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 the behaviour of the gentleman accompanying him, who clutched 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 we began our long journey northwards.

We had three stops to make as we worked our way up the length of Myanmar, and 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 final descent to rattle down onto the country’s most northerly airstrip. It’s a place that most of its people never visit, let alone foreigners, but 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 at its outskirts and behind them, like an oil painting, white-capped peaks strove for the heavens. In light of its remoteness, it was by nature a self-sufficient kind of place, a fact that was in evidence at the market where fresh herbs and ginger root from garden plots nestled up against a variety of bushmeat that had been harvested using 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 (though somewhat 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 ongoing 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. 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 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. In hindsight, I can confirm that this is both an 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 to the side of the road 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 would be easy to repair if they broke down which was what really mattered. We bungeed our bags to the back seats and then set off up a deserted dirt road into hills swathed with thick jungle that was 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 which 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 could throw one 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 vehicles 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 very lucky, a tea shop. Whenever we stopped, people came up and shook hands and then inevitably 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. A frequent presumption was therefore that we 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 there only out of curiosity and wanderlust, my interlocutors just 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 leaving their barracks out of fear for their lives. This last reason seemed particularly incongruous in an area where the inhabitants were some of the most hospitable and friendly people 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 favoured autonomy from the rest of the country, something that they had 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 enable their passage to India, the lowland Burmese made a pact with them, promising to help turf out the British if Tokyo in return left 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 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. But the supposed English gentlemen subsequently failed to honour their 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 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 presented me to the local pastor, one Mr. Pung, 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 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 from my glass 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 surprised to spot a faded black-and-white photo of a white-haired 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 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 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, of course, a church. They even salvaged parts of crashed wartime aircraft that they found 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, a quite remarkable 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 number of village churches and crosses hanging from necks bore testament 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. 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 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 too many cliff edges. The further out we got, the more helpless I became, my urban skillset increasingly irrelevant to survival. Soon enough I was 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 mattered.

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.

This 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. 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 would be impossible for any army to cross the dense, mountainous jungles on Burma’s eastern fringes, and thus 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, having already gained substantial experience of tropical warfare. So they hacked their way right through that totally impregnable jungle in 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 chose to head north to escape the advancing Japanese instead, eventually ending up in Putao. This became the last bastion of British control, with the refugees hoping that it would stay that way thanks to the extreme isolation and surrounding Himalayan peaks. But the Japanese soon started to close in and the food started to run out, leaving them no choice but to attempt what they had so wanted to avoid: walking out to India. This was now an even tougher proposition than before however, given the much more northerly starting point that meant wilder country, denser jungle, and higher mountains, added to which the monsoon had set in, turning what were already tenuous jungle tracks 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 acted as psychological crutches in a world they’d seen turned completely upside down. But the perceived value of these fell 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 sometimes 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.

Thankfully however, 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 were using 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 therefore 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 been 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 they had no inkling of my recent escapades 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 were here to escort me out.

I packed 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 whirred along the taxiways. Mine would be an easy exit, unlike the local resistance fighters who would now be retreating deeper into the jungle and hunkering down. We took off and I shuddered as I looked out of the window, thinking about what the people I’d met over the past days would now be facing.

The airstrip and its military hardware shrunk to mere toys as we climbed higher, before being completely consumed by the surrounding mountains and jungle. As I looked out over the endless green ridges, I realised that the real power actually lay with this wild, untamed nature and not the men with guns. History had shown that you had to learn to live in harmony with it to survive, like the local people and Japha did, like Mr. Morse and his followers had done. Coming in instead as an outsider and trying to impose your will just didn’t work. The name of the game was adaptation and humility, something that boded rather well for my new friends, but not so well for their pursuers.