I travelled to burma and got special permission to travel to the North or Burma…Kachin State. I brought a tour guide with me. I suggest if you do this trip, pay a local person to be your tour guide..travel with you. I do not reocmmend a military/goverment escort unless you must. Not a good situation to be in. But a local guide.maybe an english speaking guide from Yangon..meets you and travels with you. You will learn so much..and it is nice to have a burmese with you when you go through the military road blocks etc….

I travelled from Myatchina to Mandalay via car. Why? cause airlines just decided not to fly that week..and if I wanted to catch my flights home..I had to drive by car. So..go with the flow. Maybe 2-3 military road blocks along the way. Little stressful..but..I got through OK.

People wrote about Kaching army …fighting against the military. To my knowledge..the Kachin put down their arms some time ago..and they are not fighting at this time.

The one person was talking about the atrocities in Burma..well..yes, it happens. But certainly don’t be talkng about it while in Burma. Big problems..if you talk to the wrong people. foreigners need to keep quiet…No talking about the goverment. Alot of “Ears” in burma..for the goverment. Just follow the rules..and you can get a rich education about Burma..and its very diverse people.

I will voice my thoughts on the atrocities of brokers/thais that come into Burma..and recruit hilltribe and/or poor burmese to come to Thailand for “Work”. They pay families $500 for their daughters..bring them to Thailand.and then sell them into sex slave industry. Terrible things…and I hope to help many of those girls in Thailand…but..again..this is not the sort of discussion you have while in Burma.

Burma is beautiful…

If it was me..I’d drive my motorcycle throughout..on a photo adventure.

Good going! For military history your best live source would be the Assam Rifles HQ in Shillong, Meghalaya. They have their antecedents in the famous V-Force of WWII operating with the legendary Chindits under the redoubtable ‘Uncle Bill’ Gen Slim of the British XIVth. The recruits were local tribal youngmen led by British officers. Of course the heroics of these levies are less sung of than their Kachin counterparts in Burma fighting along with Stilwell’s Americans.

We’re having serious internet problems for two weeks now, however, it seems to be working fine for the moment so I will have to be brief.

We say TIM (This is Myanmar) – because things that are taken for granted elsewhere, basic necessities such as water, electricity, etc are still scarce in a city like Rangoon (Yangon) where I live!

So you can imagine what it would be like to travel to far remote areas in the country.

Regardless of the various opinions, views and insights on this Ghost Road which I still refer to as “Stilwell”, we should not forget that this road is part of a forgotten era of WWII.

My intentions are not to get into the politics or the business potential related to the road. My interest simply lies in the fact that the lives of many people were changed before, during and after this road was built and we still a road that we have so much to learn from.

The one thing I can assure you all is that it will be highly unlikely to see anytime soon, that this road will turn into an all weather road – as Stilwell had wanted to do.

The Ledo Road in Burma going NE from Shingbwiyang is simply fascinating as one goes up into the mountains traversing thick, dense forest with small villages of Naga, Kachin, Rawan and some Burmans living in unpopulated, remote areas.

It will still be a remote area for quite sometime as there is lack of interest from the in-country business people to promote this part of Burma. And that is a good thing.

Khine

Hla Oo, you got a point all those nostalgic forests will be gone (btw how many many of those pristine trees have escaped the heavy logging in Kachin state?) You are right about Northeast India, the only saving grace being India is a democracy overriding the military. The Ledo road has been upgraded to a 2 lane national highway. But its a dead end. And then there is the more easier competing highway between India and Burma in the Kabaw valley (Moreh-Tamu)

Guess the fate of the Stilwell road(the Indian one) will depend on the level of co-operation between India and China (which can swing either way in these times of recession). And of course with Burma in agreement to the operation of the road.

http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200310/200310_burma_1.html

In the beginning he seems pretty dumb for someone who has spent so much time climbing in the Himalayas (Is every Buddhist monk a lama? Just because an Ambassador has a 1950s body doesn’t mean the insides are that old, etc.), but hold on and by the time he gets to Myitkyina, he gets some wisdom:

“She tells me that since Myitkyina is now open to foreigners, tourists are coming. She believes someday there will be tourists on the Stilwell Road, and she wants them to know the truth. That it is not a road built by Americans. That was history. History is over. It’s a road built by the Kachins.”

His experience of Myitkyina reminds me of what Vietnam is still like if you get a little off the Lonely Planet conveyor belt: someone is always watching you, everyone knows where you are and where you’ve been.

Sadly, nothing progressive would be happening soon in that remote area as long as there is a convenient or rather comfortable stalemate between Burmese Army and Kachin Independence Army, KIA.

With ever-restless hill tribe separatists on their hands, the Indian Army also wouldn’t initiate anything progressive about the Ledo Road, I guess.

At least one good thing out of the whole quagmire is that the pristine rain forest will still be standing there majestically until the bulldozers arrive in the very near future. Chinese had done that wholesale clearing on their end and converted old Burma Road into an Eight-Lane Motorway.

Hla Oo

Hi, this is Khine from Burma.

Sarah, if you are going to visit Pangsau Pass in June, you will encounter that due to monsoon, the road will be wet, muddy and slippery.

At least that is the situation for us living in Burma to travel to the NE part of the country bordering India.

Should you need further info, please do not hesitate to contact me.
khaingt@gmail.com

Khine

Its very unlikely that you would succeed in getting direct people experiences of WW II, simply because of the elapsed time since 1942-45 and now. Even if you do get hold of surviving people from that time, they are more likely to be in Kohima Nagaland and several places in Manipur. These were actual grounds of grim and fierce fighting. The Japanese did not cut through to Dimapur from the Naga Hills. As far as Arunachal is concerned IMHO, the only area that might directly in the action would be along the Stilwell road through the Patkai hills beyond Ledo. Even those experiences would be limited, as the American-Chinese forces crossed over to the Burmese side of the Patkais – where all the action was. All these areas are predominantly Kachin and Naga tribes inhabited. The Kachin Rangers were formed and attached to the US Army under Gen Stilwell and even received Presidential citations for their extraordinary war achievements one of them being a rather grisly “highest kills per loss rate”. Interestingly the Kachins are one of the earliest instances of a sort of local militia raised by the CIA (then called OSS operating out of Assam) to fight foreign invaders, a trend which has continued till today _ Iraq and Afganistan.