Another volunteer on site, Maggie, was asked to move to Doi Luang for 3 weeks to prepare six students for the same test my night students are taking (part of the same organization, butit's a different branch). Doi Luang is about an hour away by motorbike, just a little further east of the Golden Triangle. Since Maggie's class only meets at night, she's often left on her lonesome during the day in Doi Luang (which is much more of a barn than Mae Sai is), so I decided to visit her on Wednesday after the radio show, while I'd have 6 hours before I'd have to go home for the night class.



I met up with Maggie at the Golden Triangle, where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet up. You can take a small boat over to Laos and there are a series of small markets and a few caged animals on display.




Maggie makes fun of me for disputing the fact that this is a bear. No really, what the hell is this?
You first look at this animal and from a distance, it looks like a bear. Then it looks up to you and it's got non-bear like features. Some cross between a pig and a lemur perhaps? It also pants the way my family dog, Tony, used to pant when he was still around. Then, this bear-like creature gets up on his hind legs and reaches ontop of his cage and wraps his FINGERS around the top. Not his paws, and not just his claws, his fingers. I'm telling you. Someone out there has to know. Tell me: What IS this guy? Docile enough to let us pet him, in any case. He's fed juice boxes of soy milk. That's pretty much all that's in his cage. It doesn't look like he gets out much, if at all. We wanted to take him on the boat with us, but we figured we'd be causing problems for all parties involved....except for maybe the monkey-bear.




This, by the way, is a bottle of whiskey with a real dead snake in it. ya know how people put worms in their tequila? People put amphibians in their whiskey in Laos. Geckos and centipedes too. We could sample whiskey that had one of those bigger sized snakes, but I just wasn't compelled to do shots at 10am on Wednesday morning...or to drink snake juice.