The alarm goes off way too early, but we manage to leave at 6am. No one of the overlanders is yet awake and the streets are still very calm. At a certain point, we have to leave the main road due to road works and drive through a local village by way of diversion. This we find very nice for we had missed such villages during this trip. We have about 20km bad road and after that we go into the mountains. The path through the mountains is very narrow, that’s why one day the traffic must drive up to the border and the other day away from the border. It’s so narrow we have difficulty passing the many trucks also because they are not really courteous. By the end of the mountain road a bus has a brakedown and is blocking the narrow road. There is a traffic jam because nobody can pass, except for the motorbikes. We count ourselves lucky again for travelling on a motorbike and after some zigzagging through the vehicles we can drive away. We also no longer encounter any annoying trucks. We get on well so, when we see our favourite dish of Myanmar, we reward ourselves with a break.
At the border we enter the immigration office where they have many questions about us: “how did you come in, where is the guide, do you have a permit that allows you to drive in Myanmar”? We say that the guide told us we could cross the border alone and that we do not have a permit. They don’t want to let us go without seeing a permit but we don’t understand how we can fix that (of course we don’t tell them we can call the guide and wait for him to arrive). What’s the big deal anyway, we want to leave Myanmar, not come inside. Ultimately, they tell us we can leave Myanmar but Mickey isn’t allowed to go outside. Then we show the Carnet de Passage and the stamp of the Indo-Myanmar border. We state that this proves that we were allowed to drive in Myanmar but they insist they need to see the permit. After a lot of nagging of our side, we can convince them to let us talk with customs. Customs eventually allows us to leave Myanmar with the bike. We get into Thailand easily. All in all this is still the smoothest border crossing we've been through, after 1.5 hours we drive around in Thailand. We still have 500km ahead of us until we can surprise Kevin’s parents... At least, if our spokes allow us because two are broken again (not the welded ones) and we need to replace them, which takes us 45min. Driving in Thailand is like being back in civilization after four months: major highways and mega stores. We arrive in Bangkok late in the evening and search for the hotel of Kevin's parents. If we turn because we are already past the hotel, we see Kevin’s parents across the street, sitting in the bar. After a few hugs, we go sit on the terrace to talk and have some drinks. Afterwards they bring us to the room they booked for us... after two weeks of camping, the contrast couldn’t be any bigger.

Ready for Thailand

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