Itai-itai in Japanese is also an exclamation that means “Ouch, ouch”,
or “it hurts-it hurts!”
More info from wikipedia:
Itai-itai disease.
I therefore was concerned when we ate at a local restaurant in Phop-Phra.
They offered rice for free...! Yikes...
In 2004 I wrote:
"While the Japanese government already helped their residents,
our government is still 'investigating' but has not done anything to help these villagers yet.
This is not a war zone but life here is not safe!"
In December 2019 I found an
article
by Bangkok Post, dated November 14, 2018 that said
"Cadmium-sickened villagers awarded B16m compensation".
Such long waiting! But good to know!
But I cannot help wondering whether the contaminated land has been cleaned up....