I'm in Mae Sai which is the northernmost city of Thailand. This dusty market town is important for us farang as it's another place we can easily extend our Thailand visa. All you do is walk over the bridge to Burma, hand the immigration guy a no-torn-corner 5 dollar bill and he will give you a stamp worth 30 more days of bumbling around Thailand.
I came here by a rented motorbike. It's quite fun to "ride" uphill now, because I feel like I'm actually just riding. Only the muscles in my throttle hand are a little sore.
It normally takes like 6 hours up to the border (from Pai) and another six hours back, but I took it leisurely on the scooter and saw some places I wouldn't have had a chance to see on my mt. bike. I went to Doi Mai Salong. A place famous in the 60s and 70s as a main conduit village of the opium trade from Burma; from here the product headed toward the Golden Triangle in Laos for processing into heroin that was mostly then sold to US solidiers in Vietnam. I still remember my college professor Alfred McCoy, who wrote a book called the Politics of Heroin, talking about this village and it being a place that seemed more like China than Thailand, due to all the KMT soldiers that had settled the place.
In fact, the guesthouse I stayed at was run by a guy from Taiwan. It was fun to talk some chinese again. Ironically, this guy owned a branch of a famous school in Taiwan in the 70s (Seasame Street, in case your interested) and was making tons of money and not working very hard (his description). But, at the end of the 70s a lot of other schools crowded the market (his eg. HESS, the school I worked for) leading him to sell his school for a lot of money. Now he has a guesthouse on top of a mountain in Thailand.
Above is a glass of Oolong Tea from Doi Mae Salong. Apparently, the original tea plants in the area were imported from Taiwan but the taste and quality don't even compare to the Formosan variety in my opinion. It tastes like what my roomate and I in Ilan dubbed xiaoshan cha (small mountain tea).
When it comes to advertising you're tea as "quality" you want the packaging to indicate gaoshan cha (high mountain tea) in the same way 100% Columbian coffee has a stigma of percieved quality. Now, how one defines what is gao (high) I don't know. I believe its something like above 1300 meters the tea plants don't require as much or any pesticides and the ratio of sun to shade to hot to cool is optimal. In Taiwan sometimes I would get a present from private English students' parents in the name of one bao ( bag, pouch, like 300 grams) of oolong tea. On the outside it carried the stamp of gaoshan but on closer inspection of the address it seems it only came from a 300 meters high tea field 30km outside of Ilan. The difference in taste from a real gao to a xiaoshan cha masquerading as a gao is fairly apparent even to the undeveloped tongue.
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