Word: mongla
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...Meanwhile, Mongla grew. Casinos and other tourist attractions were built, and soon thousands of Chinese day-trippers from neighboring Yunnan province were pouring over the border to visit them. Later I picked up an official tourism leaflet, written in Chinese, which described Mongla as "a beautiful and prosperous region (with) unique natural scenery and curious local customs." One of those curious customs was public executions. Lin governed his private fiefdom with medieval brutality. On one occasion three men suspected of plotting to assassinate him were dragged into the busy market and machine-gunned to death by his teenage bodyguards...
...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...