Laos border - Snake and scorpion whisky

Isn’t it an awesome experience to  cross the river to step into another country ?! No visa . No immigration! Yes. That’s Golden triangle located  in the Chiang Mai province of Thailand.  This is the point where three countries, Thailand, Burma and Laos meet together. They are just separated by the muddy Mekong river. All that you need to do is to take a boat to reach the other side, to step in to Laos.

As we boarded the boat  from Thailand, within 5 minutes our guide pointed to  a standing Buddha statue towards left side and said ‘ Look at the border of Myanmar’ ! A few meters away there were few buildings representing Myanmar’s  architectural elegance. Towards the right hand side he pointed and said ‘Now that is Laos.’ I suddenly remembered Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia. He  once wished that his dream is to roam round the world without visa and passport. That was his dream of becoming a world citizen!

I was told that the   golden triangle was once an opium growing   place.Now this unique place has grown into a tourist place with many casino buildings. Thailand doesn’t have legal land based casinos. This is the place that the Thai people intrude to test their luck in the luxury casino centers.

We skipped the casino centers and  reached  to  the other shore of the river – Laos country.  The place was full of shops selling souvenirs, currency, China made bags with all labels from Gucci to Louis Vuitton :- ) There were  few restaurants as well.

That doesn’t attract me after seeing markets after markets in Chiang Mai. The jars full of liquid and  some creepy stuff  inside intrigues me. Guess what ?! While the first jar had a   dead cobra, second had a huge lizard and the third one was with turtles and scorpions.The last jar had tiger penis. Our guide explains that the liquid is  rice whisky infused with the dead animals. 

Each one has a therapeutic value. Turtle for long life, Lizard whisky for skin beautification and tiger penis as an aphrodisiac. Being vegetarian and coming from Indian traditional background it was hard to believe. People could drink this. Well, that is travel. It takes us to the world which we wouldn’t have imagined in dreams as well.

People started trying out the shots. As earlier confided neither I am adventurous about food nor brave hearted to try out fried insects or exotic whisky with snake. I  was happy clicking them. Unfortunately, I have deleted  all the pictures of the day from my camera while deleting old picture to accommodate space . I can’t forgive me for this. All that i have now are a  few pics clicked from my phone :-(

There  were shops selling bottles of the animal infused whiskey and some of them were combination of one or two animals.  I can’t comment on the taste. But heard that it was mild in taste with the flavor of the animal inside. Snake and scorpion whisky bottles in different sizes were available for sale.

Have you ever tried such things? Pls share..

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