my burmese spring break, chapter I: Kunming

Zach and I met up at 8:30 in the morning, packs on our bags, ready to go. We walked out the east gate of our university towards the subway station that would take us to the airport. It was Friday, May 1, and we were flying to Kunming--our first stop on the way to Burma.

The flight was normal enough--a kungfu movie projected on the wall in front of us; a tasty meal that included a packet of mushrooms with a label that read something like "mistakes with flavoring soup"; and there was an exercise routine. That's right: an exercise routine. About two thirds of the way through the flight soothing music suddenly started playing over the speakers and all the stewardesses stood up in the aisles and led all of the passengers in a stretching routine. Arm stretches, leg stretches, head and neck stretches. It went on for a good ten minutes: a whole plane full of strangers reaching their arms up to the sky in synchronization. It was at that moment I really felt one with China.

Zach and I had planned to stay in Kunming for only a day and then go further south to walk over the Burmese border, but we ended up staying much longer in China than we had intentioned. What happened was this: as soon as we arrived in Kunming we rushed off to the Myanmar consulate to get a rush one-day visa, only to find that the consulate was closed. The consulate was located in a non-descript apartment building, and there we stood in the lobby as the building security guard shook his head and pointed at a phone number for us to call.

Zach: "Hello, is this the Myanmar consulate?"
Man on the other end: "I'm not sure if this is the Myanmar consulate."
Evasiveness. Cynicism. It was clear we had gotten a hold of the Burmese bureaucracy.
We learned that the consulate wouldn't be open until Monday "at around nine or tenish." And with that we left to make the most of our extra time in China.

Luckily Kunming proved to be a fantastic city. Kunming is the capital city of Yunnan province in the south of China. It has a bustling downtown with a large European-style pedestrian zone, a hip university neighborhood in the north of the city, and it is a great jumping off point for travellers headed in all directions. In the city-center there are ponds of goldfish where children gather to fish for them and take them home. They also row themselves in little child-sized paddle boats, and one little girl was blowing bubbles with her parents and looking generally adorable. And they sell terrific BaoZe in Kunming. BaoZe are the sister-food of dumplings: a yummy (usually meat) filling on the inside, covered not in a noodle-like shell like dumplings but instead a ball of steamed dough. Zach and I ate BaoZe almost exclusively for our entire stay in Kunming. The best were the ones filled with sesame seed: delicious.

The hostel we stayed at was great. It was called The Hump, named after the stretch of the Himalayas over which American forces flew supplies from Burma to China during the war against the Japanese. The atmosphere was nice, the beds comfortable, but by far the highlight of the hostel were the friends I made there, namely a bunch of Dutchies! One young couple was going on a year-long adventure travelling around the globe, and two other ladies from the south were travelling separately, one of whom had met a British chap along the way who was now travelling along with her. I also made friends with a girl who goes to Oberlin and is here studying Chinese. She works at Philmont Scout Ranch, and as a result knows oodles of Mormons. Between our appreciation for both Mormons and the liberal arts, we have a lot in common. But man, was it wonderful to talk with those Dutchies. It was great to use the language again, but moreover, whenever I meet a Dutch person when I'm travelling, my heart melts a little bit. I can't fully understand or explain it, but just knowing someone is from Holland makes me love and care about them in a deep and special way.

Much of my time in Kunming was spent walking around, people watching, talking with Zach about everything under the sun, eating, exploring, et cetera. On Sunday night we went to see "Wolverine," continuing a long tradition of visiting foreign movie theaters that was first instilled in me by my brother long ago. It was a great movie, made all the more enjoyable by the fact that it was dubbed into Chinese. Action movies don't really need dialogue anyway, and when the characters are speaking a different language it makes the whole film seem so much more exotic and interesting.

Finally Monday rolled around and we made it to the Myanmar consulate at exactly "nine or tenish" and got our visa's without much of a hitch at all. But in the afternoon we had to meet with our "travel guide" and that was something else of an experience. At around 4pm we arrived at the Camilla hotel where the government-sanctioned travel agency was located, literally with its office in a hotel room. But from that room we were taken away by our travel guide--who himself could not have been much older than we were. He took us to a different building, down a back alleyway, covered in grime. We went through a small side entrance and somewhere along the way two other large men had come to accompany us, though I never fully figured out why. We walked into the building and around a dark hallway until we came to a room with a desk, several chairs, and a copy/fax machine. One never knows quite what one should expect when dealing with Burmese officials, so as you can imagine we took our seats cautiously and breathed in the tense air. Our "travel guide" took the money we owed him and inspected our passports for a long while. And then one of the other big guys' phones began to ring. It was a peppy song, the king you would dance to, and it when on and on and on. He never picked up but just let it ring. That was the relief I was hoping for, and immediately the anxiety diffused. After some more formal document exchanging and an explanation of the border crossing process, we left without further incident.

That same evening we rode sleeper bus from Kunming to Ruili, the Chinese town right on the border, where we arrived Tuesday morning. From there we walked across the border, got cleared by the Myanmar immigration officials, and began our drive into Burma.