BUMMER!!!

I'll do easy ones, like land border crossings from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, to Cambodia, and then maybe Cambodia to Thailand. Both are perfectly legal. Real problems are things of the past. Remaining land mines there are as frequent as WW II American or British undetonated bombs in today's Germany. I'd previously done such border crossings in the Southeast Asian neck of the woods and they were pretty cool, (China to Laos, China to Vietnam, Vietnam to Laos, Laos to Thailand, Cambodia to Thailand - that one in two locations, one of which was still supposed to be mined at the time, so the pickup we traveled in left the road and drove through the bush.)

The present Burma thing I didn't want to describe in this blog in order not to jeopardize it. But now, since that stint went belly up .... here comes the story (for obvious reasons I'll need to fudge a few things.)

I heard of foreigners getting a permit to do the road, but mostly from north to south. I don't know why I was turned down when I applied, but there might be all kinds of reasons.

The road from Mandalay to Mu-se at the Chinese border is the main highway through the Golden Triangle. According to my contact, Ne Win, a now clean (he claims) heroin addict since age twelve, that makes Mandalay the world's opium and heroin capital. The supposedly perfectly good road is the link for Burmese jade to the north and opium to the south. Ne Win filled me in on the nitty-gritty of the locale - over a bottle of Slivowitz (where he got that Serbian booze in Burma remained unexplained).
In short, in the region everybody is at everybody's throat, be it over territory, market share, influence, weapons, or national preference; Lao, Chinese, Burmese and Thai all have their fingers in the pie. As of late, he says, even Indians have gotten into the act and become new players in that game for keeps. That is the reason India refuses to do their part in restoring the WW II Ledo road that was built under US general Joe Stillwell from Assam to China - not to have a direct link to the Golden Triangle.

That is the stage for the game I tried to play.

It is Wednesday, the 8th of February, the day when all is supposed to happen as arranged.
I had the forged documents, prepared by me during the last few days. They gave me permission to   go up to China. The idea was, should I be caught by the authorities, the people transporting me would be blameless since I'd showed them my permission.

At five AM I was waiting for my pickup. A quarter past I called my man.
"Can't make it today," he said.
"Its got to be today," I said.
"I'll send somebody."
A kid on a motorbike picked me up.
In a Mandalay outskirts a little truck was ready to leave for the north, the direction I wanted to go. After a long discussion (in Burmese) between the kid and the truck crew, we drove back on the bike to an Internet café where the kid, who spoke no English, skyped Ne Win (who was in China at the time) and talked. Then I got on the phone.
"They are all afraid of the consequences if they are caught with you," he said.
"I got to go!"
"I'll try contacting a Chinese outfit for you," he said, "stay by a phone."
"I don't care where they're from."
"Wait for my call!"
I stayed by the phone all day (reading an anthology, Stories of the Orient, a book I'd downloaded back home in Manhattan onto my iPad) waiting for a phone call from China.
Every time I previously tried getting out of Burma by land, the problem turned out to be my fear of consequences for locals who helped me. Every time I willingly gave up on my adventure when authorities got wise to me, so locals helping me would not get hurt. This time I tried to do it without that risk, but ....
Waiting, drinking tea and reading stories of the Orient.
As I write this February 8 has passed and now it is the 9th. Got an email from
China. They can do it north to south but not the other way around, it said.

I'll book a flight to Yangon and from there to HO CHI MINH CITY. Stay tuned even though now I am but a PAPER TIGER.

Maybe you'd like to read a fictional account of an exit from Burma I wrote after previous unsuccessful attempts to bust its borders. A SHORT STINT IN BURMA. I wrote it as fiction to avoid problems for people who attempted to help. It is available as an e-book or a paper version from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Another one, A SHORT STINT IN TIBET, a non-fiction, real true story account about illegally crossing into Tibet by walking over the Himalayas and entering an uninhabited area, can also be downloaded or bought as a paper version. That one, with many flashbacks, is as close to an autobiography as there ever will be.
SEASONS OF SAND, the non-fiction book about my three years in the Sahara, (Simon & Schuster, 1993), came out as a reprint by Authors Guild's Backinprint editions. So far this one is only available as a real paper and cardboard thing.
The German hardcover version is called EIN MACCERONIBAUM IN DER WUESTE, the paperback's title is EIN GARTEN IN DER WUESTE.
The French hardcover, Séléctions du Readers, is called SAISONS DE SABLE.

Go forth and buy them!