Notes from the Outpost of Sangkhlaburi

I had some vacation time, so I'd gone up into the mountains around Sangkhlaburi. It's a remote place, four hours' bus ride from its own provincial capital.

Getting off the bus you feel like you're in a true outpost, all wooden buildings and steep streets without order and design. Beyond the lights of the town are the vast forests of the Dawna and Tenasserim Mountains, and beyond them, the war-torn states of Lower Burma.

Three memos written in my notebook at a cafe:

1. I'm sleeping so much here-- the weather saps one's energy with its schizophrenia, cold rain alternating with blistering heat. Everything is thick, humid, moreso even than Bangkok. The entire town seems stifling and waterlogged, prone to immense fungal growth.

2. And there's something sinister about its locale next to the Vajiralongkorn Reservoir, the old town submerged under the new. In the dry season, the ruins of the old temple emerge, but in the monsoon, everything remains hidden. The water immediately below my room is dense with lake weeds. I imagine trying to swim in the murk, my legs swept at by sinuous underwater greenery, like ghosts trying to pull me down into the gloomy depths.

3. I climb to the grand pagoda that looks out over the reservoir and find it devoid of worshippers. Statues representing the days of the week scattered around the edges of the central tower, out of order, mixed up, left to gather dust or perhaps never finished. At the base, a few rough-hewn wooden figures have gathered the gifts of devotees: a silver-leafed tree (the old symbol of fiefdom in the Siamese Empire), candles of many-colored wax, bottles of syrup-sweet red soda, and a pale statuette looking remarkably like a Buddhist Virgin Mary.

Sangkhlaburi is a tourist town on one level, but it is also a purgatory, a transit point. It is a town of unfulfilled dreams and failed developments, an inheritor of all of the ugliness that has happened in this region-- imperialism both local and European, colonialism, economic conquest, displacement, forced migration, socialist purges, capitalist destruction, holy war, tribal battling, and the general shittiness of mankind.

This is a town of milling orphans and teak houses clinging precipitously to mountain slopes, occupied by nationalities on the run. The red sarong of a girl indicates her Mon ethnicity-- a people who once commanded vast swaths of present-day Myanmar and Thailand, but have now been consigned to remote backwaters, their ancient language and script fast becoming relics. There are the Karen, fractured by 70 years of civil war, the longest internal war on the planet. Saddest of all are the Indo-Burmese, refugees from an unremembered nation. Their ancestors were the indentured labor of the British Raj, were slaughtered in the Rangoon race riots of 1930, were purged as collaborators after the Ne Win military coup in 1962.

And there are the countless women with hollow eyes and missing teeth, carrying massive loads on their backs and puffing cheroots in the rain. Their clothing comprises a set of signs and symbols as emblematic as national flags, but unreadable by I, the Westerner, the tourist.

And yet it's a lovely place, a remarkably lovely one at that. The mountains here are a prehistoric boundary, a seam at the meeting point of the Indian, Eurasian, and Sunda plates. It is a border both geological and cultural, separating two old warring empires. Humanity's use of the hills is transient. The mountains stand as impassive as the Buddhas of the temples they contain.