The Forgotten Frontier

The boy’s headgear of bamboo and animal tusks was a bit of a giveaway that this was no ordinary flight, along with the behaviour of the gentleman accompanying him who was clutching his boarding pass like life depended on it, hands ensconced in woolly mittens despite the 30-degree heat. Our twin-prior plane taxied across the apron, made a shaky roll down the runway, reluctantly launched into a bone-juddering take-off, and then made a slow bank over the city of Yangon before starting its long journey northwards up the entire length of Myanmar.

We had three stops to make along the way, and at each the local airport got smaller, the runway bumpier, and the embarking passengers less conventionally attired, at least from my narrow point of view. The final leg took us over a vast expanse of densely forested mountains with not a house, field, or even plume of smoke in sight, before we made our final descent, bumping down onto the country’s northernmost airstrip adjacent to the settlement of Putao. It’s not a place that the majority of the country’s people, let alone foreigners, ever visit, but is actually the gateway to one of Myanmar’s best-kept secrets - its very own slice of the Himalayan mountain range.

Putao was more village than town, a single paved street, a handful of open-fronted shops, and a small school. It did also boast a church however, thanks to the zeal of American missionaries in the last century. Forested hills nibbled on its outskirts and, like an oil painting propped up behind them, rose the mighty, white-capped peaks of the eastern end of the word’s highest mountain range.

Given its remoteness, Putao was by nature a self-sufficient kind of place, as was in evidence at the market where fresh herbs and ginger root from garden plots brushed up against a variety of bushmeat that had been harvested with homemade crossbows and vintage rifles. I even came across the skull of a gibbon, informed by the stall-holder that its brains made a most excellent cure for colds and cramps (if a little less portable than paracetamol).

That evening, I had the cozy, crackling fire at my small guesthouse all to myself. It wasn’t just the region’s remoteness that kept people away, but also the conflict between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar military that had now been raging for decades. The fragile security situation meant that movement was strictly controlled and foreigners like myself were not supposed to venture beyond the outskirts of town. This meant that I was going to have to be a little sneaky.

I was up before sunrise the next morning to meet my guide, Aung, who arrived in a battered old double-cab pick-up truck. I stowed my bag in the back and then squeezed myself down behind the front seats to stay out of sight of the military checkpoints that we would have to drive past to get out of town. I can now confirm that this is both a very effective concealment strategy and a particularly uncomfortable way to travel over unpaved roads.

An hour later, with the final checkpoint well behind us, we pulled up by the side of the road where Aung’s friend was keeping watch under a large banyan tree over two motorcycles. They were not much to look at, just battered old 125cc Chinese-made Hondas, but they were simple and would be easy to repair which was what really mattered. We bungeed our bags to the back seats and set off up a deserted dirt road into hills swathed in thick jungle, still glistening and dripping after a recent rain shower.

The further we went, the more frequent and the more basic the river crossings became. Once sturdy metal bridges morphed into wood then steadily deteriorated until we were presented with just a couple of precarious planks thrown across the water, then finally nothing at all. That meant shifting down into first gear, gunning the throttle and just going for it, praying that the water was neither too deep nor hiding any large rocks that could throw you right off. My bike started to grow on me as it managed these crossings with aplomb, never complaining or threatening to stall. The compact size and weight also meant that, when came across a landslide blocking the road, we were able to just dismount and physically carry our vehicles right over.

Villages were now few and far between, appearing maybe once an hour, a few wood and rattan houses on stilts with thatched roofs and, if we were very lucky, a tea shop. Whenever we stopped, people would come up and shake hands before inevitably asking us where we were heading and why. That last question seemed to be of particular interest as, in an area where distances and conditions make travel an ordeal to be undertaken only when strictly necessary, the idea of a foreigner making such a journey voluntarily was simply bizarre. A frequent presumption was therefore that I must be looking for some kind of business opportunity, maybe scouting for jade? Or perhaps after a nice little timber concession? Once I got it across that I really was doing this just out of wanderlust, my interlocutors just shook their heads and laughed kindly at my evident lunacy.

In the mid-afternoon, we passed a small village with a difference, surrounded by a bamboo palisade with sharpened spikes sticking out at all angles. Aung informed me that this was an army outpost, home to just six soldiers, all of whom hated it as they were far away from their homes in the lowlands, didn’t speak any of the local languages, and rarely left their barracks for fear of their lives. This last reason seemed particularly incongruous in an area where the inhabitants were among the most hospitable and friendly I’d ever encountered, but then again I wasn’t the sole representative of a distant, oppressive regime, and one which, as far as I could tell, provided no other public services or infrastructure in the area beyond a mini-fortress of scared men and their guns.

Aung told me that the majority of local people indeed favoured autonomy from the rest of the country, something that they were actually promised over half a century ago - by the British. At the start of the Second World War, Burma as it was then known, was being ruled as a British colony. In 1942, when the Japanese invaded the country to facilitate their passage to India, the lowland Burmese made a pact with them, promising to help turf the British out in return for Tokyo leaving Burma a free and independent country after the war. But the ethnically non-Burmese who lived up in the peripheral highlands of the country wanted no part of such an arrangement. They instead promised the British officers on the ground that they would help them fight the Japanese in return for London guaranteeing independence for their respective regions after the war. The deal was done and hands were shaken. The highlanders kept up their side of this agreement admirably, their knowledge of these wild lands and toughness as fighters proving crucial in enabling the British to eventually push the Japanese out of the country. But these supposed English gentlemen then failed to honour their side of the deal when they quit the country after the war, instead inking a hasty handover deal with the new Burmese government that omitted to secure the promised independence for their highland allies. Now largely forgotten by the outside world, the latter continue their struggle to this day.

As the sun dipped behind the hills, we pulled up in a small hamlet sloping down to a wide river. There was a scattering of stilted dwellings, a couple of chicken and pig pens and a church. Aung led me towards one of the houses and introduced me to the local pastor, an elderly but sprightly gentleman decked out in diamond-checked baggy trousers, an “Adidos” sweater and a yellow woollen bobble hat. He greeted us warmly and invited me inside where a fire pit was crackling in the middle of the room. I took a perch on a low stool and gratefully accepted some tea which I sat and sipped while various villages appeared at the doorway to chat with the pastor, whether seeking spiritual counsel or just as an excuse to ogle the strange outsider, I wasn’t quite sure.

But it turned out I wasn’t the only foreigner in the room. On the wall in the corner I spotted an old black and white photo of a white-haired gentleman in spectacles. I pointed to it, making a quizzical face to my host, and immediately received an enthusiastic response, “Ahhh, Mr. Morse! Mr. Morse!” Unlikely as it was, I knew exactly who he was talking about. Before setting out on the trip, I’d spent an idle Sunday afternoon browsing the shelves of a dusty bookshop that I’d come across in the backstreets of Yangon. Tucked away in its creaking shelves, I’d chanced upon a title that was simply too good to pass up - “Exodus to a Hidden Valley”. It was the astonishing life story of this very man.

Mr. Morse was an American missionary who had come to Putao along with his family in the 1950s after some extensive proselytising in China. Back then, there was not a single Christian in this part of northern Burma, whereas today around ninety per cent of local people are churchgoing, a transformation that is overwhelmingly due to this one man. But when his preaching was at its zenith in the early 1960s, a military coup down in Yangon installed the first in a long line of military dictators into power. These were not the kind of people who were amenable to outside influences and they promptly decreed that all foreigners in the country were personae non gratae.

Orders for Mr. Morse’s deportation duly reached Putao but, instead of packing his bags and heading to the airstrip, he instead organised some four thousand of his local followers to accompany him on an absolutely remarkable exodus. Splitting into small groups, they followed animal trails out of town into the jungle, then regrouped and hacked their way through dense, inhospitable terrain for weeks until, confident that they had finally evaded pursuit by the army, they descended into a remote valley in the vast inhabited no-man’s near the Indian border. Here they cleared the bush, built houses and a church and planted crops. They even salvaged parts of crashed wartime aircraft that they found to make a waterwheel to generate electricity. In short, they established their own civilisation from scratch in the middle of the wilderness. Unbelievably, they continued to live there with zero contact with the outside world for over six years. Eventually however, the army tracked them down, captured Mr. Morse, and then expelled him from the country. But his legacy and influence were not so easily booted out, as was convincingly demonstrated by the number of crosses hanging around necks and secured to the gables of homesteads across this part of the country.

A couple of beaming, elderly ladies now arrived bearing generous bowls of rice, potatoes and fish. The pastor, Aung and a few other villagers joined me around the fire and we ate together with our hands as the sounds of crickets and cicadas drifted in through the open wooden shutters. After dinner, there was more tea, now accompanied by long, dark green cheroots lit up to the sound of contented sighs. Thoroughly exhausted by this point, I retired to a small adjoining room and laid out my sleeping bag on a bamboo platform, leaving the villagers to smoke and chat with Aung. Up here, beyond the reach of TV and newspapers let alone social media, he acted as a kind of one-man social media feed, providing eagerly awaited news of the outside world.

Over the next few days, we penetrated further into the mountains on ever narrower tracks, skidding over loose rock and mud and getting uncomfortably close to cliff edges. Finally, the track become so rocky and steep that further progress on two wheels became physically impossible. Aung told me that the next semblance of anything like a road would take a week’s walk to reach, by which time one would be on the other side of the Chinese border. We left the bikes propped up against a cliff wall and continued on foot up to a ridge for a panoramic view over chains of grey and green mountains, leading off to India in one direction and China in the other. We could just see make out a small village in the far distance, probably a half day’s walk away. Its smattering of wooden houses and handful of fields clung to the only areas of flat ground in the vicinity, the rest all jungle-cloaked mountainside with not another man-made object in sight. However, if you did go hacking your way through it, you might just find some very incongruous remnants of civilisation.

This was because Mr. Morse wasn’t the first one to have plunged into the wilderness on a mission to escape a pursuing army. Though the British had eventually prevailed over the Japanese during the Second World War, this was only after they were first all but pushed out of the country. This initial rout went down as one of the most rapid military collapses in British history and their longest ever military retreat. The main cause was complacency - the top brass were convinced that it was impossible for any army to cross the dense, mountainous jungles on Burma’s eastern fringes, and therefore that any Japanese attempt to invade would come either by sea or along the coast road, both of which they had well covered. But the Japanese had no such reservations about their own abilities, especially given their substantial experience of tropical warfare. So they hacked their way right through that totally impregnable jungle in just a matter of weeks and were on the outskirts of Yangon before the British knew it.

With escape by air or sea soon impossible, over half a million colonial civilians now fled westwards on foot along jungle tracks towards India, some 1,500 kilometres away. Given how daunting a prospect that must have appeared, some instead headed north, ending up in Putao. This became the last bastion of British control and the refugees hoped that it would stay that way thanks to Its extreme isolation and surrounding Himalayan peaks. But the Japanese soon started to close in and the food started to run out, leaving no choice but to do what people had so wanted to avoid and trek out eastwards in an attempt to reach India. But this was now an even tougher proposition, given the much more northerly starting point, crossing through even wilder country with denser jungle and higher mountains, added to which the monsoon had now set in, turning what were already tenuous jungle tracks into rivers of waist-deep mud.

Fearing they might never return to Burma, people tried to take as much with them as they could, with treasured possessions also acting as psychological crutches in a world that had been turned upside down. But the perceived value of these keepsakes dimmed rapidly with each additional day on the trail so one-by-one they were discarded in the mud. Which is why over the years local hunters have returned from forays into the bush bearing not only their usual bounties of boar and deer as bounty, but also sets of silverware, gramophones, candelabras, typewriters and even, on one memorable occasion, a whole piano that was found half-buried in the undergrowth.

Thankfully, I had the luxury of returning back the way I had come without the worry of being pursued by an army, or so I thought. On the second night of our long journey back, we slept at a small logging camp in the jungle where local people still used elephants to move the freshly felled timber. As we sat sipping tea around the fire that evening, they told us that there had been recent fighting just a day away.

We moved as fast as we could from then on, slipping back into Putao two days later. The next morning, the front desk at my guesthouse told me that soldiers had been round looking for me the day before. They caught up with me after breakfast and I steeled myself for a stern dressing down or worse for having ventured outside Putao. But they were in fact apologetic and seemed to have no inkling of my recent adventures. Instead, they explained they were here to tell me that due to “operational reasons” all foreigners were now banned from this whole area of northern Myanmar with immediate effect.

The soldiers asked me to pack my things and then accompanied me to the airport. There, two fighter bombers sat on the runway and military trucks and jeeps rumbled along the taxiways. While I had the luxury of escaping on a plan to Yangon, Aung told me that the local resistance fighters would retreat further into the jungle given the imminent threat, history repeating itself once again in this beautiful, haunted land.