Market of Eden: The White Temple, Chiang Rai, & Mae Sai Visa Run

Mae Sai is a town with a bridge crossing into Burma from Thailand. It's a place people go to extend their tourist visas. Locals there sell lots of fruit wine and the other usual Thai thingy-ma-bobs. And that's really all that can be said about the town of Mae Sai.

The actual town of Mae Sai is not the interesting part about this trip. As a traveller you might have to make a visa run now and then, and many stories are less than encouraging. My own experiences with visa runs have left me running back to my temporary city of Chiang Mai. But the trip to Mae Sai can be made into a great little adventure. Here's what you'll need in your imaginary adventure bag:

• A vehicle - preferably a hired 110cc scooter, so that you can experience all that lovely plastic rattling and coughing while you drive at 80km along the highway.
• A passenger - this has to be someone who doesn't complain about having a sore backside, or not having toilet stops for several hours.
• Toilet roll - for when you actually do find a bathroom.
• A towel - you can sit on this to ease your sore backside, and use it to dry you off after splashing about in rivers along the way.
• Sunscreen - the amount of times humans have ended up looking like lobsters because they "forgot the sunscreen" must be astronomical.
• Clothes - I would recommend two shirts and a pair of pants for the more brutish of our species, and a sundress, bikini, lingerie, tank top, shorts, jersey, t-shirt, jeans, high heels and make-up, all in a Louis Vitton bag, for the more sensible of our species. Not! Go as minimal as possible - you're the one who has to lug it around everywhere you go. Plus you're weighing down that 110cc scooter.
• Camera - and the charger.
• Mosquito spray - you think you know all about mosquitoes? Welcome to the world's most incomprehensibly mean mosquitoes. I think they lacked love growing up.
• A bad sense of direction - this talent proves to be invaluable when you find yourself parked at the top of a mountain exclaiming, "I've found the top of the world!"
• An easygoing nature - you're about to eat at places on the side of the road that will put all sorts of creatures on your plate, and you're about to stay at places where the ceiling drips brown goo - into your eye. You're probably also about to drink all night in a dodgy little bar when it's election weekend, and therefore drinking is temporarily banned. On top of that, you're going to come across hundreds of people trying to sell you all the same touristy junk they try and sell you in Chiang Mai. And because you forgot the sunscreen, you're going to be horribly grumpy and sunburnt. All in all, you've got to have taken a massive dose of chill pills when you were a teenager, and they're still busy working their way through your system now. Mai bpen rai, no worries, hakuna matata.