to stay here,” he warns, taking short sips of
Chinese almond tea, “you watch your mouth.”
The next day we return to Tachileik. Mark
is back in touch. A friend had been caught by
the Thai authorities with more than £200,000
of meth destined for New Zealand. Mark had
been in on the deal too. Business is down and
his friend could be sentenced to death. He seems
worried and asks in a less guarded moment
whether we’d consider smuggling a Chinese-
made pill press into Myanmar for him. When
we ask him about seeing inside his Machine,
he’s jumpy. He says, “No one will be watching
you. You’ll be fine. You’re not going to have any
problem.” He seems high.
The next morning a Lahu militia member
invites us to his home, near a monastery on the
edge of Tachileik. He tells us his men are guard-
ing an ice lab run by a Wa cartel in a village
hundreds of miles west. This would prove the
Tatmadaw, as many have told us, are in cahoots
with the Wa to produce tonnes of meth. The
Lahu man’s plan is familiar: we’ll wear Wa uni-
forms and travel in a tinted-window vehicle to
slip past the many Tatmadaw checkpoints along
the way. We fly from Tachileik to a distant city
to continue negotiations. But two days later the
plan changes. The checkpoints are too much and
the Lahu won’t “take responsibility” for us – ie,
they’re too scared to lose face.
Checkpoints are literal and figurative road-
blocks in modern Myanmar. They carve up
its land, divide its people and provide a safe
haven for crime. They burn days of our trip
and cut us off physically from those who might
provide us valuable information. If anybody
doesn’t want us to see something, go some-
where or speak to someone, there’s a simple
one-word excuse. The checkpoints render
Myanmar into a maze of impenetrable king-
doms, keeping the law away. More than that,
though, they are a surrogate for poverty that’s
not just financial but bureaucratic. Phone signal
shifts from town to town. Most people have
three or more numbers. Secret police litter the
landscape. Families and friends are cleaved from
each other. Simple journeys are made near-
impossible, or worse. Outsiders are kept fully
outside and locals are conscripted into pointless,unending battles against the state, stoked by
China, mostly just to keep a small clique of gen-
erals and gangsters rolling in cash.
Once it’s clear we won’t get anywhere with
Mark or the Lahu and his peers, we have one
more chance to find The Machine. A contact
in Laos tells us he knows a band of smugglers
who operate between the two nations, in a con-
cealed part of the Golden Triangle. We travel
over two days through Myanmar, Thailand and
finally Laos, before driving up the shore of the
Mekong to a village that sits right next to a
“friendship bridge” into Myanmar.
There, in a bamboo-hut restaurant, posing
as Australian meth dealers, we meet the
smugglers: a middle-aged couple from
the village across the river, who claim that the
easiest way to ship is via the Kings Romans,
where they could deliver a tonne of product
to the door of one of its restaurants. It’s the
perfect stopover: no cops, no rules. They’ll skim
ten per cent of the value of the drugs. Even
that would leave us with millions of pounds
of profit. But seeing one of their producer’s
Machines? Out of the question. We thank them
for their time, watch them walk back across the
bridge with no intervention from border guards
on either side and plan our final route back to
Myanmar. Our chances of seeing The Machine
dashed, we decide it’ll be more pleasant to
take a longboat back down the Mekong to the
Kings Romans, rather than spend another two
days behind the blacked-out windows of our
car. We haggle successfully with a local pilot,
grab a couple of Beerlaos and get on our way.
It’s a wild ride, past vestigial rock forma-
tions, thick forest and grassy ranges that lollop
on the horizon. Two hours in, far short of the
casino, the sun dips behind the earth a final time
and we moor on a sandy beach surrounded by
mangroves. It’s too far to walk to the nearest
town so we start a fire and stare at the star-
filled sky. Some villagers are enjoying ChineseNew Year celebrations nearby and fireworks
soundtrack a night that gets increasingly cold
and uninhabitable, forcing us into the forest on
repeated firewood missions. On one, my travel
companion slips in the darkness and breaks a rib.
We sleep in hour bursts before the fire dims
and we replenish it, hoping snakes or other crea-
tures aren’t alerted to the flames. Somewhere
along the way I catch a rest, during which the
sun splits day from night. Once a heavy mist
rises above the river, our pilot chucks us some
dried noodles and we continue the journey.
Around 90 minutes later we spot the familiar
gold hotel of the Kings Romans. Except this
time its façade is almost finished and even
more cranes dot its lurching skyline. Chinese
lanterns hang from every building. Even the
outbreak of the coronavirus doesn’t seem to
have kept punters away from the casino floor.
If the US Treasury hoped its sanctions would
slow Zhao Wei’s hedonistic juggernaut, they
hoped in vain. As we drive through towards
the Laos border with Thailand, we spot the
patch of land on which we discovered the tigers
almost four months previously. All that remains
is some dried grass. There has been more press
about them since we came. Accusations of drug
trafficking might do nothing to harm the Kings
Romans, but perhaps the ire of the animal
rights lobby is something it could do without.
A colleague claims the yewei is still on the
menu, though. The tigers, like The Machine
itself, are somewhere. GINSIDE THE MOST BRUTAL DICTATORSHIP YOU’VE
NEVER HEARD OF (Sean Williams, September 2019)
HOW THE WORLD’S FIRST BITCOIN HEIST WENT
SOUTH (Peter Ward and Sean Williams, April 2019)
RODRIGO DUTERTE’S RAGING WAR ON DRUGS
(Jonathan Miller, July 2018)+^ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine‘ The landbelongs toLaos. Butthe skybelongsto China’A user injects crystal
meth in Tachileik,
Myanmar – the Golden
Triangle’s ‘Reno’MYANMAR04-20FeatureMyanamar_3468200.indd 187 13/02/2020 17:18
APRIL 2020 GQ.CO.UK 187