On the China-Myanmar Border: Act Three

Continued.

Having been detained, and then let go, by the criminal gang that was operating its own border crossing just off the main road, I decided that my remaining time in Myanmar would not be spent doing any more exploring. I shouldered my backpack, clutched my day bag and a Shan-style woven hat I’d bought as a souvenir, and made my way toward the large group of people milling around outside the official border crossing.

To make a long sub-plot short, as well as to drop two cliches in as many paragraphs, suffice to say that border procedures were a huge pain. Involving lots of lines, and the same confused, and then exasperated, border agent over and over again, the whole deal was also uneventful-enough to be unworthy of recounting here (although that hasn’t stopped me before). What matters is that once I finally got through the Myanmar side, I was feeling nothing less than euphoric at being back in China. Finally, back in a more-normal country! I’ve never smiled so brightly at a Chinese immigration officer. Nor at one of any other country’s immigration officers. I felt like I was home. 

On the China-Myanmar Border Continued: Ducking to China

Continued. In case you forgot. (It’s been a while–I did!)

I don’t remember waking up. Just standing out on the street with my bag, saying goodbye to my no-need-to-name-here Burma Driver, and thinking: Hey, my back and joints actually feel pretty good this morning. Last night’s tendon-stomping, human-trafficked masseuse (and I’m not saying that to be funny) must have know what she was doing after all.

My head was another story–the result of yesterday’s dehydration and this morning’s hot sun. But nothing that a cup of Myanmar’s sugar-slushed, condensed-milk-swirled variant of “coffee” couldn’t fix. I sat down at a nearby tent serving breakfast, downed four gulps from a dirty cup in between bites of a fried oil-bread stick (油条), and before I knew it I was out in back, looking for a good place to squat amid the mess of trash, flies and filth. Just another Myanmar morning. 

On the China-Myanmar Border, Trouble Ahead and Trouble Behind

This post continues the incredible saga of my trip from Myanmar back into Yunnan.

The last stage of my journey was actually supposed to be the second-to-last. But then I lost my day-pack, and plans went awry.

Not just the day-pack was lost. The contents, in ascending order of importance: cellphone, Kindle, camera, iPod touch (which is my laptop when travelling), highly marked-up copies of 《中国非传统安全研究报告（2012版）》 and Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century, and lastly a notebook filled with crucial research notes for a thesis due in six weeks. Bad things to lose. Real bad. 

Postcards from Northern Shan State

A Late Postcard from Mandalay (blame the Myanmar postal service?)

Editor’s (okay, Bayley’s) note: This post and the next are a quick look back at the final segment of our (okay, Nick’s) winter travels: from Chiang Mai to Mandalay and along the Burma Road back into Yunnan.

Nick here: Well, I’ll start this off by saying there’s certainly not much I can add to all the hype about Myanmar that already exists out there. Western backpacker blogs already wax endlessly poetic about how they beat a path to get off the beaten path to travel there “before everything changes.” All the politicians have now long since exalted the country’s Hope and Change and the fact that they got to hug and kiss, repeatedly, Aung San Suu Kyi. The geo-strategists of the interwebs have probably already written all there is to write (and more) about all the very serious and momentous geopolitical possibilities now on the horizon. And now in the past few months the human rights skeptics have already gotten to chime in with their I-told-you-so’s and not-so-fast’s. What’s left to say?

In Mae Salong, Home of the KMT’s ‘Forgotten’ 93rd Division, Watching CCTV

We have to continue to fight the evil of communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium. -General Tuan, 1967

Coming down through Thailand’s far north, approaching Mae Chan, the hazy flat expanse of green rice shoots west of bustling Highway 1 ends at the base of high hills of scrub jungle, scattered villages, and the occasional half-completed holiday resort. Speeding upwards on a careening tuk-tuk, amid the dark shade of the surrounding hills at mid-morning and catching faint cross-breezes coming down from Myanmar’s Shan State, I felt a sudden, surprising sensation of cold. In Thailand, even in February, it’s easy to forget what that feels like. The old man in the bench across folded his arms against his chest, kicking his feet out for stability as we rounded another curve.

Crossing the Mekong (times 3, 4, and 5 of 6)

The Mekong is the World’s 14th longest river, which I guess means it’s not all that long. But starting high in Tibet and ending at the southern tip of Vietnam, its waters do flow down through, and between, quite a number of disparate areas and countries. So on this trip through Yunnan and northern Southeast Asia, we have crossed / will cross it once each at Jinghong, Jingha, Houay Xai, and somewhere near Baoshan. That’s been the plan, anyway. That is, we sure didn’t plan to cross it more than once at Houay Xai, the border crossing from Laos into Thailand. Certainly not three times, each with our two big bags and one small toddler stacked precariously on a low-riding bamboo boat with a sputtering outboard. But thanks to the fact that we inattentively walked right past the dozing officials who were supposed to give us our Laos exit stamps, and the fact that the Thailand immigration official on the other side of the river cared, for some reason, whether his Lao counterparts on the other side were doing their job, we were directed to go back, wake up the exit-stampers, and thus make two extra crossings of that stinkin’ river. So while some parts of our trip have felt like we’re just rushing through, this little stretch of smelly water was one place we really savored. Any longer and we might have been able to figure what cut of our extra ferry tolls those border officials collected.

Happy Chinese New Year! In Yao.

For Chinese New Year, we once again escaped to the hinterland. Last year, it was to that mostly-deserted little island of Hong Kong. This year, we found ourselves in Muang Sing, a busy market town and administrative center for an area of Laos abutting the Chinese border. Same holiday, different place: here the Chinese farmer’s calendar is also observed by the Yao, an ethnic group located in pockets across southwest China and this part of Laos. And as we discovered, they have their own variation on the tradition of doling out the hongbao-wrapped yasuiqian: red-dyed eggs, tied up in colorful strings and—you guessed it—given to kids on New Year’s Day. Owen got given two—so for all involved, it is an auspicious new year indeed.