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 his life depended on it, hands ensconced in woolly mittens despite the 30-degree heat outside. Our twin-prop plane taxied across the apron, made a shaky roll down the runway, and then reluctantly launched into a bone-juddering take-off. We made a slow bank over the city of Yangon before starting our long journey northwards, up the entire length of Myanmar.

We had three stops to make along the way, and at each the airport got smaller, the runway bumpier, and the embarking passengers less conventionally attired, at least from my blinkered point of view. The final leg took us over a vast expanse of densely forested mountains with not a house, field, or even a plume of smoke in sight, before making our final descent and bumping down onto the country’s northernmost airstrip. It’s not a place that most of the country’s people, let alone foreigners, ever visit, but it is the gateway to one of its best-kept secrets - Myanmar’s 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. Forested hills nibbled on its outskirts and behind them, looking like an oil painting, hazy, white-capped peaks thrust for the heavens. In light of its remoteness, it was by definition a self-sufficient kind of place, which was in evidence in 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 make an excellent cure for colds (albeit somehwat less portable than paracetamol).

That evening, I had the 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 been simmering for decades. The fragile security situation meant that movement was strictly controlled and foreigners such as myself were not allowed to venture beyond the outskirts of town. That meant I was going to have to be a little sneaky.

I was up before sunrise the next morning to meet my guide, Aung, who turned up 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. With hindsight I can confirm that this is both an effective concealment strategy and a particularly uncomfortable way to travel over unpaved roads.

An hour later, with the final checkpoint now 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, battered old 125cc Chinese-made Hondas, but they were simple and would be easy to repair if they broke down which was what really mattered. We bungeed our bags to the back seats and set off up a deserted dirt road into hills swathed with thick jungle, still glistening and dripping after a recent rain shower.

The further we went, the more frequent, as well as the more basic, the river crossings became. Initially sturdy metal bridges morphed into wooden structures which then steadily deteriorated until all that was left was a couple of precarious planks thrown across the water, and 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 though, as it managed these crossings with aplomb. Plus its compact size and weight meant that, when we came to a landslide blocking the road, we could handily just dismount and carry our steeds 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 maybe, if we were very lucky, a tea shop. Whenever we stopped, people would come up and shake hands and then inevitably ask us where we were heading and why. That 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 doing it just for pleasure seemed simply bizarre. A frequent presumption was therefore that I must be looking for some kind of business opportunity - scouting for jade perhaps? Or maybe after a nice little timber concession? Once I got it across that I really was doing this just out of wanderlust, my interlocutors shook their heads and laughed benevolently 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 told me that this was an army outpost, home to just six soldiers, all of whom apparently hated it due to being far away from their homes in the lowlands, not speaking any of the local languages, and rarely leaving their barracks out of fear for 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 that, as far as I could see, provided no other public services or infrastructure in the area beyond this 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 promised over half a century ago - by none other than my fellow countrymen, 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 enable their passage to India, the lowland Burmese made a pact with them, promising to help turf out the British if Tokyo left Burma a free and independent country in return. But the ethnically non-Burmese who lived up in the peripheral highlands of the country wanted no part in any such arrangement. They instead promised to help the British officers on the ground to resist the Japanese advance in return for London guaranteeing independence for their respective regions after the war. A deal was duly 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 critical in allowing the British to eventually push the Japanese out of the country. But these supposed English gentlemen subsequently failed to honour their side of the deal altogether when they quit the country after the war, instead just inking a hasty handover deal with the new Burmese government that made no mention of 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 at 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, one Mr. Pung, an elderly yet sprightly gentleman decked out in diamond-checked baggy trousers, an “Adidos” sweater, and a yellow woollen bobble hat. He greeted us warmly then invited us in for tea. A fire pit was crackling in the middle of the room and I took a perch on a low stool next to it and sat sipping while assorted villagers appeared at the doorway to chat with the pastor, whether genuinely seeking spiritual counsel or more as an excuse to ogle the strange outsider, I wasn’t quite sure. But it turned out that I wasn’t the only foreigner in the room. On the wall in the corner I was surprised to see a faded black-and-white photo of a white-haired gentleman in spectacles. I pointed to it, making a quizzical face at Mr. Pung, and immediately received an enthusiastic clap in return, “Ahhh, Mr. Morse! Mr. Morse!”

Improbable as it might seem, I realised that I actually knew who he was talking about. Before setting out on the trip, I’d spent an idle Sunday afternoon browsing the shelves of a dusty old bookshop I’d come across in the backstreets of Yangon. Tucked away on its sagging 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. Today, around ninety per cent of the 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 dictators. These were not the kind of people amenable to outside influences and they promptly decreed all foreigners in the country as personae non gratae.

Orders for Mr. Morse’s deportation duly reached Putao. But, rather than packing his bags and heading to the airstrip, he instead organised some four thousand of his local followers to accompany him on a quite 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 several weeks until, confident of having finally evaded pursuit by the army, they descended into a remote valley in the vast uninhabited no-man’s land near the Indian border. Here they cleared the bush, planted crops, and built some houses and a church. They even salvaged parts of crashed wartime aircraft to make a waterwheel to generate electricity. In short, they established their very own civilisation from scratch in the middle of the wilderness. Unbelievably, they continued to live here with zero contact with the outside world for the next 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 the number of churches up here and crosses hanging around necks bore testament to.

A couple of beaming, elderly ladies 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 open wooden shutters. After dinner there was more tea, 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 the internet, he acted as a kind of one-man social media feed, passing on 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 far too many cliff edges. The further out we got, the more helpless I was as my skillset became increasingly irrelevant to survival. Instead, I was soon totally dependent on Aung for securing such essentials as shelter, warmth, food and water. A guy who in the city would be dismissed as a country bumpkin, unable to operate a mobile phone or an ATM, was now revealed as a true master of the skills that really matter.

Finally, the track became so rocky and steep that further progress on two wheels became 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 make out a small village in the far distance, probably half a 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 was jungle-cloaked mountainside with not a man-made object in sight. But if you did go hacking your way through it, you might just find some rather surprising remnants of civilisation hidden in its depths.

That was because Mr. Morse wasn’t the first person to have plunged into this 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. It was a rout that went down as one of the most rapid collapses in British military history and their longest ever retreat. The main cause of this 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 have to come either by sea or up along the coast road, both of which they had well covered. But the Japanese had no such reservations about their own abilities in the bush, having by now gained 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 Brits knew it.

With escape by air or sea now impossible, over half a million colonial civilians fled westwards on foot along jungle tracks to try to reach India, some 1,500 kilometres to the west. Given how daunting a prospect this must have been, some understandably instead chose to head north to escape the advancing Japanese, eventually ending up in Putao. This became the last bastion of British control, the refugees hoping it would stay that way thanks to its extreme isolation and the surrounding Himalayan peaks. But the Japanese soon started to close in while the food started to run out, leaving people no choice but to attempt what they had so wanted to avoid - walking out to India. However, this was now an even tougher proposition than before given the much more northerly starting point which meant much wilder country, denser jungle, and higher mountains, added to which the monsoon had now set in and turned what were already at best tenuous jungle tracks into rivers of waist-deep mud.

Fearing that they might never return to Burma, many of the refugees now left Putao carrying as much as they could, including treasured possessions that no doubt also acted as psychological crutches in a world that had been turned completely upside down for them. But the perceived value of these diminished rapidly with each additional day on the trail and so, one-by-one, they were discarded in the jungle. Which is why over the years local hunters have returned on occasion from forays into the bush bearing not just their usual bounties of boar and deer, but also candelabras, gramophones, sets of family silver, typewriters and even, on one memorable occasion, an entire piano that was found half-buried in the undergrowth.

Thankfully though, unlike Mr. Morse or the British, I had the luxury of returning the way I had come without the worry of military pursuit. Or so I thought. On the second day of our long slog back, we stopped at a small logging camp in the jungle where they still used elephants to move freshly felled timber. As we sat sipping tea around the fire that evening, the mahouts told Aung that there had been recent fighting just a day away. That was a little too close for comfort.

We moved as fast as we could from then on, finally slipping back into Putao two days later. The next morning, the front desk at my guesthouse informed me that the army had come round looking for me the day before. They caught up with me after breakfast and I braced myself for, at best, a stern dressing down. But it seemed that they had no inkling of my recent adventures as they instead apologised to me, explaining that due to “ongoing operations” all foreigners were now banned from Putao with immediate effect. Just like Mr. Morse, I was now persona non grata and they had come to escort me out.

I packed my things, said goodbye to Aung and climbed into their truck for the short ride to the airport. There, two fighter bombers sat on the runway as jeeps whirred along the taxiways. Mine was an easy escape, unlike the local resistance fighters who would now be retreating deeper into the jungle. We took off and I shuddered as I looked down out of the window thinking about what they and the people I’d met over the past few days would now be facing.

The airstrip and its military hardware transformed into toys as we climbed higher, before being completely consumed by the surrounding mountains and jungle. As I looked out over those endless green ridges, I realised that the real power actually lay with wild, untamed nature and not the men with guns. You had to learn to live in harmony with it to survive. As well as with your fellow humans, given that nobody made it out here alone, meaning that cooperation - and therefore trust - was key. That boded rather well for my new friends, and not so well for their pursuers.