SHAN STATE, BURMA
Mong La is defintitely interesting, but Burma is hard to travel through. It’s not North Korea; visas are pretty easy to get and you can fly into Yangon or Mandalay without any trouble, but tourists aren’t welcome outside predominately Bamar areas. Every single one of Burma’s borders happens to be in a minority region, so it’s pretty much impossible to enter overland.

Luckily, for the past few years the Shan State has been the one place in Upper Burma where you can both enter by land and travel beyond the border. The crossing at Tachileik is usually just a day trip – Thais cross the border to buy cheap Chinese stuff and tourists who need to renew their visas can just hop over and back – but the $10 entry permit actually allows a stay of up to two weeks. There’s no damn way they would have ever let foreigners into the rest of the country from Tachileik, but the road to Kengtung and Mong La was fine if you were willing to stop at military checkpoints.

Fine until the Kokang Incident, anyway. In August of last year the Burmese raided “a gun factory suspected of being a drug front” about 250km north of Mong La, sparking a breakdown of decades-old cease-fires with every ethnic minority army in the area. By the end of the month about fifty people were dead and 37,000 refugees had run into Yunnan.

Refugees from Kokang in Yunnan province, from Flickr user treasuresthouhast

None of this happened anywhere near Mong La, but the Burmese cracked down anyway and stopped letting foreigners in. It may have opened up by now, but I didn’t get far enough to find out – Since the Kokang Incident, all foreigners traveling beyond Tachileik need to hire a “guide.”

“Guides”, who may or may not be minders, cost about US$30 a day plus all their food and lodging. If you’re traveling solo that effectively quadruples expenses and I only brought US$250. Nobody could tell me if Mong La was even open, either. The soldiers at the border said yes, the tourist office lady with a curious Victorian accent said no and every other English speaker in Tachileik didn’t understand why I’d ever want to go there.

I did find one guy who was willing to take me without a guide – he wanted to smuggle me through the checkpoints in the trunk of his Lada.

In one week, I’ll be in Calcutta.