November 29, 2014
Oh Babe, I Hate To Go
Paying the visa overstay with the ugliest bills we can find
Kalaw to the Heho airport
Dear little friends,
The older European guy down the hall, was lecturing one of the underlings at our guesthouse in Kalaw.
"If you turn off the power, the dark hallway will cause somebody to fall down and get hurt."
We wanted to tell him to not waste his breath on the underling but take it right to the top, the lady at the front desk who instructed her staff to turn off certain circuits during the day and often into the night, separate circuits that powered the televisions, the wifi, the lights, and the satellite signal. No doubt the hotel saved a few pennies this way but it incited a lot of rebellion in the hallways, we found the switch pretty quickly even though it was ten feet up on the wall simply because the diminutive staff had placed a chair under it. It became a stealth uprising, unnamed people would climb the chair and turn it on and watch Al-Jazeera on the lowest volume, on the TV moved onto the bed and plugged into the other outlet that did work.
Later the excessive electricity would be detected and the unnamed people would hear a quiet shuffle out in the hallway and pfft, the power was off.
Later we would hear an underling being chewed out for something, was it the vast amount of wattage we were using? Or because they had given our breakfast table one too many packets of powdered creamer? The eye-rolling and giggling among the staff was epic when Desk Lady was on the phone or helping a potential trekker set up their trek to Inle Lake, they skipped upstairs and sang in the bathrooms as they cleaned, they went on the roof and tossed their sunflower seed shells over the side or flirted with the construction workers next door.
Every small thing was becoming allegory. That's how you know when your mental visa is on overstay.
We paid our bill, loaded the bikes, stopped to say goodbye and have a photo taken by our new friend across the street who sold water and pirated music and video games and had already plied us with innumerable cups of Nescafe with sugar and limes in it. He gave us a mix tape cd of American Christmas tunes as a parting gift.
We were heading to the Heho airport, 22 miles away, several of which we remembered vividly from the week before as being pretty serious uphill, and we wanted plenty of time to deal with Golden Myanmar Airways, who were yet to be informed that we had 8 bags and 2 bikes to be plopped into what was probably a small commuter prop flight to Tachileik, where we would cross into Mae Sai, Thailand. It was a $25 taxi ride to the airport, so we knew we were going to be heading up that hill again. Everybody said that after that one big hill it was all downhill to the airport. Everybody.
The light in Kalaw is beautiful in the morning. Evenings get smudged with cookstove and garbage-tidying smoke and dust, but the mornings are mile-high crisp blinding sunlight, and it warms up pretty quickly. A most surprising and unlikely thing happened on our ride out of Kalaw. We went up that hill without excessive suffering. I'm not sure how that happened, maybe there is less gravity in Kalaw now or we left something heavy back in the powerless guesthouse room, it's hard to say. Of course all the downhill-sayers were lying fools but it was still a beautiful, no, gorgeous ride. The country opens up into this amazing tumbled quilt of red soil, seafoam sesame, yellow rapeseed, and tawny rice stubble. The rice harvest is still going at that altitude and the rice is threshed by hand by teams of energetic flayers onto tarps, then winnowed and stowed in rice bags and hauled off by tuologgis.
This would be a good time for me to soliloquize about tuologgis. I had a sort of romantic ideal of the ol' chugging tuologgis as these ancient leftovers from the British era that Serve The People, but no. These tuologgis are rejects from China, there are 80 times more than last time we were here, and they are disgusting in every way, earsplitting, foul-breathed, slow, and they tend to go up the hills at an only slightly faster pace than us, meaning as they pass us we have to listen and breathe for far longer than we ever should. I can only imagine the lungs and ears of their drivers and occupants, it is nothing to see four-year-olds plopped in the bed of the tuologgi right under the exhaust pipe that extends up from the cab. We saw shops putting together brand new tuologgis so there won't be any lessening of the fleet any time soon.
On one of the hills that was supposed to be down but was up instead, we saw something of note. Two cycle tourists were parked on the side of the road taking photographs. Of us, we assumed, and strove to impress them with our valiant pace up a hill that shouldn't exist on our low gears on small bikes. These folks looked like the real deal with lycra clothing and nice Trek bikes which were a lot cleaner than ours. We recognized them from the Nepali restaurant the night before where they had been fixated on my handlebar bag. Here I thought they were admiring my edgy taste in purses but no, they had probably been debating opening a cycling conversation with us. They didn't then but now of course we all did. They did shoot a couple of snaps of us but when we turned around we saw a huge Buddha we had ridden right by, which is why they had stopped in the first place.
It was fun to meet cyclists of course, and after chatting and comparing notes we invited them to go ahead and pass us like we were going backwards as we all hove to, but they kindly hung back, probably to give us an hour's head start. We didn't see them again.
Six years ago we flew into the Heho airport on a knuckle-cracking prop plane, and landing there, encountered one French-Canadian who was fresh off a several month stint in Myitykina working with Doctors Without Borders in the meth capital of Asia, who looked pretty homesick and eager to speak English. The other few Burmese passengers jumped into Toyota Corolla taxis and the remaining drivers pounced on us.
"Twenty dollars!""Nineteen dollars!"
We were having none of it, and put on our backpacks and started walking down the road to the highway, about 2 kilometers. They followed us slowly in their taxis telling us how far it was to the road and all, but the numbers weren't changing so they gave up after about 1 km, and turned around to wait for the next incoming flight, of which there were precious few.
The air up there was so clear and crisp after the smoggy smother of Yangon, the quilt patch fields so gorgeous, all was beautiful as we hiked to the highway and thumbed down a truck and paid them $3 for our ride to the Inle Lake junction. We felt like we were playing hooky from school, like we had escaped to heaven, it was pure freedom. That was a great day.
Turning onto that 2km road today, it was the same kind of day, only in reverse. The air, the sky, the brilliant colors and beautiful air were ours, and our bikes slowed down, dreading the airport, the hassle ahead, the leaving. We hadn't done enough, enough photography, enough tea, enough looking, enough listening, enough quiet enjoyment, had we? Our drivetrains seemed to be gummy with regret.
Unlike the somnolent airport from six years ago, tour buses and taxis briskly came and went. Rich Burmese girls stepped into waiting limos, European Club Med types blondely walked to the taxis in their short-shorts and local Shan boys lugged their bags behind them. As we folded up our bikes out on the portico area an aging French tourist halted her rolling bag at my elbow, shocked that we would block her path to the ramp and refusing to lift her enormous hard-side thing two tiny steps down to the pavement. We ignored her and eventually she did it but I thought of the lonely Canadian starving for conversation in a jungle airport. Where was he now?
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There may be a lot of bustle and wifi (three bars, but still didn't work, big surprise) at the Heho airport but it still had a lot of homely features. Somebody was drying laundry on the railing behind the immigration area. Children home from school on a Saturday sat behind the reservation desks with their moms, eating rice out of tiffins.
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Some guys covered the sharp bits of our bikes with cardboard and wrapping tape and our hugely excessive baggage weight problem was solved with 15,000 kyat, a steal. And then we were on board an impressively new prop jet with cute, if harried, stewardesses who helped elderly Burmese women tuck their baskets of corn into the overhead compartments and off we went. At some point the loudspeaker started playing some "relaxing airline music" which was a bit perplexing, since they started with a cover of John Denver's "Jet Plane", in English. There was another dumb American song and then some Burmese pop and then that phase of the flight was over and we were probably all sufficiently relaxed so it went silent again.
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Out the windows we could see some of the country we had cycled around, Inle Lake and beyond, the mountains, the rice fields. Then we were flying over new country, forbidden to foreigners, heavily jungled forests and hills, large rice areas with quirky karst lumps here and there, then, the closer we got to Tachileik, mountains denuded for opium, rubber, and other questionable enterprises. A gash-new road wound over mountaintops to a suspiciously orderly array of long buildings, more GSS, natch. You can't hide much from the air.
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The plane landed at 5:00. Six miles to the border that closed at 6:00. Suddenly we didn't want to stay in Myanmar one more night. A taxi driver threw our stuff onto his roof and into the back, joined by two backpackers and their backpacks, and he studiously drove us as far as he could, nearly to the Myanmar Immigration station, where he jumped out, put our stuff on the sidewalk, found a man who would carry our bikes for $5 to the Thai side, and after much chaos and over-stay fee bickering over the state of our US dollar bills, and then on to the grouchy Thai officials, we found ourselves and our pile of bags and trussed-up bikes on a concrete flat area under a nice street lamp and the metal gates to Myanmar rolling shut with a big clang.
All this time Bruce had been getting quieter and looking a little wan. We reassembled the bikes, pumped up the tires, disposed of the cardboard and zip ties in a nearby (gasp!) garbage can, observed by polite boys playing around on their trick bikes and waiting for us to leave their play area.
Mae Sai used to feel pretty sketchy but now it just feels like crap shopping albeit with good street food. You know something is wrong when Bruce's bike does not brake for Thai street food. I was busy marveling at the smooth sweetness of real asphalt and also the improbably polite, if left-driving traffic. We found our humble guesthouse after a few wrong turns and me reminding Bruce to ride on the left side of the soi. No sooner had we arrived and paid and entered our odd little room then he made an express trip to the bathroom and the jig was up. That last mung bean pastry he bought in Kalaw had struck and he was down for the count.
So, we are in Mae Sai, Thailand today, resting and recovering. The Keflex seems to be doing the trick and we were able to venture out for some delicious Thai soup, restorative soup from a cafe with the "Clean Food" inspection symbol that has never let us down. The guesthouse kids are playing in the courtyard and trying to peek in at the "baw sabai" farang until I shoo them away. The pants that got greased pretty good during last night's reassembly are drying on a fence. It's warmer here than in Kalaw, but still very pleasant, no a/c needed. There is some dreamy Thai music playing next door but it's not drowning out the sappy, tired old song that is still ear-worming through my head.
"Well, my bags are packed, I'm ready to go. I'm standing here outside your door.I hate to wake you up to say goodbye.
So kiss me and smile for me,tell me that you'll wait for me,hold me like you'll never let me go."
I've departed Burma with complicated tears before. We never seem to leave Myanmar without one last fight to show us who's boss, and as usual, Myanmar handed us our asses on a bridge, a germ, a cloud of dust, a big batch of fury. Yet my face still aches from smiling, I am so proud of what we did, and the new friends we made and new places we saw. It's all going to change, it is changing, it has changed.
Today's ride: 23 miles (37 km)
Total: 209 miles (336 km)
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Have you ever thought of teaching a class on writing travel journals or on the qualities and benefits of the adventure travel mindset?
Also .. I love your description of the European tourists "blondely walking" .. yet another brilliant verbal snapshot that will have me giggling for the rest of the day.
5 years ago
Now I'm looking forward to reading about your time in Thailand (I was there before and after my trip to Burma).
5 years ago
5 years ago
5 years ago