My Golden Ass

Sally, a 20’ish backpacker with blonde dreadlocks from Britain, and I are sitting on the couch in a swanky Kowloon apartment. We looked at the two pieces of shiny gold, stacked one on top of the other like a little five-inch phallus on the chrome and glass coffee table.
“In your ass, Kevin,” said Sally.
“Wait, you mean in my ass, ass?” I said just as Peter, who moments earlier collected our passports, and in whose 1980s modern decor bachelor apartment in Hong Kong we were in, walked into the room. I saw his reflection in several of the apartment’s many mirrors that were angled right at me.
“Ya, in your azz, azz” said Peter, in his guttural Swiss German.
With the contraband stowed at my feet, I settled into my window seat for the quick hop from Bangkok to Mandalay, Burma. Two bottles and a box. I knew the bottles, but as a non-smoker, I had never heard of the box. It was common knowledge among the backpacker set in Asia that if you go to Burma, bring the allowable limit of one bottle of Johnny Walker and one carton of 555 cigarettes to sell on the black market and make enough in profit to pay for an entire week of budget travel. I figured, what the heck, I’ll bring two of each and splurge. Not that I needed the extra money for this trip to Burma.
I had plenty of cash saved, and by nature I tend towards being thrifty, so given the opportunity to save a few bucks, or in this case to make a few extra dollars, I’ll take it. I was on an extended, multi-year trip, and so budget travel and stretching out my savings made sense. As a twenty-something, my crowd were the budget-travelers, the other young people bouncing around Asia and the rest of the world on a shoestring. Comparatively speaking, I just had really long laces.
I bumped my way down the aisle of the plane, finding my seat well back in coach class. As a backpacker in Asia for the better part of a year already, I looked and smelled a little rough. I was always uncomfortable with that when taking flights. The guy sitting in the seat next to me said, “it looks like you’re planning for a party” as he glanced at the whiskey and cigarettes in their duty-free plastic bag by my feet.
“Just planning to do a little business to pay for the week of travel in Burma,” I said.
“I’m Peter, from Switzerland,” he said as he extended his hand.
“Kevin - nice to meet you.”
“I believe the limit for duty-free in Burma is just one bottle of liquor and one carton of cigarettes. It looks like you have two of each,” said Peter.
“I know - but how much trouble can I get into by bringing a little extra? I can make double the money, and the risk seems pretty low. Maybe they take away one of each - that’s the worst thing that would happen.” I was looking at Peter, and I caught an unmistakable pursing of his lips, a tiny, tight-lipped smile, a nod of his head, and an extra gleam in his eyes. Peter’s an interesting and friendly guy, who presented himself as more of a young businessperson in the way he dressed, with a sharp haircut, clean-shaven and nice clothes.
“What are you hoping to see in Burma?”, I asked.
“I like the sight-seeing, sure, but I’m more interested in meeting people, other travelers, who might have an interest in my business affairs”. I wanted to ask more, but a voice over the speaker announced we would be landing, and we joined in on the flurry of securing tray tables, putting our seats upright and so I never had a moment to ask him to explain this.

The slight tension in my stomach increased as I considered what I would say, and what would happen should they question me at customs with the extra contraband. What if, in fact, it’s a big deal not to declare extra duty-free purchases, and what would the penalty be for my “mistake”. Even though I only had an extra ration of whiskey and cigarettes, I was a little nervous, and I wondered what real smugglers must feel like - the ones with cocaine strapped to their bodies, or heroin in condoms in their stomachs. I approached the customs officer and tried to act normal, thinking all the while that he could tell I was up to something.
And then nothing happened.
“Welcome to Burma”, said the Customs Officer.
I made a swift clearance through passport control and customs, with my contraband booty undiscovered. My first attempt at low-grade smuggling was a success, and I grinned as I collected myself after clearing the exit.
I ran into Peter again, and as we were both going to the same hotel, we shared a taxi to the town of Maymo, and then a local rickshaw up to the hotel. The taxi driver bought all the whiskey and cigarettes for double what I had paid for them. I looked over at Peter, and he had a wry smile on his face.
“You seemed cool and calm during the entry process, and I can tell that you are a person who can handle pressure.”
The taxi dropped us off at what looked like a very large and well-groomed English country estate called the Candacraig Hotel. The waiting smiles and head-waggles of two turbaned porters jostled into position to be the first to grab my filthy and well-worn backpack.
Known as the British Club in the days of the Raj, George Orwell used it as his retreat during the five years he served in Burma with the British Army. I had always wanted to stay in this hotel, not because of Orwell, but because of a lifelong fascination with the British Raj and the colonial era. This being Burma, one of the poorest countries of the world - and one of the least expensive - a splurge for a night at the famous Candacraig Hotel was well within my backpacker budget, now augmented with my recent smuggling booty.
At check-in the mustachioed concierge in a crisp white jacket said that they serve dinner after sundowners, at 6:30 PM. Dining at Candacraig is still a very formal affair, with jackets and ties preferred for men, but as a backpacker I had neither, so I cleaned up the best I could with my one pair of summer-weight long pants and my one collared short-sleeved shirt. Both stayed clean by being wrapped in a plastic bag for the occasional border crossing and perhaps (in my pre-trip fantasy) drinks on the terraced back lawn of an embassy party thrown in my honor by an American ambassador in some tropical country (never happened). For sundowners, and keeping with British colonial tradition, I was having a Pimm’s No.1 Cup on the balcony with Peter, who, while not in a jacket and tie, at least looked smart in his slacks and dress shirt. He had invited me to join him for Candacraig’s traditional British dinner: roast beef, mashed potatoes, peas, and Yorkshire pudding.

With me in my border-crossing best and Peter dressed for the evening, we connected, as travelers often do, with a comfortable back and forth of storytelling and recounting of our adventures traveling around Asia. I felt an immediate kinship with Peter, more so with him than with many other young travelers I encountered. He was smooth and comfortable with conversation. It seemed we were more alike, with similar backgrounds - it was a feeling. He conveyed sincerity and trust. Peter said I should drop by Hong Kong, where he lives, if my travels brought me there. My itinerary included Hong Kong, so he wrote his phone number on a slip of paper. And that’s how I ended up in his apartment, four months later, staring at a stack of gold. I’d just learned that Peter was a gold smuggler, and he had just invited me into his fascinating world.
Gold was legally bought and sold in the Hong Kong gold markets in those days, and at the time they only produced it in three shapes: flat and thin gold bars, two-inch high cylinders (the “saltshakers”), and very thin sheets like foil. The flat bars are taped to the body, the cylinders go up the bum, and they line the foil into clothes or luggage. Capitalism at its best.
His gold smuggling operation worked like this: couriers, young foreign backpackers, get a round-trip airline ticket from Hong Kong to Kathmandu, Nepal and $1000 in cash after successfully transporting the gold. That was a lot of money for a young traveler in Asia and one could live for months on that in the right places. Couriers were easy to recruit. Word got around the traveler grapevine easily, primarily in the main hostels in Kowloon, which were in a notorious multi-story building known as Chungking Mansions. It’s the center of Hong Kong’s gold smuggling operations, and one or two days of hanging around on any of the levels would invite a whispered inquiry from a stranger.
“Do you want to do a gold run?”
Peter was just one of many gold smugglers running these operations to Nepal. If you got referred to him, they gave you his address, which was a posh condo complex in Kowloon, right at the Star Ferry. This is some very prime real estate of glass and chrome high-rise condominiums and hotels with million-dollar views across Hong Kong harbor. Prospective couriers came to the apartment and surrendered their passports to Peter, who then gave them the two pieces of gold, which weighed approximately two kilograms, or nearly five pounds in total. They went off to his bathroom, where some lube was waiting.
The five-inch long, two kilos of gold go up the rectum, and the candidate had to spend half an hour walking around the apartment and up & down the stairs to make certain that they could “accommodate” the gold. If the trial-run is successful, the courier’s passport is returned, and they are given their instructions: travel date, flight number, when and where to pick up their airline ticket, how they would get the gold, and what to do upon landing in Kathmandu.
“Your turn, mate,” Sally said to me. She and her boyfriend Jonathan had already made one successful courier run, and they were back for their next $1000 of travel money. She described to me how it worked.
Once on the plane, an unknown guy comes to your seat and hands you a little airline travel kit with the gold inside. It seems the smugglers are in cahoots with the airline people. It’s suggested that you keep the little butter packet that comes with the meal to use as lubricant, and thirty minutes before landing you should go to the toilet and make the “insertion”. The three of us were sitting on the sofa in Peter’s apartment. They were cracking up, which made me crack up. Jonathan, who didn’t seem like the smuggling type, was an avid bird watcher who always walked around with a pair of binoculars around his neck.
He described how 30 minutes before landing, there was a line of young backpackers in the aisle from the cockpit all the way back to the rear bathroom, each carrying their little airline toilet bag and the pat of butter. Or “butt-a” as Jonathan pronounced it in his cockney accent. He said that every now and again someone would crack open the toilet door and yell, “flight attendant, more butt-a please”, the flight attendants would laugh, and they would deliver another little packet.
Sally said every time the plane hit a bit of turbulence, there was an audible scream as the couriers tried to maintain their composure. Upon landing in Nepal, the plane taxied onto a runway parking spot, and they rolled up the stairs to disembark—there was no jetway in those days.
“So, I inserted the gold and went back to my seat, trying hard to keep a relaxed face,” said Sally.
“The plane made a hard landing, which hurt a bit. They brought the steps to the plane, and we all walked down to the tarmac. Just as I took the last step, plop, plop, — both of the gold pieces popped out of me butt, down me pant leg, and started rolling under the plane. It terrified me that the shock would show on me face, so I tried to look natural while I scooped them up and put them in me handbag. I looked around, and none of the airline or customs people seemed to notice what had just happened. I knew the fate of other gold smugglers who got caught - years in a Nepali prison - and visions of me rotting in a nasty prison cell flashed through my mind.”

The situation at the Kathmandu airport was this - they had no modern metal detectors like most other airports in the world, so a passenger, or courier, just presented a passport in the customs hall, grabbed their luggage, and walks into Nepal. Peter’s local liaison had your name and description and would wait for you just outside the arrival hall. They would greet you and take you off to some private toilet where you would expel the gold, hopefully be able to wash your hands, and turn it over to receive your open-ended return ticket and $1000 cash. Easy.
Jonathan picked up the gold from the coffee table, handed it to me and said with a wink, “Come on now, off you go”.
I didn’t need the thousand dollars to keep traveling. I’m not much of a lawbreaker or big risk-taker, and I couldn’t imagine doing this. But I was on the trip to learn new things, to have some new experiences, and for a bit of an adventure. Sticking five pounds of gold up my ass was not what I was thinking, but what the hell, I had come this far. I took the gold and headed for Peter’s bathroom.
A lot of foreign backpackers were in prison in Nepal—some for drug offenses, and many for gold smuggling. Of course, this operation is well known to Nepalese customs, and there was a lot of speculation that the King of Nepal was hoarding all the millions in gold coming from Hong Kong, Thailand and other countries. Nepalese customs can’t appear to be complicit, however, so now and then, they bust a few backpackers and throw them in jail. And every year on the King’s birthday, he has a general amnesty and lets everyone out. That’s what they say, anyway. One theory is that they then smuggled the gold across the border to India, where many people keep their wealth in gold jewelry. A friend speculated it was the government of India who was buying the gold and then trading it to Russia, their current ally, for military equipment (MIGS).
I came out of the bathroom, and Sally, Jonathan, and Peter were all waiting for me to say something. I had learned a lot. I learned about Burma, where I met Peter. I learned about young travelers smuggling high-priced goods around Asia with no risk, for minor money, and about gold smuggling to Nepal at considerably greater risk and only a bit more money. And perhaps to the chagrin of a couple of fellas over the years and a kinky girlfriend or two, I also learned that my “azz azz” does not inhale.
As I rode the elevator down to the lobby from Peter’s apartment, I looked at myself in the mirror in the elevator, gave myself a little wink and a nod...as I knew for certain there was no way I would have even considered smuggling gold across international borders, let alone put some up my azz azz.