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Expense would not be heavy. To Bhamo would be easy. As things now stand, with no railway, one would need to take a few provisions and cooking utensils, and a camp bed and tent, unless one would be prepared to do as the author did, and patronize Chinese inns, such as they are. The rest would be easy to get on the road.
He had written, he said, to the poor woman telling her, dying as he believed her to be, to come down to Bhamo by boat to see me. In Bhamo I stayed in the comfortable house of the Deputy Commissioner, and was treated with the most pleasant hospitality. To my regret, the Deputy Commissioner was down the river, and I did not see him. He is regarded as one of the ablest men in the service.
All the trade of Burma and Yün-nan flows back and forth through the gates of Teng-yueh, over the great caravan road to Bhamo on the upper Irawadi. An important post of the Chinese Foreign Customs, which are administered by the British government as security for the Boxer indemnity, is situated in this city, and we were looking forward with the greatest interest to meeting its white population.
But I feel I should like to say just a word of praise of the remarkable work of the American Baptist Mission, which has its headquarters at Bhamo, among this tribe in Burma. At the time I arrived in the city the annual festival was being conducted at the Baptist Church, and hundreds of Kachins were assembled in the splendid premises of this mission.
We decided to come here again with some sort of a house on a keel of our own, and stop and shoot here and there, and paint; perhaps drift down river from Bhamo through the defiles, with sport wherever one wanted it four kinds of deer, elephant, jungle fowl, francolin, snipe, geese, duck, possibly leopard or tiger, and a few miles inland there are rhino and gaur there's a choice! and I'd have a net too four weeks out, by "Henderson" or "Bibby," four here, and four back I wonder if my presence could be spared at home.
Again did I get a fright that my manuscript would never get into print, for my pony, Rusty, probably cognizant of the fact that he, too, was finishing his long tramp, nearly stamped the bottom of the boat out, and threatened to send us down by river past Bhamo quicker than our arrival was scheduled.
The greater part of the city within the walls is waste land or gardens. The houses are collected mainly near the south gate, and extend beyond the south gate on each side of the road for half a mile on the road to Bhamo. There is an excellent wall in admirable order, with an embankment of earth 20ft. in width.
And now lovely, lovely Burma! I had not been in Burma two minutes before the very box containing the clothes into which I must change before I could enter into the social life of Bhamo swung from the broken pole of one of my coolies, and rolled rapidly towards the river. It was recovered after great trouble.
It is also true that Nampoung is only thirty miles or so, as the crow flies, from Bhamo, and when one has been in the wilds, and out of touch of civilization for months at a time, Bhamo is by no means a place to be despised. So thought Gregory, of the 123rd Burmah Regiment, as he threw his line into the pool below him.
An interesting place is Bhamo, the last station for the river steamers and close to the frontier of China. The town is more Chinese than Burman in character, though on the banks of the River Taiping are the remains of pagodas and other buildings of purely Burmese origin.
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