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ARTICLE : BURMA or BUST PAGE 1
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http://www.outsidemag.com:80/magazine/1099/199910hardway1.html
Outside magazine, October 1999
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 |
4
A half-mad dash to Hkakabo Razi seemed like a good
idea
at the time. And hey, how tough can it be to sneak
past the
Chinese Army?
By Mark Jenkins
I feel the lorry slow down and
press my face against the
metal slats. We are passing
through a black forest. In the
walleyed beam of one
headlight, I make out men with
rifles standing in the road
ahead.
"Keith!" I croak in the
darkness. "Steve! Cops!"
The three of us burrow beneath
the canvas tarp in the bed of
the truck, just as we've already
done at a dozen military checkpoints. Bruce, our
Chinese
interpretercumflimflam man, is riding up in the cab
with the driver.
He'll pass the cash and crouch on the floorboards.
We're en route to Burma (officially known as Myanmar)
via the
most beautiful path possible: across eastern Tibet.
Our traveling
companions in the bed of the truck are Tibetan
pilgrims. Stoic
inside their huge sheepskin coats, eyes closed, black
ponytails
lifting in the cold night wind, they're pretending to
sleep. When we
hide underneath the tarp they slide their
leather-bound bundles on
top of us. Eastern Tibet is generally closed to
foreigners?especially foreigners like us, with no
permit to travel.
Were it not for the quiet help of the Tibetans, our
journey would be
impossible. Like all people who live under foreign
occupation,
Tibetans are rebels. They countenance those who
thwart authority.
The truck jerks to a stop. Through the slats I watch
three Chinese
soldiers approach the cab. They bark orders at the
driver, and he
gets out. The soldiers, bundled in quilted fatigues
against the
October cold, are belligerent and friendly and drunk.
I don't know
what's being said, but I know what's going on. The
driver gives
each of them a handful of bills and takes a swig of
beer from their
bottle. Then he climbs back into the cab and fires
the engine.
The truck begins to lumber forward, heavy and
loose-jointed. I
think we're home free when one of the soldiers bounds
up onto the
running board. Suddenly he is shouting?he's spotted
Bruce. He
swings his rifle through the window and the driver
cuts the motor.
I can hear Bruce opening his door and talking fast,
but it doesn't
help. The soldiers climb up into the bed of the truck
and peel back
the canvas with the muzzles of their weapons. Bruce
makes one
more valiant effort to bribe them, but what's beer
money compared
to capturing three lao wai?
We're taken to a sleepy commander wearing an enormous
green
trench coat, a fur aviator cap too small for his
round head, and
muddy bedroom slippers. He sits behind a rickety desk
in an
unheated barracks. Bruce does the talking while we do
our best to
look bewildered and guileless.
No money changes hands?a bad sign. Money is the
smoothest
lubricant on earth, liquor a close second. With both,
many an
ungainly situation can be coaxed to glide along. With
neither, it's
like trying to push a safe through sand.
The commander's face betrays nothing. He is neither
overtly brutal
nor fatuously easygoing; he is officious, distracted,
disinterested,
and cannot be bought. So why has he been sent to this
end-of-the-world outpost? On second thought,
unbribability may be
a career liability in the Chinese Army.
Eventually the commander waves his hand, lazily, like
a king, and
the soldiers escort us outside. I ask Bruce what's
going on.
"Is not so good. He say interrogation begin at
midnight."
The moon is glimmering on an archipelago of puddles
that will be
frozen by morning. Mountains black out most of the
starry sky.
The soldiers from the checkpoint march us through the
village on
log planks laid in the mud, the lorry heaving along
behind like a
forlorn elephant. Outside a walled compound the
Tibetans hand
down our gear.
Inside the compound we're put into a room with wooden
beds and
straw mattresses and told to wait. The moment they
leave we
huddle to get our story straight.
Whenever you are arrested, anywhere in the world, you
have to
have a story. This is fundamental. As with stories
for other
occasions, the tale need not be the truth. What it
absolutely must
be is believable. Verisimilitude is the god of all
good stories. The
truth is often complicated and not always
particularly plausible, so
you have to decide whether it's really the tale you
want to tell.
In our case, the truth is that we're on a clandestine
expedition. Our
plan is?or was?to slip down to the southeastern tip
of Tibet,
cross the border, and make the first ascent of
Hkakabo Razi, at
19,260 feet the highest peak in Burma. After the
climb, assuming
everything was still going well, we intended to walk
the legendary
Stilwell Road?a military highway built by the
Americans during
World War II and then abandoned to the jungle in
1946?until we
crossed back into China or were arrested and
deported. We're
heading to northern Burma by way of Tibet because the
Myanmar
government refused to even consider our expedition.
This is the truth. A wildly implausible story that
implies we are
premeditated lawbreakers. Bruce suggests we claim to
be
ordinary feebleminded tourists who have no idea how
we ended up
400 miles beyond anyplace we're allowed to be.
For the next few hours we do whatever people do when
they are
waiting for something that just might not turn out to
be hunky-dory.
Keith, tall and strong as a Giacometti sculpture,
fiddles
incessantly with the straps of his backpack. Steve,
his mouth
sealed even tighter than usual, glares blankly at the
blank walls.
Bruce plays with his thin mustache and smokes one
cheap
cigarette after another. I scribble in my journal.
At the stroke of midnight, having let our
imaginations run wild,
we're fidgety. At 12:30 we stop holding our breath.
At 1 a.m. we
uncork our sleeping bags and go to sleep.
I wake just before dawn. Not a soldier in sight.
Inertia and ennui
are the two most wonderful loopholes in any
bureaucracy.
Combined, they often form a hole big enough to crawl
right
through.
I tiptoe over and shake Bruce. "Let's get out of
here."
Bruce blinks, looks around, and trills, "Jailbreak!"
He's learned half
his English watching bad American movies. His full
nickname is
Bruce Lee, although he is too out of shape to fight,
doesn't climb,
and can't hike worth a damn. The name refers to his
quickness of
mind and tongue, not body.
"Out of sight, out of mind," I say. Bruce loves
American idioms.
"Ah, good one," he says.
The four of us slip out of the compound, Bruce bribes
another
never-sober trucker, and we're on the lam.
Illustration by John Harlin