On Wednesday, 6 February, we left the banks of the Kok River at 8:30 for a ride up through the range of mountains that separated the Kok river basin with the Nam Mae Chan river valley.
Long day in the saddle, with 5:43 moving time, covering 77.83 miles and more than 5,300 feet of vertical climbing. The day was also pretty warm, after we came down out of the mountains, and the temperatures were in the low eighties. 
Wednesday was Chinese New Year and we rode through a small village where the children were out stopping cars and asking for donations for their school. Although the obvious choice for a funding source, I'm afraid we looked just too much like space creatures with our skinny tire bicycles and spandex shorts for the children to dare approach us. But, they waved and we then spent most of the morning climbing, dropping down, climbing again as the hills rolled upwards and then down to Pasang.
Just north of Pasang, we stopped for a nice bowl of noodles and chicken, with loads of fish sauce. I'd come to enjoy a hearty Thai food lunch at midday on a long ride, since it really sat well and digested quickly while in the saddle after lunch. Of course, eating in roadside places is a dangerous game, since sitting on a skinny bike seat doing 23 mph is not where you want to come down with stomach problems. Markus suffered from too much spice on one ride, but it might have taken his mind off his sore knees. (In Markus' case, enthusiasm actually trumped preparation and he survived averaging more than 120 km per day despite never having ridden over 35 km in a day before.) 
So, how did they know we were not Burmese refugees? We were waved through dozens of police checkpoints over the two days near the Burma and Laos borders. Although there are no good figures, they estimate that there may be over 50,000 people who have fled the violence in Rangoon and elsewhere throughout Myanmar. Khun Game pointed out worker "line-up" areas, where the Burmese come to stand and wait for employers to drive by and pick them up by the truckload and at much lower prices than the Thais will accept. Khun Game was a bit surprised when I told him that there were similiar areas in cities all over the US where illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America assemble looking for work each morning.
Of course, this entire region used to be an illicit opium producing area, until the US Government came through with eradication and crop substitution. Now, you can find fields of garlic, tobacco and one heck of a lot of strawberries. There were perhaps 50 strawberry stands as we rode the final kilometers north into Mae Sai, the big border crossing with Myanmar. I stopped at the first stand that I rode past and bought a bottle of strawberry wine from a nice but shrunken-up old lady, not realizing that there were 49 others further down the road, full of much juicier strawberries.
Rumors in Chiang Mai and Bangkok are that the entire area is now a transit point for crystal meth, being produced in Myanmar. Sounds like a bad substitution to me, but probably more profitable than strawberries and garlic.
In the photo below, if you look carefully at the sign, you will see that we were into the endogenous varieties on Wednesday and not interested in stopping in at the Opium Museum. 
We stopped at the border, walked around the "Friendship Bridge" and were not tempted by any of the cheap Chinese goods that flow into Thailand across Myanmar (China is just 70 miles away from Mae Sai, across Myanmar and along the Laotian border.)
The day ended with a crosswind flat and fast ride eastward to the town of Golden Triangle, sitting on the banks of the Mekong River. During the rainy season, the big freighters bring huge quantities of Chinese commercial goods down from Kunming and the Yunnan Province. These days it is just a sleepy city, living off a notorius reputation. We stayed in a basic cottage hotel, where we ate peanuts, drank strawberry wine and Heineken and ate at a perfectly charming little hovel, where I had wild pig and fried noodles.
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