They call it the Bamboo Curtain. It is China's secretive border with Burma. There is no reason to go there at all, nothing much to see. So I did a strange thing. I decided to go totally out of my way to take a look. Just for the thrill of the ride somewhere totally different. It didnt disappoint. For a couple of days I wandered around, not another Westerner or even Chinese tourist in sight. No one really spoke any English. It was just me and my phrase book, trying to fathom what I was doing in such a place.
In what felt like no time at all the bus engines had been switched off and there was the silence of an unexpected blurry-eyed arrival in a town I could not remember the name of. Sometimes when you travel you do not need to see a particular sight or undertake a designated experience. Just getting an open-eyed feel for somewhere which looks intrguing on a map is enough. Ruili, right in the far south western corner of China was such a place.
Like so many other places in China, it totally confounded my expectations. The scenery was stunning: an area known as the sea of heat for all its thermal energy and some twenty volcanoes, it is also very earthquake prone. My second bus deviated away from the main highway - I thought this was to avoid paying the toll, as had happened previously (see below) but no, this was indeed the rough dirt track to the Burma border. It was a road for motorbikes, jungle-clad with overlapping ferns, brilliant for hiding things or bandits poerhaps, unsuited to buses and it reminded me of the beginings of the Lost City in Colombia.
(www.alitravelstheworld.com/colombia)
This road, the Burma road was, I could see, still being built by hand, brick by laboriously chiselled brick. Teams of labourers toiled in the warm sun. Tea plantations began to emerge and then the mighty girth of the Mekong river and a precarious wobbly planked bridge. Banana plants and sugar cane-filled fields. Then, always a surprise around the next bend, flat plains.
There was that lazy hum and distant drone of the Asian Sub-continent, the sleep-inducing haze and mind-draining heat. Water buffaloes and cycle rickshaws. The people, I noticed, now had darker features and were more ragged looking, and less purposeful in their demeanour. I oculd easily have changed countries. I could easily have been in Burma.
In what felt like no time at all the bus engines had been switched off and there was the silence of an unexpected blurry-eyed arrival in a town I could not remember the name of. Sometimes when you travel you do not need to see a particular sight or undertake a designated experience. Just getting an open-eyed feel for somewhere which looks intrguing on a map is enough. Ruili, right in the far south western corner of China was such a place.
Like so many other places in China, it totally confounded my expectations. The scenery was stunning: an area known as the sea of heat for all its thermal energy and some twenty volcanoes, it is also very earthquake prone. My second bus deviated away from the main highway - I thought this was to avoid paying the toll, as had happened previously (see below) but no, this was indeed the rough dirt track to the Burma border. It was a road for motorbikes, jungle-clad with overlapping ferns, brilliant for hiding things or bandits poerhaps, unsuited to buses and it reminded me of the beginings of the Lost City in Colombia.
(www.alitravelstheworld.com/colombia)
This road, the Burma road was, I could see, still being built by hand, brick by laboriously chiselled brick. Teams of labourers toiled in the warm sun. Tea plantations began to emerge and then the mighty girth of the Mekong river and a precarious wobbly planked bridge. Banana plants and sugar cane-filled fields. Then, always a surprise around the next bend, flat plains.
There was that lazy hum and distant drone of the Asian Sub-continent, the sleep-inducing haze and mind-draining heat. Water buffaloes and cycle rickshaws. The people, I noticed, now had darker features and were more ragged looking, and less purposeful in their demeanour. I oculd easily have changed countries. I could easily have been in Burma.
And then some Chinese soldiers stopped the bus stopped the bus and asked me questions. Was I American, one of them asked, as he thumbed through my passport. Absolutely not, I replied, takign the risk of humouring him. It seemed to work. He and his colleague looked long and hard at my bag and gave me the benefit of the doubt, waving me on my way. But to where?
What a strange place Ruili was. Again there was the strong sense that I had left China altogether. I almost had. I was totally on my own in an unfamiliar town and it was strangely stimulating. Everyone I passed in the street looked at me hard. I attracted plenty of attention everywhere. No one seemed to speak my language. The men wore sarongs, like loose skirts which they had a habit of crudely 'readjusting' from time to time.
I found a hotel. it was rather surreal, vast and empty looking. The reception lady sent me to what felt like the furthest away possible room, at the end of the corridor where there were protruding cameras, which I cheerily waved into on my way past each time. It felt like I was their only guest. 'Classic Jazz Tastes Style!' boasted the hotel pamphlet. My room looked pretty ordinary and shabby to me. They even had a comb and shower cap in the bathroom (really useful to a bald man!). And the TV didnt work. And i thought back to the bus station which had clocks on the wall showing the times in 'Greenwich, Peking and Rangoon.' And I began to wonder if perhaps this city was not dissimilar to Rangoon, something I might well be able to find out within a couple of months time.
to be continued.....
First impressions are not always the most favourable. Shops didnt seem to sell anything I needed or wanted - an ice cream or a cold beer perhaps. Instead they offered expensive jewellry, designer sunglasses, washing machines, beds and even an entire row of stores selling blankets. Christ, it was well over thirty degrees, there was no danger of catching a chill at night here!
I walked into a supermarket to muffled titters and giggles. No less than ten uniformed girls greeted me at the entrance and then one of them escorted me around the shop. It was like having my very own personal shopper. Outside another large electronics store, the shop assistants were skipping, sop few customers were there.
Someone offered me teak, jade and some opium (a big problem, but thats another story) and at the border, did I require the services of a ladyboy? I'd heard stories that hairdressing shops were not indeed what they seemed and were fronts for brothels. Luckily as someone who isnt big on hairdressing expenditure, that wasnt a problem.
In fact whole swathes of the town felt like it was just one big front for various illicit endeavours.
The Brurmese people, at first glance to me, reminded me of Indians or Pakistanis and they spoke like them too. I came across a couple of boys who were very inquisitive in English. I thought they spoke it better than actually did and only realised when they kept repeating everything I said!
The markets, like plenty of markets in China were not for the faint of smell of the weak of stomach. Dogs in cages, cats on leads, blood fur and feathers all amalgamated together on the floor. I was sure there was a decent chance I'd pick up bird flu. A mentally ill man, ragged and destitute in a way that you would never come close to see in my own country or indeed continent, was craling his way laboriously across the dirty floor. Where he was going, or indeed where he had come from, no one seemed to know, or to care. It seemed that some people were actually living or sleeping in this market in hunched gloomy squats with washing hung outside. What a place to live. What an existence.
One strange thing about Ruili - there were many strange things - was that the town just seemed to come to a abrupt halt at the end of the main road (some eight lanes wide). High rise buildings, then jsut dirt and mud, nothing but the rubble of countryside again.
One thing that struck me as I picked my way through the mayhem - it was strangely compelling - was how busy or pre-occupied most people were. Children being schooled, a mother arranging her daughter's hair, a man texting on his mobile phone (every has one) families scoffing noodles, making tea, counting money, a woman methodically putting on her make-up.
Then it struck me. I'd come all the way from the sprawl of Beijing right to far fringes of the Burma border to encounter what I expected China to be - the lonesome anonymity of the strange alien outsider, the awkward and rude hotel service (another story) and the weirdness.
Having taken myself to some of its remoter fringes, I am tempted to conclude that maybe, just maybe, China as the monlithic homogenous entity we hear so much about, is not quite what we've told it is or what we think it is. Yet in this far flung corner of a vast country people seemed to posess something very un-Chinese - that rare commodity called time. And it occurred to me that people werent spitting in the street. I had barely noticed.
What a strange place Ruili was. Again there was the strong sense that I had left China altogether. I almost had. I was totally on my own in an unfamiliar town and it was strangely stimulating. Everyone I passed in the street looked at me hard. I attracted plenty of attention everywhere. No one seemed to speak my language. The men wore sarongs, like loose skirts which they had a habit of crudely 'readjusting' from time to time.
I found a hotel. it was rather surreal, vast and empty looking. The reception lady sent me to what felt like the furthest away possible room, at the end of the corridor where there were protruding cameras, which I cheerily waved into on my way past each time. It felt like I was their only guest. 'Classic Jazz Tastes Style!' boasted the hotel pamphlet. My room looked pretty ordinary and shabby to me. They even had a comb and shower cap in the bathroom (really useful to a bald man!). And the TV didnt work. And i thought back to the bus station which had clocks on the wall showing the times in 'Greenwich, Peking and Rangoon.' And I began to wonder if perhaps this city was not dissimilar to Rangoon, something I might well be able to find out within a couple of months time.
to be continued.....
First impressions are not always the most favourable. Shops didnt seem to sell anything I needed or wanted - an ice cream or a cold beer perhaps. Instead they offered expensive jewellry, designer sunglasses, washing machines, beds and even an entire row of stores selling blankets. Christ, it was well over thirty degrees, there was no danger of catching a chill at night here!
I walked into a supermarket to muffled titters and giggles. No less than ten uniformed girls greeted me at the entrance and then one of them escorted me around the shop. It was like having my very own personal shopper. Outside another large electronics store, the shop assistants were skipping, sop few customers were there.
Someone offered me teak, jade and some opium (a big problem, but thats another story) and at the border, did I require the services of a ladyboy? I'd heard stories that hairdressing shops were not indeed what they seemed and were fronts for brothels. Luckily as someone who isnt big on hairdressing expenditure, that wasnt a problem.
In fact whole swathes of the town felt like it was just one big front for various illicit endeavours.
The Brurmese people, at first glance to me, reminded me of Indians or Pakistanis and they spoke like them too. I came across a couple of boys who were very inquisitive in English. I thought they spoke it better than actually did and only realised when they kept repeating everything I said!
The markets, like plenty of markets in China were not for the faint of smell of the weak of stomach. Dogs in cages, cats on leads, blood fur and feathers all amalgamated together on the floor. I was sure there was a decent chance I'd pick up bird flu. A mentally ill man, ragged and destitute in a way that you would never come close to see in my own country or indeed continent, was craling his way laboriously across the dirty floor. Where he was going, or indeed where he had come from, no one seemed to know, or to care. It seemed that some people were actually living or sleeping in this market in hunched gloomy squats with washing hung outside. What a place to live. What an existence.
One strange thing about Ruili - there were many strange things - was that the town just seemed to come to a abrupt halt at the end of the main road (some eight lanes wide). High rise buildings, then jsut dirt and mud, nothing but the rubble of countryside again.
One thing that struck me as I picked my way through the mayhem - it was strangely compelling - was how busy or pre-occupied most people were. Children being schooled, a mother arranging her daughter's hair, a man texting on his mobile phone (every has one) families scoffing noodles, making tea, counting money, a woman methodically putting on her make-up.
Then it struck me. I'd come all the way from the sprawl of Beijing right to far fringes of the Burma border to encounter what I expected China to be - the lonesome anonymity of the strange alien outsider, the awkward and rude hotel service (another story) and the weirdness.
Having taken myself to some of its remoter fringes, I am tempted to conclude that maybe, just maybe, China as the monlithic homogenous entity we hear so much about, is not quite what we've told it is or what we think it is. Yet in this far flung corner of a vast country people seemed to posess something very un-Chinese - that rare commodity called time. And it occurred to me that people werent spitting in the street. I had barely noticed.
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