On Saturday I planned to accompany some friends to the border market to buy some furniture for their new place. The border market is about a 20 minute bike ride from MaeSot, but since there was the chance we might have large items to bring back we decided to take a songtao (pickup truck with a covered back). On Friday it rained. A lot. Definitely way more than usual even for the rainy season! This continued all night and into the next day. Heavy, heavy rain. While it is a bit challenging to deal with this kind of weather when one's primary mode of transportation is a bike, I did manage to find a few positive aspects of all this rain...
1. It got cooler!
2. Creative rain attire. Most people either wore ponchos or gave in completely and didn't wear anything. Several folks had umbrella hats. One little boy walked alongside his father wearing absolutely nothing and seemed quite pleased with himself. But the guy who took the cake was wearing a full body poncho (a jumpsuit in poncho material). I need to get me one of those before the next big rain...
Our group of five met up and consolidated bikes at my friends' house around 10am and waited for the weather to clear. Happily it did...but in the time it took us to walk down the stairs to the outside the rain was at it again! We all either poncho-ed or umbrella-ed up (I did both) and started our walk toward the Burmese market where it was rumored we could find a songtao. Water was starting to collect around the roads and we found the entire area in front of the hospital a pool of shin deep water. Thus we detoured down a side street where we found shelter in a Burmese tea shop, a nice halfway point in our 15 minute walk to the market. Again, we hoped the rain would subside and were happy to people watch and eat samosas for a bit. Finally after an hour it was time to make a decision. In the end we decided to buck up and go...but had to cross through this to get to the songtao...
If you think that water looks blacker than it should be, you are spot on. This was a black river about ankle deep running through the food market. The locals are real troopers for continuing to sell in this weather! About halfway through this walk my friend Jo hitched us a ride on a passing pickup truck. Not all of us got a ride....
Sorry boys...so we made it to the end of the black river. At this point the boys went off in search of a songtao and as I understand it got on one going the wrong way before they jumped off and found where another would get us. Somewhere between 20-23 people and numerous large containers of commerce fit on this songtao. Here we are all piled in...
After all 23 people were in we set off! While we made a few stops along the way we were sure this songtao was actually going to the border market. Turns out, while it made most of the journey, it wasn't. Just before the market we turned left down a looooong road leading to some residential areas and ended up having to hop off. Thanks again to Jo's quick thinking we caught a ride back up the road (and hill) to the highway on a pickup truck, just as it began to rain hard. Again.
Things at the market were interesting but relatively uneventful. No furniture was purchased but we did manage to find a really neat-oh Burmese antique store with some crazy old items. Alarm clocks, lots of hand-painted pottery, and really old rusting toy cars. We finally headed back about 3ish and found food in a delicious Burmese tea shop. Yogurt Lassi, tomato salad, and chicken dumplings...yummy. To get there some of us did have to walk through the black river again, but it was worth it.
After a third black river crossing my friends did purchase some desks and we all slopped back to their house to get bikes, passing through a final river that was overflowing from a saturated field. There was a bit of current in this river, and as my friend and I waited hopefully for another nice pickup truck (that never came) we noticed tad poles swimming out of the drain into the field, locals fishing for either fish or frogs with nets in the flooded field, and a team of four men cutting a path for the water to flow into another field so it wouldn't flood the entire road. I wish I had a picture of this scene but don't...
When I finally biked across town to my house I found many major roads flooded (ankle-shin deep) with muddy water. Just when I thought the worst was over I found the road that T's my street had turned into a muddy river with a medium strength current. I managed to bike through this and got home where I stayed until the next day!
The rain turned out to be caused by the remains of a typhoon and the flooding in the city was actually caused when the authorities opened the city reservoir because not doing so would have caused more damage. While a lot of 'lakes' we around Monday and Tuesday I must say that the public works folks did a great job of getting rid of most standing water and clearing out the drains of debris.
Now that you know everything you ever wanted to about flooding in MaeSot, I'll sing off...
1. It got cooler!
2. Creative rain attire. Most people either wore ponchos or gave in completely and didn't wear anything. Several folks had umbrella hats. One little boy walked alongside his father wearing absolutely nothing and seemed quite pleased with himself. But the guy who took the cake was wearing a full body poncho (a jumpsuit in poncho material). I need to get me one of those before the next big rain...
Our group of five met up and consolidated bikes at my friends' house around 10am and waited for the weather to clear. Happily it did...but in the time it took us to walk down the stairs to the outside the rain was at it again! We all either poncho-ed or umbrella-ed up (I did both) and started our walk toward the Burmese market where it was rumored we could find a songtao. Water was starting to collect around the roads and we found the entire area in front of the hospital a pool of shin deep water. Thus we detoured down a side street where we found shelter in a Burmese tea shop, a nice halfway point in our 15 minute walk to the market. Again, we hoped the rain would subside and were happy to people watch and eat samosas for a bit. Finally after an hour it was time to make a decision. In the end we decided to buck up and go...but had to cross through this to get to the songtao...
If you think that water looks blacker than it should be, you are spot on. This was a black river about ankle deep running through the food market. The locals are real troopers for continuing to sell in this weather! About halfway through this walk my friend Jo hitched us a ride on a passing pickup truck. Not all of us got a ride....
Sorry boys...so we made it to the end of the black river. At this point the boys went off in search of a songtao and as I understand it got on one going the wrong way before they jumped off and found where another would get us. Somewhere between 20-23 people and numerous large containers of commerce fit on this songtao. Here we are all piled in...
After all 23 people were in we set off! While we made a few stops along the way we were sure this songtao was actually going to the border market. Turns out, while it made most of the journey, it wasn't. Just before the market we turned left down a looooong road leading to some residential areas and ended up having to hop off. Thanks again to Jo's quick thinking we caught a ride back up the road (and hill) to the highway on a pickup truck, just as it began to rain hard. Again.
Things at the market were interesting but relatively uneventful. No furniture was purchased but we did manage to find a really neat-oh Burmese antique store with some crazy old items. Alarm clocks, lots of hand-painted pottery, and really old rusting toy cars. We finally headed back about 3ish and found food in a delicious Burmese tea shop. Yogurt Lassi, tomato salad, and chicken dumplings...yummy. To get there some of us did have to walk through the black river again, but it was worth it.
After a third black river crossing my friends did purchase some desks and we all slopped back to their house to get bikes, passing through a final river that was overflowing from a saturated field. There was a bit of current in this river, and as my friend and I waited hopefully for another nice pickup truck (that never came) we noticed tad poles swimming out of the drain into the field, locals fishing for either fish or frogs with nets in the flooded field, and a team of four men cutting a path for the water to flow into another field so it wouldn't flood the entire road. I wish I had a picture of this scene but don't...
When I finally biked across town to my house I found many major roads flooded (ankle-shin deep) with muddy water. Just when I thought the worst was over I found the road that T's my street had turned into a muddy river with a medium strength current. I managed to bike through this and got home where I stayed until the next day!
The rain turned out to be caused by the remains of a typhoon and the flooding in the city was actually caused when the authorities opened the city reservoir because not doing so would have caused more damage. While a lot of 'lakes' we around Monday and Tuesday I must say that the public works folks did a great job of getting rid of most standing water and clearing out the drains of debris.
Now that you know everything you ever wanted to about flooding in MaeSot, I'll sing off...
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