Matt Schiavenza

24 hours ago I was just settling into a two-hour Burmese massage in Jiegao, a small town located directly on the border of China and the country now known as Myanmar. Now, I’m back in my comfortable office in Kunming, fresh from a shower and clean clothes and with a slightly battered bicycle. This is nice.

A few notes from the rest of my trip:

- We hopped off the Tengchong-Ruili bus just after Mangshi, a medium-sized city near the border of Baoshan and Dehong prefectures. Immediately we noticed a Southeast Asian feel in the new region, with dark-skinned ethnic minorities wandering about and palm trees lining the roads. A humidity that we hadn’t felt in Kunming for weeks also set in, making our cycling more difficult than normal.

- Not long after beginning the last leg I noticed my back tire had gone flat. Possessing a puncture-repair kit but lacking a pump, I was forced to push my machine into the nearest village, where I was able to communicate to the locals that I needed an innertube patching.

- While the local and I plugged the hole we began chatting. He had worked in Kunming for several years before coming back to the village. He said he had a maintenance job repairing the automatic coffee vending machines that each language school in the city has. This made me feel less secure about his patching job, as I distinctly recalled these vending machines being constantly out of order.

- The men in the village were small and wiry while the women were slightly stockier. Most of the men were shirtless and wore sarongs and sandals. Upon inquiry they turned out to be of the Jingpo minority, a group better known in the West by its other name, Kachin. This ethnic group straddles both sides of the border but has a far larger population in Burma. For some reason all the men were heavily tattooed on their chest and arms.

- Ruili was larger, more cosmopolitan, and far livelier than I had expected. I also found it less seedy than its reputation had suggested. We found a great bar/restaurant called Bobo Cafe, serving delicious Myanmar beer and some mean banana pancakes. Why is the beer so much better in countries like Burma and Laos than in the far more developed China?

My friend has a theory that poor countries ensure a supply of good beer in order to placate the population, for whom the indignity of drinking bad beer may constitute a rallying cry in anti-government demonstrations. Then again, countries such as Germany and the Czech Republic in Europe have excellent beer and good governments. Both, though, have lousy food. Maybe you just can’t have it all.

- Ruili also has a night market roughly ten times larger and more impressive than the one in Kunming, the provincial capital. I would gladly trade the noxious discos that abut Kunming’s night market stalls for some of the wonderful Burmese barbeque meats we sampled in Ruili

- We went to Jiegao, the actual China/Myanmar border town. There, we stopped and had a two-hour Burmese massage. I felt so loose afterwards I wouldn’t have been surprised if all of my bones and muscles collapsed in a heap on the floor. Fortunately they didn’t. I felt great.

- Several of the locals in Ruili refused to talk to us or were curt and rude when they did. I couldn’t figure out why. This is highly unusual in China, even in border towns.

- The bus back to Kunming was a bruising 14-hour sleeper. I had an upper-middle berth, about as bad as possible, especially considering that the berths were not built to accommodate people over 5 foot 6 or so.  My poor legs crumpled into origami-like positions only hours after going through the whole massage rigmorale. I’m surprised they haven’t deserted my torso for a more friendly owner yet.

-There were two drug checkpoints on the bus back, one at 11:30pm and the other two hours later. In both cases we stood by the side of the road for about a half-hour while two military policemen, none older than 20, searched the bus. I’m not sure how much this method has stemmed drug trafficking across the border, but it certainly worked to alienate all of the passengers. At best it should merit mention in any guidebook entry covering the region.

- I ate a big honking American breakfast upon returning to Kunming and enjoyed every bite. And the coffee! How a billion plus people in this country largely live without it in the morning escapes me.