Updated update

Joe is back in Yangon from his trek in the wilds of Chin state. He'll be back here in Bangkok late tonight. In an e-mail yesterday, he said the trek was memorable. At a village celebration he witnessed the slaughter of a bullock and a pig and said he may yet become a vegetarian. He has many good pictures, including one of a Chin woman playing a nose flute (but not of a Nose woman playing a chin flute). Photos should appear on the blog later this week.
I'm working on my Strachey book. I've told a couple of people that I now know enough about Thailand to know how little I know. Anyway, I'll just use what it is I know, if only I can figure out what it is I know.
I've gone back over the Myanmar blog and fixed some typos and other minor errors. One was a spelling for Aung San Soo Kye that I think I made up.
I just learned that we will have to do a "visa run." Tourists entering Thailand receive a 30-day visa and cannot have it extended for more than a week. We're not leaving the country until May 4, so we'll have to do what other farangs do---apparently it is a cunning feature of industrial tourism in Southeast Asia---and cross a border and then come right back with a new Thai 30-day visa. Most people take the bus to a Laos border town for the turn-around, so we probably will, too. I've always been curious about that border (last year we flew in and out of Laos). The Laos drive on the right, the Thais on the left. What happens in the middle of the border bridge over the Mekong? Maybe I'll find out. (In 1963 I was in Addis Ababa on the day the Ethiopians switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. People were terrified and traffic moved at a crawl. The problems began several days later.)