In Which Our Heroes Ride A Bus, Cross A Border, Ruminate On The Nature of Travel, and Escape a Potentially (But Probably Not) Dangerous Situation

Once again, we were staring down an infinite chain of mountains.  The days were ticking down on our visas.  Rain hammered down on the road, turning it to an impenetrable quagmire, and when it wasn't raining the wind was howling in our faces at 30 kmph.  We would need to make good -- nay, miraculous -- time in order to make it to the border and avoid dying cold and alone in a Chinese prison.

So what else is new?

This situation, like most we find ourselves in, was not...not un-entirely our own doing.  I mean, sure, we had taken longer getting out of Beijing than we had meant to, but, well, it wasn't our fault that the train we planned to take was sold out.  And, yeah, we had taken longer getting out of Kunming, but I mean, we had to bike all over creation to find a map (which, in the end, we didn't use).  But surely, 900 kilometers from the border with two weeks left on our visas, we couldn't be blamed for saying, "Eh, hell with it, let's give it our best."

"Our best" worked out to be Yangwu, a sleepy little mountain town a scant 200-ish kilometers from where we started in Kunming.  A week of blowing out our knees pushing up mountains, hair-raising pitch-black rides back down them, slogging our bikes through fields of mud to find hotels (that rarely had Western toilets but always had Wi-Fi), hunching by the side of the road eating jerky and crackers when no restaurants could be found...in short, it was fantastic, but we just plum ran out of time.  Disappointed that we would have to cross the titanic mountains ahead of us by bus instead of bike (though maybe not that disappointed), we made our way to what Apple Maps told us was the Yangwu bus terminal.  From there, we hoped to catch a bus to Jinghong, where buses leave daily for the Laotian border and freedom.

We approached a man who was standing by the snack bar and informed him of our plans to take the bus to Jinghong.  We used our best phrasebook Chinese, which mostly consisted of pointing to the phrasebook and repeating key words in English.  He nodded and explained something vaguely helpful-sounding in Mandarin, and we nodded back.  There was a long pause as we basked in our mutual understanding that we would just pretend we knew what the other was saying.  A small crowd began to gather, including a 9-year-old girl who flipped through her colorful English textbook to try and translate.  Eventually, we repeated a few of the things the man told us for confirmation.

"8:00 p.m. tomorrow?"  He nodded.

"For Jinghong?"  Nod again.

"From here?"  Another nod.

Satisfied, we returned to our entirely too comfortable hotel to enjoy the rest of the evening.  It wasn't until two beers and half an episode of "Star Trek" in that Jenn pointed out how exceedingly odd the circumstances that we agreed to were.  For instance, the fact that no buses seemed to be entering or leaving the place we understood to be the bus station.  And the fact that there was nowhere to buy tickets.  Also, he may have just been nodding to be polite.  Or, hell, to say "no."  We agreed that we would try to confirm what he told us the next day, but we would ask for another night at the hotel just in case.  Our enjoyment of the evening was dimmed somewhat by our uncertain future.  Tick-tock.

The next morning, I hustled over to the bus station (?) while Jenn nursed her sore muscles.  The bus station was a hive of activity, though it did have oddly few buses during the daytime.  The old, toothless woman running the snack bar was still there, though the rest of the cast of characters was new to me, and if the old woman recognized me, she gave no sign.  I repeated everything I was told the night before as simply as I could, and the crowd discussed my words carefully.  I must have said something right, because eventually they all started to vigorously deny that any buses ever left from there.  A different little girl with a different English textbook used the index as best she could while the other people looked to her expectantly.  She excitedly pointed back the way I came and shouted, "Way!  Way!"

One middle-aged dude used a familiar tactic: writing down what he was telling me.  I try to take it as a compliment that people assume that if I can't speak Chinese, surely I can read it at the very least.  Eventually I got what I hoped was the correct information: that I would have to take a bus from Yangwu to Yuanjiang (which he pronounced "ING-jang"), then a bus from Yuanjiang to Jinghong, then a bus to Laos.  And no, he had no idea how much the bus cost, when it left, whether we could get our bikes on it, or where exactly it stopped.  I thanked him and the others with great enthusiasm, smiled, turned away, and began tugging on my collar frantically.

After some deliberation, we decided that the best course of action was to try to bike to Yuanjiang and take the bus from there.  According to the Internet (ha ha ha), Yuanjiang did have a proper bus station where one could do things like buy tickets and wait for the bus, and it wouldn't take too long to get there since it was only 100-ish kilometers away (ha ha ha again).  The fewer buses we took, we reasoned, the less money it would cost, and also the less stress; getting our bikes on buses was usually a harrowing ordeal involving shoving our bikes into tiny spaces, and the threat of bent spokes or broken fenders was a real one.  Biking it would be.

The ride into Yuanjiang was mountainous but breathtaking.  For two days we huffed and puffed through bamboo-forested valleys and up muddy slopes that twisted through the rocky cliffs, then careened right back down them, yahooing and blowing past confused-looking farmers who smiled when we shouted "Ni hao!" to them.  It was a rough couple of days, and we nearly expired in the process, but we did make it to Yuanjiang.

Catching the bus from Yuanjiang was a fairly simple affair.  The tickets to Jinghong weren't terribly expensive, maybe 30 bucks apiece.  Unfortunately, in the process of boarding the bus we had to cram our bikes into the luggage compartment underneath, a narrow little space that had room for two bikes so long as they didn't have pedals, handlebars, or wheels.  We nearly perished with worry, especially when every little push into the compartment brought scary creaking or metallic grinding noises, and we almost destroyed our bikes, but we managed to fit them in somehow.  An afternoon of motion sickness later, and we were in Jinghong.

Jinghong is the capital of Xishuangbanna, a tourist destination for Chinese travelers, and it wasn't hard to see why.  Just a few hours south of where we started, we had clearly made it into the tropics: the main drag by the bus station was packed with fruit vendors, knick-knacks carved of bamboo, and countless motorcycles zipping through the crowd.  We crashed in the hotel right above the bus station, happy to be off that bus and glad that our race to the border was nearly at an end.  We chowed down on our last Chinese meal that we thought we'd be having for awhile, enjoying every last bite of spicy tofu.

The next morning, we readied ourselves for another interminable bus ride, this time across the border.  It was a disappointing time, without a doubt; we had been looking forward to crossing a border by bike since we'd dreamt up this trip, seeing the bewildered, impressed faces of the immigration agents and the boring foreign tourists marinating in their buses.  The reality would be different.  But then, it did beat the reality of being thrown into jail, a world made more vivid by the showing of the amazing and ultraviolent "Ricky-Oh: The Story of Ricky" on the previous bus.  Protip: don't try eating anything with red sauce while watching this fine film.  Or anything at all, really.

The good news about the bus from Jinghong to Luang Namtha is that we didn't have to cram our bikes under the bus.  The bad news: we had to hoist them onto the roof of the bus.  The station attendant pulled down the ladder, handed me a rope, and gestured for me to get on with it.  When I demonstrated my charming incompetence with tying knots, she patiently helped secure the bikes enough that I could haul them, hand-over-hand, onto the top of the bus, where I carefully arranged them as best I could on the luggage rack.  I descended the ladder back to terra firma and patted myself on the back while the bus driver rearranged the bikes and everything else I'd touched.  Good enough.

So, my nemesis, gravity.  We meet again.

The only bump in the road was a literal one.  Around hour six of the journey, we rocked out of our seats and heard a "splat" off to the side of the bus.  As we discovered later, we had sacrificed one of our water bottles to the Road Gods.  We also discovered with some alarm that someone had gone through our bags, but had apparently given up in disgust after opening our tools pannier, which contains a collection of wrenches, rags, chain grease, clotheslines, spools of thread, loose batteries, and mysterious pieces of plastic that is so precisely-ordered that it just happens to look like a bunch of trash.

You can see how shaken up we were by this intrusion.

The border crossing, an intense bureaucratic affair that we'd prepared for and envisioned for some weeks, was entirely uneventful.  This was the first land border that either of us had ever crossed, or at least the first one with an actual border crossing and guards and such.  It wasn't quite the glorious, heroic sight that we'd hoped for, but all said, it wasn't too bad: forking over a few bucks, getting a stamp, watching our Swiss busmate slip through the border without having to pay for a visa, and then back on the bus.

And just like that, we were in Laos, and everything was instantly different.  The bus dropped us on the main road of Luang Namtha, a sleepy little street that had a dozen guesthouses and two dozen restaurants on every block.  Foreign tourists with harem pants, dreadlocks, and enormous backpacks outnumbered the locals by a wide margin.  Local tribeswomen in colorful local garb shuffled up and down the street hawking bracelets, belts, and, weirdly, commemorative U.S. silver dollars; when we refused their offerings, they would pantomime smoking something, and we'd wave them away more frantically.  When we'd boarded the bus in China that morning, we were cosmopolitan world travelers, far too cool to say a word to any of our Western busmates.  Now, surrounded by free Wi-Fi and expensive brick-oven pizzas, we were marks like any other, indistinguishable from the drunken European revelers or capri-panted nervous-looking middle-aged tourists.  We had been delivered by the bus from "off the beaten track" to the head of the Banana Pancake Trail and all its questionable comforts.

For the uninitiated, the Banana Pancake Trail is what most people think of when they describe a vacation as "off the beaten track."  By some estimates, it stretches from Vietnam and Laos through to Indonesia in the south and west to parts of India.  It's a series of exotic locales in developing countries that are shockingly different from one another in culture and geography, yet virtually indistinguishable from one another from the perspective of the Western tourist.  Every stop on the Trail affords pristine guesthouses, solicitous shopkeepers, bus rides to the local cave/waterfall/jungle/extremely large ball of twine, and cuisine inoffensive to the Western palate.  $10 banana pancakes in countries where many of the locals subsist on less than a dollar a day, in short.

Over the course of this trip so far, we had had the privilege of being the only foreign travelers in the area most of the time.  In Japan, Korea, and China we were a novelty, we were relatively exotic and interesting from the perspective of the locals (that is, as far as we could tell; they could have thought we were colossal jerkfaces and we would have no way of knowing).  Each of those countries was sufficiently developed that we never had to worry about impassable roads, gangs of highwaymen, or even non-working ATMs, plus we could pat ourselves on the back about being super cool and adventurous because we were the only white people around.

Now in Laos, all of a sudden travel didn't seem like something that only cool, worldly people do.  It seemed like something done by...well, people we didn't really like very much.  The kind of people who drove very nice cars in high school or drunkenly gave us noogies during study abroad.

From Melanie Swanson's charming e-book on bike touring in Southeast Asia.  A great source of
information and chuckles!  Get it here if you're interested.

And as cool as we felt the week before, all of a sudden we were afraid that we were just like all these other people, the ones we felt so comfortable judging.  I grew more somber and reflective with each glass of beer until I had nearly given up on the concept of travel and my identity as a human being.  Maybe it doesn't take an amazing pioneer spirit to travel the world.  Maybe it just takes money.  Had we invested years of our life and thousands of dollars on a mere commercial transaction?  Sure, travel is broadening, travel exposes you to new places and people and cultures, but it's still something you get by spending money.  If all these people drunkenly singing "Hey Jude" in their Beer Lao T-shirts weren't made cool by traveling the world, then how could we pride ourselves on traveling the world?

Because, make no mistake, we aren't too different from all those other tourists.  For three or four days in Luang Prabang, we downed beers with our friends from the bus, thrilled to have the chance to check Facebook, eat french fries, and talk with some kids from Wisconsin about the midterm elections.  We drank cup after cup of coffee, our first since leaving Korea.  Were we ridiculous to go to such effort and travel thousands of miles from Kansas just to spend all our money on food that reminds us of home?

Eventually Jenn snapped me out of it (literal snaps were involved) and we pledged to spend our last evening in Luang Prabang doing something cultural.  We visited the Night Market for an introduction to Laotian culture and cuisine, and also hopefully get some chicken.  At 6 p.m. the sun was down and the market was as bustling as it was going to get.  A dozen or so tourists were snorking down pork ribs, papaya salad, and grilled bananas sold by bored-looking local teens.  Stray dogs patiently watched the diners, and as soon as the tourists abandoned their empty banana-leaf plates they were on the stone tables licking every last bit of sauce.  Chickens, unlike the rest of the city, did not wander around underfood; they knew the score.  Clouds of mosquitoes flitted through the few haloes of electric light that painted the little market like a gloomy little bar.

While Jenn grabbed us a table, I ordered us a batch of fried noodles from one of the vendors.  By the time I got back, I saw that the huge table Jenn had chosen had attracted another visitor: a Laotian dude sat opposite Jenn, and three beers sat at the corners of the table.  Jenn looked back and gave me a frantic smile, then the new guy looked to me and did a triple-take.  I smiled at both of them.

"What's happening?" I asked quietly through my smile.  Jenn smiled back, and the guy introduced himself.  I utterly failed to pronounce his name, then introduced myself to him while I opened the box of noodles as casually as I could manage.  When we began to eat, the guy pulled out his phone and glued his eyes to it.

"Uh...thanks for the beer!" I said, cracking mine open.  The guy made some indeterminate hand gesture and rose to make a phone call.  "Everything all right?" I asked Jenn.

"I'm so glad you're back," she said.  "He was trying to pick me up."

"Really?  Are you okay?"

"I think he thought you were a lady."  We slurped down our noodles, unsure of how to proceed.

After a minute or so, the guy returned, carrying three big boxes of food.  I started to protest, telling him we'd already eaten, but he seemed to pay me no notice as he tore open the styrofoam containers.  Then, out of the corner of our eyes we saw one of the purple-scarved old ladies who sells bracelets approach our table.  The guy waved her over, then beckoned into the distance.  Within seconds, there were a dozen old ladies, all dressed identically, all bearing cloth shoulder bags or beaded bracelets.  I was dazzled by activity: they all started to grab for the food, or maybe they were laying their goods on the table?  The guy took a handful of bags from one of them and started to flip through them in front of us.  In our time in Luang Namtha, we hadn't seen a single Laotian person pay the tiniest bit of attention to these ladies.  Was he in the market for a fringed purse or souvenir bracelet?

"We should go," Jenn said.

"Yeah."  Our beers still full, our dishes on the table, we stood and walked away briskly.  I saw the guy look up to us before I turned away, and I quickly mumbled a thank-you and apology, and then we were gone, power-walking back to the hotel as politely as we could manage.

We still have no idea what was happening at the Night Market.  It could have been a scam of some kind, some way of distracting us in order to grab our wallets or swindle us into buying unwanted merchandise.  Then again, it could be that we had caused some great offense by ungratefully running away from a friendly local who wanted to share his food and culture with us.  I don't think we'll ever know.  But the next day, we were gone from Luang Namtha, escaping the situation as well as our philosophizing about travel.  It was back to being the only honkies around and being too tired to care.  Almost, anyway.