The Forgotten Frontier
The boy’s headgear of bamboo and animal tusks was a bit of a giveaway that this was no ordinary flight. Likewise for 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 beginning our long journey northwards.
We had three stops to make along the way as we worked our way up the length of Myanmar. At each the airport got smaller, the runway more bumpy, 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 we made our last descent and rattled down onto the country’s most northerly airstrip. It’s a place that most of its own population never visit, let alone foreigners like me, but is actually 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 at its outskirts and behind them, propped up like an extended oil painting, rose jagged white-capped peaks thrusting for the heavens. Owing to its remoteness, it was a self-sufficient kind of place, something that was in evidence at the market where fresh herbs and ginger root from garden plots nestled up against assorted bushmeat that had been harvested using homemade crossbows and vintage rifles. I even came across the skull of a gibbon, and was informed by the stall-holder that its brain makes an excellent cure for colds (although, as I helpfully pointed out to her, a somewhat less portable one than paracetamol).
That evening, I had the crackling fire at my small guesthouse all to myself. It wasn’t just the region’s remoteness keeping people away, but also the ongoing conflict between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar military that had now 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 pass to get out of town. In hindsight, I can 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 now well behind us, we pulled up at a spot where Aung’s friend was waiting under a large banyan tree, keeping watch over two motorcycles. These were not much to look at, just battered old 125cc Chinese-made Hondas, but they were simple and easy to repair which was what really mattered. We bungeed our bags onto the back seats and set off up a deserted dirt road into hills swathed with thick jungle, still glistening and dripping following a recent rain shower.
The further we got from Putao, the more frequent and the more basic the river crossings became. What were initially sturdy metal bridges morphed into wooden structures that then steadily deteriorated until all that was left was a couple of precarious planks thrown across the water, and 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 would throw you right off. My bike started to grow on me though as it managed these crossings with aplomb. Plus I found that 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 handful of wood and rattan houses on stilts with thatched roofs and maybe, if we were lucky, a tea shop. Whenever we stopped, people came up and shook hands, then asked 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 solely for pleasure came across as simply bizarre. Once I got it across that I really was there only out of curiosity and 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 hated it due to being far away from their homes in the lowlands, not speaking any of the local languages, and rarely being able to leave their compound out of fear for their lives. The last reason seemed particularly incongruous to me in an area where the inhabitants were some of 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 with their guns.
Aung told me that the majority of local people indeed favoured autonomy from the rest of the country, something that they had in fact been 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 facilitate their passage to India, the lowland Burmese made a pact with them, promising to help turf out the Brits in return for Tokyo leaving Burma a free and independent country once they were done. But the ethnically non-Burmese who lived up in the peripheral highlands of the country wanted no part of any such arrangement. They instead promised to help the British officers on the ground 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.
These highlanders kept up their side of the agreement admirably, their knowledge of these wild lands and toughness as fighters proving critical in allowing the British to eventually push the Japanese back out. But the supposed English gentlemen then failed to honour their own side of the deal 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 that 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 but sprightly gentleman decked out in baggy, diamond-checked trousers, an “Adidos” sweater, and a yellow woollen bobble hat. He greeted me warmly and then invited us both 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 seeking spiritual counsel or just 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 intrigued to spot a small, faded black-and-white photo of an elderly Caucasian gentleman in spectacles. I pointed to it, made 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 knew who it was. Before setting out on this trip, I’d spent an idle Sunday afternoon browsing the shelves of a dusty old bookshop that 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 remarkable 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 that all foreigners in the country were now 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 the 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 houses and, naturally, a church. They even salvaged parts of crashed wartime aircraft that they found and used then 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 there with zero contact with the outside world for the next six years, an astonishing testament to both bushcraft and community cooperation. Eventually however, the army tracked them down, captured Mr. Morse, and subsequently expelled him from the country. But his legacy and influence were not so easily booted out, as the many village churches and crosses hanging around necks bore witness to.
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. In these parts, existence was a communal affair and, after dinner, yet more villagers joined for tea and the lighting up of long, dark green cheroots to the sound of contented sighs. Thoroughly exhausted by this point, I made my excuses and retired to a small adjoining room where I laid out my sleeping bag, 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 urban skillset became increasingly irrelevant to my survival. Soon, I was totally dependent on Aung for securing such essentials as shelter, warmth, food and water. Here was a man who in the city would be dismissed as a country bumpkin, unable to operate a mobile phone or an ATM, now revealed as a true master of the skills that really mattered. One of these was his linguistic abilities which allowed him to tap into the local grapevine whenever we passed anybody, gleaning invaluable intelligence on the conditions ahead.
Finally, the track got 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. So 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 occupied the only areas of flat ground in the vicinity. The rest was all 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 from an army in hot pursuit. Although the British had eventually prevailed over the Japanese during the Second World War, this came 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 was complacency - the top brass were convinced that it would be 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 already had well covered. But the Japanese had no such reservations about their own abilities, having already gained substantial experience in tropical warfare. They used this to hack their way right through that totally impregnable jungle in a matter of weeks, showing up on the outskirts of Yangon before the Brits knew it.
With escape by air or sea suddenly impossible, over half a million colonial civilians now 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. The small town became the last bastion of British control, with 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 and the food started to run out, leaving no choice but to attempt what they had been trying so hard to avoid in the first place: walking out to India. This was now an even tougher proposition than before however, given the much more northerly starting point which meant crossing wilder country, denser jungle, and higher mountains. Added to which the monsoon had now set in, turning what were already tenuous jungle tracks at best into rivers of waist-deep mud.
Fearing that they might never return to Burma, many of the refugees left Putao carrying as much as they could, including treasured possessions that also acted as psychological crutches in a world they’d seen turned completely upside down. But the comfort these provided diminished rapidly with each additional day on the trail and so, one-by-one, they were discarded in the jungle.
That is why, over the years, local hunters have on occasion returned from forays into the bush bearing not only their usual bounties of boar and deer, but also candelabras, gramophones, sets of family silver and even, on one memorable occasion, an entire piano that was found half-buried in the undergrowth.
As for the refugees, many sadly didn’t make it, ill-adapted as they were to travelling through the jungle, even once relieved of their family heirlooms. But a number of them were saved by a fellow countryman, a British tea planter by the name of Gyles Mackrell, who had an estate just over the border in India. He was a man who had been living in these parts long enough to know that local problems required local solutions. On hearing of his compatriots’ fate therefore, he immediately ascertained that there was only one realistic method of rescue. He promptly saddled up his elephants and pushed his way through the jungle to reach them.
Thankfully, unlike Mr. Morse or those poor refugees, I had the luxury of returning the way I had come without having to be in fear of my life. Or so I had thought. On the second day of our long slog back, we were invited to stay the night at a makeshift logging camp deep in the jungle where elephants were moving freshly felled timber. As we sat sipping tea around the fire with the mahouts that evening, they told us 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 undetected two days later. The next morning though, the front desk at my guesthouse informed me that the army were now coming round checking for foreigners on a daily basis. They appeared after breakfast and I braced myself for a stern dressing down, assuming that by now they must have got wind of my recent escapades. But it seemed they had no inkling of what I’d been up to, as they instead apologised to me, explaining that due to “ongoing operations” all foreigners were now banned from Putao with immediate effect. So, just like Mr. Morse, I was now persona non grata and they were here to escort me out. I packed up my things, said goodbye to Aung, and climbed into the army truck for the short ride to the airport. There, two fighter bombers sat on the runway as jeeps trundled along the taxiways.
The airstrip and the military hardware shrank into mere playthings as we climbed higher, before being completely consumed by the surrounding mountains and jungle. Mine was an easy exit, unlike the local resistance fighters who would now be retreating deeper into the jungle and hunkering down. I shuddered to think about what the people I’d met over the past couple of weeks would be facing in the coming days.
But as I continued to look out over those endless green ridges and reflect on my travels with Aung, I realised that the real power lay with this wild, untamed nature - and by extension with the people who, like him, had learned to live in harmony with it and with one another. That was as opposed to the outsiders who came in and tried to dominate both it and them. Local wisdom, humility and cooperation always seemed to win the day up here - they were what had rescued the refugees, routed the Japanese, and sustained Mr. Morse’s followers. They had also done a damn fine job of keeping me alive since I’d arrived. That all boded rather well for my new local friends, and not so well for their pursuers.