Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The way to Pyin-Oo-Lwin was the way to China. Nine hours north was the town of Mong Yu, on the border, with the Chinese town of Wanding on the other side. At the end of another day's travel, about three hundred miles by bus over the mountain roads of Yunnan, was the provincial capital of Kunming. Myanmar's close relationship with China meant that the border was wide open. Myanmar trucks went north carrying vegetables, huge teak logs, crates of precious rubies, and bales of opium; Chinese trucks came south with cargoes of rubber sandals and tin pots and cheap bikes, arms and ammo.

This train was so slow that the sun came up before we began the serious climb out of the flat river valley of Mandalay. As soon as we ascended the first hills, the air freshened with cooler aromas of vegetation, the yellow blobby flowers of the kasein trees, the canal odors with their hyacinths, which the Burmese feed their pigs. Ponds were layered with white lotuses, lovely orchards of plum trees spread out for miles, and fields bristled with onions. The recent rain had left a sparkle in the air—the sweetness still lingered.

The young teak trees here were spindly, with big fan-shaped leaves, lots of them beside the track.

"They are twenty-two years old," Ko Tin said. He was on the seat beside me—upright, on cushions, like a booth in a diner, too narrow to recline on, too stiff-backed to be comfortable, but Pyin-Oo-Lwin was only five hours up the line.

"In Kachin there are teak forests, trees one hundred years old. The Chinese buy them."

In the distance was a great blue humpbacked mountain, its scored and shoulder-like ridge extending for miles.

"We call that mountain 'the Buffalo,'" Ko Tin said. The name could not have been more apt. Once hearing it, I no longer saw a mountain but only a muscular animal.

I was inexpressibly glad to be heading this way on this creaky train—grateful that so little had changed, though I hated to think that the time warp was entirely due to the military dictatorship, which had kept Myanmar in a state of suspended animation. All that had changed was that the prisons were bigger, and the army was so huge it was like a parallel population—healthier, better dressed, better educated, feared and hated ("Soldiers here don't have to pay taxes!"). In a country where everyone else lived precariously, the military was secure. But because of their struggle, the Burmese were eager to talk, to help, to work, and in spite of the threats and dangers, willing to confide in a foreigner.

I mentioned the army and people said without prompting: We hate them. I mentioned the government and they said: They're corrupt, they're bad, they're destroying the country. I mentioned Aung San Suu Kyi and her fourteen years of house arrest and they said: We want her. Or: We want democracy. I asked questions about Buddhism and they said: The monks are angry too! When I raised these subjects I always got the same answers.

Ko Tin was no different. He said he hated the army, and "I like democracy." And he mentioned that anyone who criticized the government was imprisoned.

"Do you know people who've gone to prison?" I asked.

"I know many people who, one day, just disappeared. Here—then not here. Went away suddenly. That is what happens. You never know where they went. They go and never come back. You never see the police. It all happens in the dark."

Now on the steepness of the mountain slopes, the train was in and out of tunnels and crossing the motor road. Convoys of trucks, tarpaulins lashed to their cargo, lumbered up the road.

One open-sided truck was filled with straw.

"Watermelons," Ko Tin said, "going to China."

One flatbed truck with enormous shrouded figures.

"Carved Buddha images. We make good ones. The Chinese people buy them for their temples."

Other trucks laden with rice, tomatoes, beans, onions, bananas, oranges, lemons, peppers—poor, hungry Myanmar supplying food to wealthy China. Myanmar was like a fiefdom of China, sending tribute, so that China could abandon its farms, build factories in its paddy fields, and spend more time developing its manufacturing and technology.

I had been wakeful at five A.M. when we set off, but a few hours later I was slumped in my seat, asleep. I woke in the chill of the higher altitude—about three thousand feet—and saw coffee bushes, flower stalls, and poinsettia trees seven feet tall.

Also army camps, many of them: big walled compounds, well-built houses and office buildings and barracks, the neatest landscaping, and one had its own airport. All of them were probably here because of the salubrious climate on the lower slopes of the Shan States.

Just before we got to Pyin-Oo-Lwin, the train passed the outer walls of what could have been a university campus—gates, archways, green lawns, flower beds—but was (Ko Tin told me) a large military academy and had a sign in Burmese and English: The Triumphant Elite of the Future.

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