Ruili and Other Places 5/08/05

Well it’s Labor Day, (or May Day as they call it) in China and as a reward for all our diligent work, Pierre and I have been given a week’s vacation from school. We decided to explore the far western area of the Yunnan Province, so on Monday afternoon we boarded a Ruili-bound sleeper bus. Our estimated time of arrival was 24 hours from when we left. For long trips the bus has two drivers – one sleeps on a bed in the front while the other drives. Our first driver was fairly calm and careful, but as night fell the second bus driver took over. This chain-smoking madman reeked of feces and drove so fast that he managed to cut about 8 hours off of our travel time. In the early morning when his shift was over he still hadn’t had enough nicotine, so he proceeded to pull out a large bong made of bamboo and puff away for the remaining hours of the trip.
As for Ruili, which is China’s border town with Myanmar, I’m sad to inform you that the days of buying a pistol from a trench coat clad fellow in an alley, after drinking codeine-laced beers at the local bar and smoking opium mixed with banana leaves are over. Sure, there are still enough prostitutes milling around the streets at night that it’s frightening to imagine that the supply comes close to matching the demand, but the Chinese government has cracked down on the waves of guns and drugs flowing out of Burma…not to say that it’s not a good thing, but we were surprised by the relative tameness of Ruili’s atmosphere…yet where Ruili failed to deliver crime-related excitement, it surely succeeded in bestowing on us one of the more disturbing images that we’ve seen – that of a freshly slaughtered German Shepard being de-furred in a store front in some maniacal-looking machine. Although I understand that dog-eating in China was probably a matter of survival rvival during times of famine, there seems to be plenty of food in Ruili these days, and that dog definitely looked less appetizing than other freshly slaughtered animals that I’ve seen. I guess it’s an acquired taste.

We saw many interesting faces in Ruili – new hill tribes that we hadn’t seen before, and of course many Burmese people. Burmese women wear a mud-like make-up on their faces that protects them from the sun. It sounds ugly but it actually looks quite beautiful. Sadly, our excitement at seeing all the new types of people was unrequited. We seemed to be the only westerners in the whole city (except for one Israeli guy we saw at a nightclub who was receiving some unwanted attention on the dance floor from a very randy Chinese man), and when people weren’t laughing and screaming “haoolllo,” at us, they were giving us the cold shoulder.

We took the first bus in the morning out of Ruili and headed to Tengchong, which is a small rural city surrounded by volcanoes. As our bus left the city and headed into the mountains, the people became much friendlier. We bought hard-boiled duck eggs along the way from a smiley minority woman who’s teeth were painted with a black lacquer (it prevents decay and is considered beautiful.)
Tengchong has managed to preserve many of it’s traditional buildings, although we had a very typical Chinese travel experience when we first arrived – that of looking for the “Old Quarter” and discovering that it was torn down last week. We’re staying in a terrifying bathroom-tile covered Commie monstrosity. Every floor is in a state of unlivable disrepair except for the floor we’re staying on (the 4th floor, which like the 13th floor in America is considered unlucky and VERY unfavorable)…anyway, Pierre and I both have the runs from gorging ourselves at a Sichuanese dumpling house (that must have been questionable)…our western-style toilet in the hotel doesn’t have a toilet seat, but we’re trying to be good sports about it. Tomorrow we head back to Kunming to get ready for final exams, and then we’re off on our final 11 week trip to Sichuan Province, Tibet and Western China.