On The Float Again

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Well I couldn't let my feet rest and the pull of distant lands and roads not yet seen finally got too much and after two years of the delights of Bradford I'm sat in a northern Thai town called Mae Salong, which is about thirty miles from the Burmese border and fuck does it make me smile.

Mae Salong is a sleepy hill town that stretches up the side of a hill. Red roofed houses fold into the distance, tea plantations shape the hillsides like a green velvet blanket and nestling between their leaves rest Akha, Lissu, Xiang and Lahu hill tribe villages with their thatched bamboo huts, all this cradled by the cupped hands of the towering hills in the distance.

I stayed in a guesthouse with Lek, I've changed his name as a caution, a Thai-Chinese immigrant who had fled China with his father during the Cultural Revolution. Lek was a child soldier of fourteen fighting for the Kuomintang Army, his father a General. A lost divison of the Chinese army was the 3rd and 5th brigades of the 93rd division of which Somboon and his father were a part.

His division, after fighting their way from Yunnan province in China, lived a nomadic and harsh existence in Burma, until finally, after fighting a guerilla war which, according to Lek, was often gruesome and terrifying against the hounding Chinese and Tatmawdaw army of Burma, his division crossed the Thai border to reach Mae Salong. Once here, it was agreed with the Thai government that they could stay permanently if they agreed to fight alongside the Thai army against the continuing threat from China's Communist Army.

Lek would sit of an evening and tell me his stories of his days as a soldier fighting in the hills surrounding Mae Salong. His eyes would flicker and look away as his memories came spilling back.

He would weep gently as he told of his friend that protected him against a troop of enemy soldiers. His friend had been shot and laid there with a machine gun and Lek tried to carry him, but his friend refused and said he wouldn't make it, but Lek should go. Lek said that he escaped into the jungle only to hear the barrage of his friend's gunfire allowing him to escape. He didn't see his friend again.

Or of the story of his march through Burma to fight the Tatmadaw, leaving with two thousand men, only seven to return, Lek being one of them. After marching through the north of Burma they couldn't get back to the north of Thailand as the amount of the Tatmadaw's soldiers and the Chinese soldiers was too many, so he and the remaining soldiers trekked into north-east India, south along the Burmese border with the Andaman Sea, crossing back into Thailand to reach Kanchanaburi in the south, then to head north back to Mae Salong, all on foot.

Lek was a truly remarkable person and he and his family one of the friendliest I have met yet. The sadness behind his eyes was only equalled by his warmth that he showed to his family and all of his guests. I will never forget my few weeks there.

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