Word: mongla
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...reach Mongla you must negotiate a bewildering variety of checkpoints. An hour or so before the town, I stopped at a bridge to show my documents at a Burmese immigration post. On the other side I was waved through two fortified checkpoints manned by conspicuously armed soldiers. This was the first indication that I had entered Lin's territory: the soldiers were not Burmese, but belonged to the National Democratic Alliance Army?a fancy name for Lin's private militia. A few miles farther on, my entry was officially recorded at a small roadside booth by a grumpy, half-naked...
...Mongla sprawls across a spacious valley bound by dark hills. I drove along the high street, where many old buildings had been demolished and replaced by the standard-issue shophouses, some of which doubled as cheap brothels. Most residents had retreated inside to escape the sweltering heat, and the streets were empty apart from a grimy Akha woman sifting through the trash cans...
...didn't linger for long, since there was a chance I'd miss the first attraction on my whistle-stop tour of Mongla?the transvestite show. The venue was on a hill to the south of town, at the end of a road leading past the crocodile show and through landscaped hills. At the top of the hill was a large parking lot packed with Chinese minibuses. The show was taking place in a dark hall packed with people, its air moist and overbreathed and circulated by several ineffectual ceiling fans...
...what was amazing about all this was the audience: they were all elderly Chinese couples on day trips from Yunnan province. About 10,000 Chinese tourists visit Mongla every day?among them, these grandmothers with blue-rinsed hair who sat unflinchingly as a trannie waltzed on in a see-through flamenco dress...
...There were also sets of postcards featuring Mongla's ladyboys in nipple-revealing evening wear. They starred in the official Mongla calendar, too. January showed a dazzling ladyboy swinging in the crook of an elephant's trunk; December had two ladyboys badly superimposed against a New Hampshire autumn. It was by far the cheapest, shoddiest, tackiest souvenir I had ever seen. I bought...