Cycling around Mae Sot District

What could be better than a sunny, 70-degree day on a motorcycle, the wind in your hair as you speed along a small highway in northern Thailand? On the left side of the road, mind you. At such a moment, it seems nothing could possibly be better. The countryside out here is composed of gorgeous, rolling green hills, dramatic cliffs, and robin's-egg skies as far as the eye can see. Although Mae Sot is quaint enough to stave off feelings of claustrophobia, and bustling enough to keep one occupied, it was liberating to break out onto the open road. That is, after a few hours of swerving around at 5 kph, bystanders staring in mild surprise at the silly 'farangs' slowly crashing into mail boxes and flower pots, and falling over like baby cows. After getting the hang of 3rd gear, we decided it was time to make a little trip over to the border, just to get the hang of it. We rode in the shoulder, where traffic is a mix of walkers, runners, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and the occasional parked car. Sounds dangerous, right? Not really. The highways around here feel very safe, other vehicles moving over to give us more than enough room. Drivers here seem more aware than those in the States, in fact. I suspect it's because there's less of an expectation for things to be safe and for the rules of the road to do the driving for us.

As we picked up confidence, we picked up speed and decided to turn around in the direction of Mae Kause Hot Springs about 20km north of town. After we turned off the Asia Highway onto the road to Mae Ramat, Christina and I stopped for gas and some of those delicious sesame things to which we've become irreversibly addicted. Out again, Christina leading the way, she shot four fingers into the air, the signal that it was time for 4th gear. Speed lines stretching behind us for kilometers, we wound our way past bean field after green bean field, eventually taking a right onto a smaller road toward the springs. We had to avoid some pretty serious potholes (another potential explanation for the conscious driving), eventually finding ourselves in a small town, the name of which I have yet to learn. The people there seemed pretty jazzed that a couple of foreign girls were riding through town, waving at us and calling 'hello!' Hello women sitting languidly on the porch in October heat. Hello old man herding his goats. Hello children running and smiling.

We arrived at the hot springs to find a small park with a little geyser pool, wooden bridges, and food stands, shadowed by a sheer cliff face to the west. Mae Kause seemed like a place where Thai families might take the kids on the weekend, and we were the only foreigners there. Observing a few kids playing near the geyser, fishing what looked like a ratan basket of eggs out of the geyser with a stick. We followed suit, buying some 'cai lek' (small eggs) from the 'pu ying' (woman) to put into the 'nam rron' (hot water). While our eggs were boiling, we met a couple of sisters having a picnic dinner. They invited us to join them on their little blanket and we chatted, mostly in English and a bit in Thai. The older sister was with the tourist police and spoke more English than the younger one, who was smiley and shy. We shared our eggs and sesame things with them, they their papaya salad and prawns with us. When we noticed that the sun had disappeared behind the cliff, at the thought of riding home in the dark we bade farewell to the sisters and headed for town. The ride back was even more beautiful in the lowering light, the breeze newly cool, relative familiarity calling us back.

A New Volunteer's Experience in Mae Sot

Motorcyclists, open-air vegetable markets, men kicking rattan balls high into the air, rain storms with a vengeance, goats eating people's flowers, and more dogs than you could ever imagine. These are just some initial impressions since my friend Christina and I arrived in Mae Sot about five days ago, a place that is already beginning to feel like home. We are two engineering students from Stanford University, born and raised in the US, and on a great, green adventure for the next three months. I first heard of BGET when I was performing research for my senior thesis at Bard College back in 2005. I was a physics major, but I wanted to apply the knowledge I had accrued to something practical, something worthwhile. I wanted to "save the world", so to speak.

So I chose to look into possibly building a micro hydropower system on my campus, a project that dramatically changed my professional goals. One day, looking for some reading material on micro hydropower case studies, I came across BGET's website and immediately felt I had found something special. I had been to Burma a couple of times with a volunteer group I had helped to form at Bard. We called ourselves the Children's Expressive Arts project and schlepped bags and bags of paints, paper, and myriads of other fun stuff to dozens of orphanages around Yangon and Mandalay, teaching for about four or five hours at each location and then, as quickly as we came, leaving with nothing but a mountain of art supplies in our wake. Who knows if what we did made a lasting impression on the children or caregivers of these orphanages, though what we did was an incredibly meaningful experience that I will treasure forever. I wanted to go back there and help more, and here was an opportunity to use my expertise to create positive, immediate, and lasting changes in people's lives. There were challenges to face, stories to share, and I wanted to be there.

It wasn't until my first year of grad school at Stanford that I heard about some fellowship opportunities with a company called MAP Royalty, which acquires and manages renewable energy royalty interests primarily associated with wind power. Looking at the list, I was delighted to find BGET as one of the internships and immediately began working on writing the best application I could. So that's how I got here, in this northern Thailand border town of about 150,000 people, depending on who you ask. Every weekday, Christina and I leave our cozy guest house and bike down the busy streets (on the left side) to the BGET office, arriving at 8am. We've been working on helping to size a couple of up-coming micro hydropower systems, which involves lots of spreadsheet calculations. We'll be installing one of these systems in November. For our project with the Global Health Assistance Program, we're also looking at some coolers that will be powered by solar to cool vaccines for Malaria, Japanese Encephalitis, Dysentery, etc. And on Saturday, we worked on building three solar water heating systems for homes in Mae Sot. We'll finish those next Saturday. And just in time for the rainy season to end!

Thanks for reading my post. Stay tuned for more!