Michael Batson

They say knowing things in the Golden Triangle is much more dangerous than not knowing them. One journalist reported rather it’s better to be ignorant than complicit, and it’s better to be complicit than dead. This watery intersection has had lots of things though arguably few of them on the surface of it, good things. These have included; ethnic militias, civil wars, gambling, smuggling, drugs, human trafficking, piracy, rogue paramilitaries, and genocide, all at the notoriously lawless region of the Mekong where Laos, Burma, China, and Thailand intersect. The area is an historical geographic crossroads, linguistically and culturally also. Now it’s a site of rapidly shifting geopolitics as China muscles in, and fast increasing trade – both licit and illicit. These days you can throw in tourism. Let’s face it, anything for a buck.The locals refer to this river junction as Sop Ruak where the Mekong meets the Ruak River, which comes out of the Shan hills. For tourists it’s the meeting point of three nations and two rivers and usually visited by day tours run from the Thai city of Chiang Mai. You get lunch, a menu of destinations packed into a day, and lots of driving. There are bars, restaurants, tacky tourist shops selling wares and souvenirs, and boat rides across the river. It’s all fairly innocuous on the surface of it. A short ride from the tri-border meeting point of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand you can get an education on the history of opium, all 5000 years of it