The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  As I stepped into the hollowed log with a hole in its side, I regretted my request to cross the Omo River. I squatted in two inches of mud as a boy who cannot have been more than eight years old, poled the log up the river’s bank and then out in to the main flow where water dark as treacle, swift and eddying, miraculously took us across to the far bank. It was Nationalities Day and villages sent in troupes of dancers, male and female, to perform. They were patient of a dreary speech through a malfunctioning megaphone and then, with much crowd support, each team sang, whooped and stamped its way around the police compound, all giggling with the fun of it.

  It is amazing what can be done with hair as short and thick as a door mat but no two heads are alike in The Omo. Beaded, woven, shorn into intricate patterns, rubbed with clay, saturated with fat, tied up on top, knitted, knotted, knobbled, knurled and even plaited; each man and woman sported something distinctive. Further down there was scope for greater imagination and artistry. Bright pieces of plastic were a particularly popular addition and were twisted and shaped, dangled from ears, threaded through noses and stuck into hair. Married women got to wear necklaces sized for an ox – three necklaces if you were number one wife, and they were solid metal. Beads were big in these parts – in size, in number and in fashion. Strung long, short, light or heavy they were multicoloured, plain or patterned and they hung them from their necks and wrapped them around their waists, arms or ankles. A metal watch strap dangled from one ear, a bunch of aluminium pull tabs formed a necklace and a picture of Osama bin Laden was threaded through a length of wire and hung around a neck. Through Melkanu I asked if the owner knew whom he had jiggling against his chest. The dialect was difficult but it seemed he had no idea and when I told him it was a picture of the most wicked man in the world he beamed with pleasure; I had probably doubled its value. When it came to the main canvas of the body, inventiveness was the name of the game; a pot of white clay and ten fingers were all these artists asked for. There was no pattern too weird, too elaborate, too eccentric or too bizarre. I was not the first to see them and they knew their worth in front of a lens: 5p a shot and they counted the shutter clicks. The women of the Mursi came more expensive but if you have got a saucer jammed in your upper lip and earlobes down to your shoulders, a premium can be expected. Most of the men had a Kalashnikov slung over a shoulder and bullets in the magazine. I checked one – an extra 10p; in the circumstances I thought the price very reasonable. There are about 25 different tribes and, like the Dogon of Mali, they are all an anthropologist’s dream.

  At Konso it was dusk and lorries laden with labourers leaving for outlying villages were throwing clouds of ochre coloured dust into the setting sun whose rays, equatorially horizontal, were split by the roadside eucalyptus. St Mary’s Hotel in the jargon of the travel agent was ‘the best available’. It may well have been but it was rough even by local standards. It also occupied a prime site at the junction of four roads where a loudspeaker blared a cacophony of music in between pep talks on Aids; no one stood and listened. Outside my room there was an enamel bowl in which appeared to be the entrails of some animal. Peering closer they turned out to be the entrails of a lavatory cistern, mine. After a dampening from the drip of a shower, I found that the tiled floor was higher than that of the bedroom and there was now a small lake around my bed. A group of Japanese arrived a little later – I wondered when they would turn up. Their 4x4s were numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and ten identikit women and two men tumbled out – several wearing masks over their mouths. They had brought their own food and two cooks were setting up their stoves in a corner of the courtyard. In another corner there was a bar crowded with locals and at the back a workshop for maintaining road construction machinery; a low loader was inching its way past Landcruisers 2 and 3. The bar turned on its music and the restaurant opposite was keen not to be audibly left out. My iPod reluctantly conceded defeat and the whisky bottle lowered a notch or two.

  Yergalem is at the heart of the coffee growing area, and Aragash Lodge provided a sanctuary; on a Sunday, I was the only guest. Huge roundels of split bamboo formed the individual lodges and had bathroom appliances that actually worked. The cool of the altitude and the cooing of mourning doves did much to relieve the splitting headache and queasy stomach I had brought from the hell hole of Konso. Alone in the dining room, the Greek/Ethiopian owner came to chat. We discussed the difficulties of attracting upmarket customers in downmarket countries but he was confident that quality will win out eventually and smiled inscrutably as only a Greek can. He had 11 brothers and sisters all of whom live abroad – a sister in Bradford sent him lettuce seed for the hotel garden.

  Longing for more cool and clean air, I headed for the Bale Mountains. It was two days’ drive to the north through coffee, wheat and barley plantations and passed people wrapped in woollen cloaks astride small, bony horses and villages each with a square mosque of corrugated sheets and sporting a minaret economically painted with windows, balconies and cornices. Whining in first gear, Teckle nursed the car up to the Sanetti Plateau – the highest road in Africa. The Afro-alpine moorland, well above the tree line of the juniper forests, was dotted with giant lobelia and patched with spreading groups of kniphobia, sage and helichrysum. The air on the summit of Tullo Deemtu was thin and crisp and cloud covered all the land around. At 14,100 ft (4,300m) it is the continent’s third highest mountain. 600 miles (375kms) to the northeast is the Danakil Depression, the lowest point on earth – what a country!

  But I tired of contrasts, the struggles to survive, the inefficiency that poverty is careless of, the stares, the drab and dreary, 30 year olds going on 60, the squalor and the half-finished. I longed for things fat and fleshy, ironed sheets and a smooth road. I lack any missionary zeal and such conscience as I have was not moved to change the lives that I saw here. Churches of all kinds, NGOs by the score, aid agencies, governments, The World Bank and United Nations have all tried or are trying; I could not see a detectable dot of success.

  Melkanu planned to open a tour agency. I told him to import bicycles – he would make a fortune. He smiled wistfully and waved a fluttering hand in sad farewell. “Abyssinia,” I cried. Well – maybe.

  Postcard Home

  Here near the Omo, I’m in the deep south,

  The men are all scarred as mark of respect,

  The women are slim which is what you’d expect

  If you got a large dinner plate stuck in your mouth.

  They told me the Omo was dusty and hot.

  Now I’ve been here a week, I can tell you it’s not.

  I’ve been drenched every day and in mud to my crutch.

  I doubt whether Noah saw such rain or so much.

  But the mountains are green and the tribes strange and queer.

  It’s untamed and untraveled and I’m thrilled to be here.

  Burma II

  January 2007

  ‘To get to know a country you must have direct contact with the earth. It’s futile to gaze at the world through a car window’ – Albert Einstein

  On New Year’s Eve the champagne exploded like a firecracker turning heads in the Golden Banyan, a small restaurant open to the street in Kentung in the Eastern Shan State. Moving the ashtray with its ‘No Smoking’ notice attached and contemplating the menu of Half Fried Egg, Wet Fried Pig’s Colon and Pig Ear Salad, I poured out the contents of the bottle into three unmatched tumblers for my two travelling friends and myself where it frothed and sparkled in pink anticipation of further celebration but none came. Here, with the Chinese border only two hours’ drive away (as is that of Thailand and Laos), the party for Chinese New Year is in February. But tomorrow is my birthday and I have more fizz in the hotel fridge.

  I had met up with my friends in the chaos of Rangoon’s airport’s internal departure lounge (I use the word colloquially – you do not lounge at a Burmese airport) and our plane had then hopped via Heho, Mandalay and Tashleik to this town in the hills. Each airport was a clone of the other, sporting
a terminal building externally decorated with multi-pitched roofs and the intricate carving of a Buddhist temple. Earlier on in the evening, we had looked in on the cathedral that sat solid and plain in a prime spot overlooking the lake and adjacent to a huge gilded figure of a standing Buddha whose outstretched right hand and raised finger was a look-a-like of Uncle Sam in that ubiquitous poster ‘Your Country Needs YOU’. Above the cathedral doors the words ‘The Gates to Heaven’ had been chiselled into the brickwork. Clearly this celestial frontier appealed as the church was packed for Sunday vespers. Headscarfed or veiled women were in the nave while the men occupied in the side aisles; an interesting antithesis to Muslim etiquette. Strings of coloured lights for Epiphany flashed on and off around the altar as we lustily sang out Adeste Fidelis guided by a hymn book in phonetic Burmese. I bet they did not have so much fun at the frowning Buddha next door.

  At dawn I watched the town wake up; the noodle makers, the dumpling steamers and the tea boilers all doing their best to disperse the early morning mist. Commuters on mopeds, looming out of the watery gloom, wore helmets based on the German WWII model. It was as though a panzer division was advancing into town. It was a sleepy town, whose empty shops seemed content to remain so, whose dogs yawned as they lay in the dust and whose inhabitants had no need to hurry. But not wishing to disappoint my friends and family, I wrote on the back of the little watercolours I sent them:

  ‘Here in Kentung it’s a smuggler’s lair,

  There is blood on the floor and intrigue in the air.

  The women are pretty but the men look mendacious,

  It’s a place to be cautious and not too audacious.

  The cops and the army are all on the make

  And opium warlords have set out their stake.

  In the smoke of the braziers a furtive shadow

  Slips down an alleyway dark and narrow.

  Is he searching for women, for drugs or for rubies?

  You need to be sure who the friend that you choose is.

  If I get into trouble through some trifling mistake

  I shall offer some crumbs from my birthday cake.’

  Later, squeezed into a tiny, tinny Honda van, we set off on the road to China occasionally dwarfed by lumbering, overloaded trucks stirring the dust and belching the black diesel smoke of an engine pushed far beyond the limits set by its manufacturer. Dormant paddy fields, newly flooded, were being prepared for the spring harvest by rows of women wrapped against the morning chill and wearing coolie hats against the later sun. Rice nursery beds of the brightest viridian dotted the flat landscape like scattered emeralds.

  After two hours of rattling, climbing and twisting along the road cut out of the red soil of the hills by Chinese engineers, we stopped amongst lush vegetation and Paul, our guide, led us up a narrow, steep and slippery path. Music, filtered by the jungle, gradually became louder and curiously familiar; it was those same hymns from the cathedral. Arriving in the village square, a stage had been set up decorated with tinsel and palm fronds and crackling loudspeakers, powered by a car battery, carried the tune to rows of villagers. Women in the elaborate headdresses, tunics and leggings of the Akha people were singing their hearts out (the men were gambling round the back). A missionary would have sunk to his knees in gratitude for work fulfilled. It was the same priest from the cathedral and his parish included scattered mountain villages and competed with the Baptists, Buddhists and those who still clung to animist traditions. In his mid-forties, he was urbane, charming and fluent in English and several tribal dialects. After he had doled out communion wafers and given a short sermon, he revved up his trail bike with its panniers stuffed with vestments and sacraments and skidded off to another jungle service. Around and about, potbellied pigs rootled in muddy corners, chickens roamed, dogs panted and families crowded the verandas of their stilted wooden houses.

  The most northern Burmese province of Kachin stretches 215 miles (350 kms) beyond Myitkyina where the railway ends and from where the mule caravans used to start, travelling to China, the jade mines and the outposts of the Empire. Distance here is reckoned by days not miles; there are only tracks and the Irrawaddy, still 1,000 miles (1600kms) from the sea, is un-navigable even in the wet season; now, it drowsed 40 ft (12m) below its top banks. On three sides, the blue mountains hemmed in the plain, curving down southwards like horns; high on the China frontier, lower towards Tibet and Assam. Kingdon Ward came this way in 1928 collecting plants. He clearly wanted it known that he was not on holiday:

  ‘These are the wild regions which the tourist who does Burma in three days only dimly hears of. For six months the mountains are swathed in impenetrable mists and drenched with rain, the paths are washed away and the rivers inflamed. The dense and evergreen jungle is alive with blood sucking creatures – leeches, horse-flies, sand-flies, blister-flies, mosquitoes, ticks and other horrors. There is an orgy of blood-thirst for salt.’

  And just as you have got your breath back and are wondering whether in the circumstances the plants were really that important on the next page he carries on:

  ‘Here whole mountain ranges have been in conflict; there is dense jungle and all the discomfort that this entails with impassable rivers, snowbound passes, incredible rain and a total lack of roads and shelter. Add to this that the tribes who inhabit the North-East frontier are some of them hostile and most of them unfriendly, and it will be realised what the traveller has to expect.’

  I had not expected temple bells, languorous maidens smoking cheroots, pagan gods with ruby eyes or strong silent men struggling with dacoits but I had not come to be punctured by flying insects or confront hostility. Even Lonely Planet talks of ‘One of the least visited regions on earth’. It was, therefore, both a pleasure and a little disappointing to fly into the little airport of Putao to find waiting to greet us the tall, charming Ma Lay with a smile sweet enough to spread, a pashmina over her shoulders and ‘gloves’ on her feet. The town dozed, children skipped home from school and cyclists slalomed through the potholes. (A bike with a crossbar is rare in this country where longyis are everyday wear.) A vehicle of great age and with several bolts less than its manufacturer intended, an exhaust that sounded its arrival a mile in advance and blowing smoke and steam so dense that it seemed to float, carried us and our smiling team of porters to the government rest house. This was dismal and soulless and had a plastic bucket for a bath, but no blister-flies, no raging rivers and no conflict. You were having us on, K. Ward.

  In the venerable, belching jeep we made our way via a track of round river stones to the Mekila River where two elephants were hauling great teak logs up the bank. Such was the great weight of their load that they took only two steps at a time, wheezing and grunting with the effort. Compared with the elephants I had seen at Taungoo on a previous trip, they were making heavy weather of their tasks; perhaps they were overdue for retirement. Boarding a long boat, whose engine spurted oil in prodigious quantities onto the static water and whose helmsman’s young son screamed in terror at the alien passengers, we chugged downstream. Bamboo hung over the river like giant fishing rods and women, washing metre-long hair on the riverbank, quickly adjusted their longyis in modesty. At a sandy bank by the village of Nam Kahn, we came ashore and set tled into the teak-floored, stilted, thatched house of our host and his delightful young family. Word had spread of the arrival of foreigners, something of a rarity, and neighbours aged between six and 70 crammed themselves into the house to stare. Having been amazed at our eating habits, wondered at our complexions and examined our clothes, they launched into a long and impressive repertoire of generally tuneful songs. Our response was several rounds of Frere Jacques, Old MacDonald had a Farm and Jerusalem. Our performance was pathetically lame at first but whisky and audience participation soon raised the tempo, volume and enthusiasm. Later, as we struggled into sleeping bags, the household gathered for a final moment of voyeurism.

  Heading south again, the chilly mists of Putao lifted at the prescribed time of 10
.30 am allowing the Air Bagan flight to take off. Snow on the mountains to the east dribbled down countless little valleys from the knife edge of the ridge before vanishing into the jungle tree line. Mykitina was hot, dusty and noisy and with avenues shaded by cinnamon trees of great size and age. We had caught up again with the Irrawaddy and had lunch beside its pale brown, languid water in an establishment imaginatively named The Riverside Restaurant. When we left, we had renamed it The Bonking Cats on account of the energetic and continuous performance under the adjoining table. Outside, huge piles of oranges, glowing like embers, were being sorted and graded in readiness for tomorrow’s festival.

  At the stadium had gathered all the tribes of Kachin state – Jingpaw, Lisu, Law Waw, Lawang Waw, Rawaung and many subtribes. Old men had dusted off their ceremonial swords and donned a jaunty headband and younger men had the chance to show off their best kit. After the tedium of speeches from generals keen to impress and assured of an audience, a military band, uniformed entirely in white and playing all-white instruments, struck up including in their repertoire Auld Lang Syne and Colonel Bogey; how the Empire lives on! They marched in their plimsolls with a curious skipping motion so that the most entertaining part of their programme was the euphonium players dancing and puffing their way around struggling to keep their balance and retain their formation. There were many military contingents on parade including the Kachin Independence Army. This band of guerrillas had been brought into the national fold for the first time in 100 years and in a tented exhibition of Kachin history, there were photographs of leaders from the ’40s whom my father would have shot on sight. The four senior Kachin chiefs in satin robes of scarlet and emerald and headdresses of a freshly painted hornbill and three foot (1m) high peacock feathers, led the procession each holding a huge parang held vertically before them. Ko Ko, the Mikado’s Lord High Executioner, would have cringed to see himself so comprehensively upstaged. 1,000 or more, decked out in their traditional best, swayed and sung their way around the stadium for two hours. Then, for tradition’s sake or maybe just for the hell of it, they formed into a sinuous and multicoloured conga line. The drummer at the stadium centre beat out the rhythm on an immense drum and then they all did it twice more – and that was only the morning session.