On our way to Burma (Myanmar) for our visa dance, that interlude travelers to Thailand are obligated to do every thirty or sixty days depending on your original entry allowance. We have two sixty day visas for Thailand so only have to boogie once over the boarder. On account of never having visited Thailand’s neighbor to the West, we’ve chosen a vacation from our vacation on the road to Mandalay.
Burma’s visa requirements are more onerous than Thailand, so we needed to go into Bangkok to get our passports pre-stamped with entry visas before the journey. In the photo above you can see about a quarter of those waiting just to get in the door of the visa section of the Myanmar embassy. Surprisingly they processed well over 400 applications in the 3 hour window. This is the most farangs (tourists) we’ve been around since arriving two months ago at the airport. Always a very interesting melange of people, quite an assembly of characters tilted more toward millennials in beach-wear. Senior citizens or even the middle-aged were by far the minority. Of course, what those tourists probably did was have their passports processed by the numerous agents with handfuls and briefcases full of applications standing adjacent to us.
Three hours later we could return and claim, with all 400 or more of those same travelers, our passports with that full page stamp permitting entry anytime in the next 28 days. We managed to get in just over 17 km of urban hiking that day between all the trip to and from the embassy.
The oven pictured above was just one of the street-side images we saw during our short day in Bangkok. According to Mike Taylor this is the way bread is cooked in Iran filled with goat cheese and onions and dipped in yogurt. We should have stopped.
Since we learned Ayutthaya is only a short train ride outside of Bangkok we always overnight in this ancient capital of Siam. After a rest and a couple of evening street vendor wok-fried omelettes at our favorite sidewalk restaurant, we’re now ready for a quick reconnoiter of Thailand’s neighbor.
