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T H I S+W E E K > Burma or Bust
D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet
Mondo Weirdo
Passages Readers' Tips and Tales
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, August 19, 1997
Sleeping with elephants
A full list of all
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_______________burma
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the Border Fanatic is a distinct variety of the genus Collector, species internationalis. Cousin to the Visa Junkie and the Pen Pal Groupie, the Border Fanatic actually has little interest in countries themselves, only a remarkable fascination with their borders. Border Fanatics will travel hundreds of miles to see and, at any cost, cross these borders (several times if possible, extra points if the crossing is illegal). Carlos had been to the Canadian border, the Panamanian borders and 15 U.S. state borders -- Four Corners was his idea of Nirvana -- as well as the Mexican border. His great dream was to visit Shenzhen, a city in south China where, he had heard, there was a street that divided Hong Kong from China: Walk on one sidewalk and you were in Chinese territory; walk on the sidewalk opposite and you were in Hong Kong. Carlos was hellbent on making the land crossing into Burma. He had spoken to foreigners who had done it and devoured recountings in the Lonely Planet guide. That Burma was home to one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, was a leg of the fabled Golden Triangle and had sealed its Chinese border to Westerners on account of its fabled heroin traffic only made it more appealing to Carlos, and as our trip approached he waxed rhapsodic on his scheme. As I did not plan to accompany him on his quest, I was not particularly concerned. He probably wouldn't get more than a few days in jail, I reasoned, and as long as he helped watch the bags on the trip there, he could have been going to wrestle alligators for all I cared. We traveled by train first to Kunming, the delightful capital of Yunnan province. There we bought bus tickets down to Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna. There are no trains to Xishuangbanna because of the mountains. The new airport in Jinghong had weekly flights from Kunming, but they were booked for the holidays, and besides, I had been advised to take the bus at least one way. The bus trip was one of the most terrifying and unpleasant I have ever taken, and I would highly recommend it at least once to anyone without dependents who wishes to travel to Xishuangbanna. The bus, a rickety old number packed to bursting with passengers bearing overstuffed bamboo baskets of holidays presents, zoomed up and down a narrow mountain road, through lush jungle foliage and stands of bamboo and around hairpin turns, narrowly missing oncoming buses and trucks. The trip lasted 18 hours over two days, and my fellow Chinese travelers, unused to long road trips, alternately smoked and barfed out the open windows. It was a heady catharsis when we finally rolled into town at noon the following day. Carlos immediately disappeared to plan his border expedition and I settled into the indolent lifestyle of the tropical town. Xishuangbanna is roughly the size of Virginia, nestled against Burma and Laos, split by the Mekong river. Two respectable mountain ranges, the Ailao and the Wulian -- foothills of the Himalayas -- form an obstacle to the construction of train lines from the rest of China. Goods enter and leave by truck via the long and tortuous road route, and until the relatively recent construction of the airport, all visitors had to as well. As a result of these obstacles, the region has more in common with its southern neighbors than with mainland China. The rugged terrain had broken the population into isolated pockets, and as a result, it had one of the most diverse mixes of authentic, practicing minorities in China. Every valley seemed to have developed its own tiny culture distinguished by language and dress. Miao, high and water Dai, Yao, Hani, Zhuang, Yi, Buyi and countless others lived in ethnic groups. Though the men favored the dull blue or green Mao suits of their mainland brethren, the women presented a veritable flower garden of traditional dress. Brightly colored skirts, flowered tops, oddly shaped bamboo hats or fancy headdresses adorned the women, each outfit signifying the wearer's ethnic group, making minority-spotting a common pastime among the foreigners. In fact, the percentage of minorities is so high that China has even seen fit to grant the region semi-autonomous status, something like Hong Kong's. This is doubtless to prevent local unrest, for China never takes any action without being under some kind of pressure. I checked into the Banna Hotel, the standard tourist lodgings. Carlos rented a room in a Dai stilt house. Before we split up, I reminded him that we had to leave by a certain date in order to be home for the start of the following term. He nodded vaguely, thumbing his maps, before disappearing. After a quick wash and a rest, I rented a decrepit Chinese bicycle to tour the town. Jinghong had few buildings taller than four stories. Though much of the architecture was of the typical Communist concrete bunkerhaus school, traditional Dai bamboo stilt houses wedged themselves between the Chinese pillboxes even in the center of town. At the edge of town the streets quickly petered into dirt roads and small clusters of stilt homes, the roads patrolled by hulking black pigs. Orange-robed Buddhist monks seemed to be everywhere in town, strolling the streets, lurking in the pool rooms, buying in the stores. It seemed that every boy younger than 18 was a monk. I learned that this had less to do with religious zeal than with the inadequacy of the region's official educational system. Parents saw a good religious education as preferable to a bad state one or none at all, and so nearly all young men, regardless of temperament, were dutifully enrolled in a local monastery. Thus, it was common to see young monks in saffron robes wearing sunglasses and sneakers and engaged in all sorts of typical teenager behavior, such as playing pool, guzzling beer from a bottle, hanging out with their buddies. Buddhist stupas dotted the countryside, their white rippling outlines like the curves of a soft ice cream cone. Forested hills surrounded flat paddy fields, watered by the Mekong River's annual floods. The Dai stilt houses were everywhere, some perched aloof in a rice field, others clustered amicably in the hillside villages. As minorities, the Dai were exempt from China's one-child policy, and they raised large families beneath the swooping eaves of their thatched roofs, while the livestock lived beneath the high wooden floor. In a nearby village I came across a Buddhist school. The head monk, a plump, middle-aged man with red cheeks and a quick laugh, gave me a tour through the student dormitory. It was a single story ancient wood structure with a few large rooms subdivided into several smaller rooms by makeshift fabric walls, each room packed with beds that were empty over the season's festival, when the boys went home. Afterwards we sat outside and chatted while he smoked and drank rice wine from a jam jar. He offered a swig from his jam jar, but I stuck to tea; in the bottom of his jar, curled up among the herbs and roots, was the biggest centipede I'd ever seen. He claimed to have lived there since he was 8 and to have had three wives, although simultaneously or not was not clear. He smiled and joked, and drew an odd map of the country in chalk on the concrete floor. It showed China as a sort of elbow macaroni bent around Yunnan province, with Canton and Hong Kong lurking off to one side. It was unclear whether this was rooted in a deep mystical Buddhist belief or a bad grasp of geography, or if he was simply putting me on. Or maybe it was the centipede talking. He drew a picture of Chairman Mao on the ground, spat violently, and erased the picture with his sandal. The days stretched on, and I continued to take lazy biking tours of the neighborhood, along with day trips by bus to surrounding towns. I saw less and less of Carlos, and after a week he vanished. Fifteen foreigners pooled their money to rent a van and a guide for a two-hour drive to one of the last remaining bits of China's rain forest. To my disappointment, we spent an hour negotiating a rather muddy trail through some unremarkable woods to a small waterfall, where we snapped a few pictures before threading our way back. There were no bright jungle birds, no tigers or leopards. A few days later I was offered the opportunity to see a baby elephant chained in the square of a nearby village, but I declined. The only tigers and elephants I was to see on the trip were those painted on a wall mural in the restaurant next to the hotel. Meanwhile, second- and third-hand rumors began filtering in from other travelers who claimed to have seen Carlos in the border towns. I talked to Fred, a disagreeable American traveling through Southeast Asia who claimed to have shared a room with Carlos in Menghai. "Crazy guy," said Fred. "Lots of fun, though. A good drinker. Did you know he's trying to get across the border?" The food was perhaps the only real disappointment in Xishuangbanna. Restaurants serving Chinese food were few and awful. Because it was winter, few of the region's tropical fruits were available, and I looked longingly at the green papayas and jackfruits clinging to the trees. One could buy small zhong-zi -- pyramids of sticky purple or yellow rice wrapped in banana leaves -- in the street markets, but except for its odd color, it was identical to gluey white rice. The two Dai restaurants in town, practically the two only restaurants in town, featured limited menus: fish prepared with lemon-grass, some bland vegetables -- pickled cucumbers or pressed, fried moss -- served with a peanut sauce that quickly grew old and fat, rubbery rice noodles, served cold in bowls of soy sauce. No meat or fowl. White rice was hard to come by, and I soon found myself yearning for some good Chinese food and a bowl of decent rice. With only a week left before term began, and still no sign of Carlos, I began to worry. I liked Carlos and wished him no harm, and began to worry he'd gotten into serious trouble. I'd heard he'd been sighted in Damenlong, a border city about six hours by bus from Jinghong. I went there to visit the Sunday market, a fabled event where people literally crawled out of the surrounding hills to buy and sell necessities and, increasingly, tourist items. It was a wonderful place, and indeed, I found Carlos' crabbed signature in the guest book of the village hotel. But there was no sign of Carlos himself. Flights out of Xishuangbanna were booked solid; I had no choice but to take the frightful bus trip back. Tickets had to be purchased at least three days in advance, and though I didn't want to leave without Carlos, I had no choice; the new term began in a few days. I put off buying a ticket to the very end, but Carlos seemed to have vanished. Then, the day before I left for home, Carlos reappeared without warning. I found him at the Dai restaurant, drinking beers with a group of foreigners, his hands flying as he told his story. Somehow he had managed to get tickets on the next day's bus, and he told me his story during the long ride home. He had made several attempts at the border. The first, from Mengla, proved to be too far away, and there were no buses to the border. On his second attempt, from Menglou, he had hitched a ride on the back of a flatbed truck along with a group of peasants crossing the border to shop. Not surprisingly, the guards at the border had managed to pick the stocky, mustachioed Hispanic man out of the group of tiny, straw-hatted Yao women and promptly put him on a truck heading the opposite way. The next day he had tried another truck; this time he took the precaution of "scrunching down" to avoid detection. It didn't work, and he was again sent on his way. Finally, he decided to make the attempt on foot from Damenlong. He set off one morning without a map or directions down one of the dirt paths that wound vaguely south through the forest. Unable to speak standard Chinese, let alone the local dialect, he merely repeated "Myanmar" over and over to any peasants he met, occasionally receiving a wave in one direction or another. The peasants became fewer and fewer, and eventually he found himself walking alone through the forest. He had not thought to bring food or water with him, and by noon he was parched from the heat. He continued on, but found no further villages or people. Now extremely thirsty, he knelt down and, in this tropical jungle region known for malaria, typhoid, cholera and hepatitis, as well as several parasitic diseases, drank his fill of standing water from a ditch on the side of the road. The water revived him, and he continued on. Although he did not pass any signs, he figured he passed the border some time in the early afternoon. It was one of the greatest thrills of his life. Shortly afterward he met a mountain chieftain who invited him to spend the night and, if he wished, to share his wife. To Carlos' credit, he declined. Predictably, Carlos showed no adverse effects from his ill-chosen drinking water.
Me, I caught giardiasis from the fried moss.
Joshua Cohen is a writer who lives in Pennsylvania. Do you think travelers have no business going to Burma? Join the "Boycott Burma?" discussion in Table Talk. ________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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