I've spent an entire week in Mae Sai. Tomorrow I hit the road to the next destination.
It was an unlikely place to spend a week, just a little border town in the far north of Thailand, but it was good to just stay still for a while. And I found a nice, cheap bungalow, where I could sit and stare at a magnificent view.
Here's a few more images from this place. First some art from yet another temple:
As is my usual practice, I mostly ate cheap (and really good) noodle soup from street vendors:
Though sometimes, like @dmaggot, I gave in to beer and cookies:
This is massive border post, through which all traffic here between Thailand and Myanmar must pass:
This sign in the market, telling people not to sell things, always made me laugh, considering it's surrounded by people selling things:
And then I climbed another little mountain, to get a view of the monastery and big Buddha statue I wrote about a few days ago:
What's next for me? I'm not completely decided.
The plan was to head east into Laos for a month, but this past week in Mae Sai has been uncomfortably cold. Every night I find myself shivering, as the lows drop to about 8C (45F). A big part of why I came here for the winter was to spend the time sweating in the heat and losing weight, but that's just not happening in the north. The weather reports all say northern Thailand and Laos are going to have lows like this for quite a while.
So I'm thinking, instead of Laos, I'm gonna go south again to southern Thailand and then into Malaysia and Singapore, where it'll be steaming hot, and then maybe Indonesia too...