International waters

A cold morning, a final temple, coffee and visa photo's for Laos, midday at the bus station and a small, local, bus up the road to the northern point of this part of the journey. Once again following the vacant footsteps of the improbable past.

I think I could get to like Chiang rai, a decent hostel and enough time to wander around a bit. But we make our choices and find the paths which spring from them, maybe across the border time slows down…

But here and now some time travel as the bus is full to bursting and then half a dozen chickens arrive fighting at their  enclosure, cardboard boxes preventing then from attaining true chaos. And, as ever, the rising of a new destination arrives upon their song, the bus chuntering out of the station, a cob of corn and the road north…

Hills begin rising on both sides as we pass the city boundary; tree lined slopes risen above rice paddies, beyond roadside stalls selling small pineapples, a scattering of temples and an urban spraw clinging to the route. Inside a soundtrack of chatter and chickens crowing, the whirring of fans...

And, as seems to be the way of things, later...

Sitting above the sai river, the flowing boundary between Thailand and Myanmar; twenty meters of shallow water curving between hills. Facing each other across the flow a broken village and our inexplicable need to impose borders upon the landscape. A football floats downstream, who's to say which side of the border it bounced over? It's that same old sense of absurdity I suppose, choose a tribe, follow some deity, maybe some subdivision of someone's true faith, true culture. Impose separation upon yourself, distances from that family which encompasses each and every one of us. The river doesn't care, it just flows on, down from the Daen Lao mountains until it finds the sea, no countries only course….