The Invisible Lines

I managed to convince my Ang Mo friend (Mr G) to exercise more often by taking a walk. So for the pass few weeks. On and off, If I am not running for the day, I would join him in his walk around the neighbourhood.

Today, we had an interesting experience. We decided to take a walk to the nearby Friendship bridge just a km away from our house (yup, its that close). This bridge is already constructed but there are many constructions still going on at the entrance of the bridge. Mainly the immigration checkpoints and custom houses. We walked straight into the compound and none of the security guys stopped us. Maybe because Mr G is a farang :P. Anyway, there were two pathways in the construction site to the bridge. We took the nearer one which is on the left and head on to the bridge. Again, no one stopped us. All the people we saw were construction workers. No immigration or border police at all. Closer to the bridge was a custom house (like those we see in Woodlands or 2nd link in Singapore. And we could see the bridge from where we stand.

Feeling adventurous on how far we could go before being chased off. We crossed the semi-constructed immigration building and went straight to the bridge. On the bridge, we met a guy on bicycle that told us we could not go any further. We thanked him for the information and he left. This left 2 of us alone on the bridge! And its wide open (no barricades at all!). I looked at Mr G and smiled. He smiled back and we crossed the bridge... Maesai River (the border) was just below us. We stopped at the other end of the bridge anf officially, we were in Thachilek, Burma without any passports. hehehe. We actually wished to continue but we saw a Burmese guard sitting about 60m away from us. He didn't noticed us so we decided its enough and headed back. On our way back, we took the right path this time as we already took the left path. We were chatting on why there are no border police or immigration officers at all?? We were speculating that maybe today is a public holiday (Teacher's day in Thailand) so maybe all at home?? Well, just when we were joking about it, we saw some containers (make shift offices) on the path we were walking and discovered it was the immigration office!! We walked pass but an officer came out and questioned us where we are going. So we just told him that we were just touring around and he just left us.. haha.. He seemed a bit puzzled why we walked out from Burma to Thailand...

Anyway, its an interesting experience and reminds me of something too. Yanni the famous composer also said this before. An astronaut was in space, looking at our beautiful earth. He tried to spot a country and could not do it. Something was missing and he learn what is missing, the "lines" that supposes to be borders were missing. :) All these artificial lines are made by us. There are no lines in the beginning and we made these "lines" to differentiate ourselves, while humanity all along is the same.