A whistle-stop guided tour of some of Mae La Oon's sight, sounds and smells...

In Mae La Oon it's ubiquitous, so no genuine tour could start without paying due respect to the building material that makes it all happen - bamboo. At the moment it's bamboo-using season, with great piles of it plonked around the camp - driven here by great dinosaur-like dust-churning trucks. So far bamboo is used for walls, under floor supports, carpets, bridge supports, fences, roofing, decorative weaving, baskets and drinking cups. Superb stuff.

COERR is one of the three of so large NGOs working in the camp (it stands for Catholic Office for Emergency and Relief for Refugees, the others are ZOA (german, all sorts of vocational training - farming, fishing, weaving, sewing etc) and Malteser (a religious organisation which funds a lot of the healthcare)). Located below Section 13 (seen here in the background), their role here is to provide vocational training as like ZOA.

Dreaming... another time, another place.

Chilling out by their dormitory. Because of overcrowding there's students above and beneath each other on two levels, and the rice is packed high next to an old weights bench on the right. The students can all play the guitar (the only instrument around, apart from what I think is a bamboo recorder), are all very good at it, and it's often the fantastic accompaniment to the late morning's (that's 7-8am) busyness as time for school approaches. Here one of the older students is actually playing the mandolin (the only other instrument in addition to the only instrument around). Its a beautiful instrument, with a strange inscription just beneath the strings: "CC".

The hospital has no doctors and is staffed by three 'medics' - folks who receive some medical training (more than a camp nurse) but who are extremely knowledgeable because of the amount of on-the-job learning they are forced to do. It's commonly and jokingly known as the paracetamol hospital as that's what you'll get, no matter what you've got. It's run by the Malteser Foundation (I think it's a German religious NGO, for a minute on seeing the red-and white signage I thought the other medical facility in the camp might be called the Opal Fruits clinic, then I remembered the name change) and is currently being extended with what I believe is a new maternity ward. The norm for pregnancy here is nine-and-a-half to ten-months. Any guesses why?

Here's some of the kids hanging around the bottom of the second set of ascending mud and bamboo steps which lead you up to the misty monastery high above. The kids are brilliantly inventive and creative, having a laugh with any old anything lying about. Cheeky, playful and abounding with ridiculous amounts of energy, they wander about in the early morning and after the day's school or nursery (if they attend) - often covered in dust and with many cuts, bruises and scars on their legs from the rough and tumble (often literally) of refugee camp life. Life isn't just play though - I see many kids helping out, carrying water, bamboo and foodstuffs - or being a runner for their moms to the local store. The kid on the right is wearing thanaka - a palliative and make-up taken from the local thanaka tree which you'll find most kids, women and a few men wearing at the beginning of the day - it's a compulsory requirement of Mondays and Fridays at Yaung Ni Oo.

The glaring halogen lights kick in between 6 and 9 every night more or less like clockwork. Unfortunately what this striking picture (why, thanks) doesn't show is what fluttering infestation kicks in with it.

Right at the top of the Section 13 slopes lies a monastery (one of only two in the camp - Christianity is the dominant religion) which houses three Burmese Buddhist monks and is host to all the festivals on the Buddhist calendar. My honourific monk vocabularly (a special form of greeting reserved just for them) isn't too hot, so on my visits to the top I have been a little apprehensive to say anything, though each time I scoot by (usually panting because it's my morning exercise) they always greet me with a smile and a wave. Sadly in the UK there is only one Burmese monk who actively speaks out about the regime and its re-presentation and misappropriation of Buddhist life and practice and its continued injustices against its people - all the others are over on Burmese passports so must ensure they somehow divorce religion from all things political.

The bamboo path cuts a winding figure through the apparent lushness of the Section 13 huts lining either side. It carries up at the top (in orange) one of the three monks on busy on the daily morning activity of collecting rice from people who wish to donate it - if you've got none to give, no problem; if you do have rice - great. Apparently this seemingly random system never fails to fill a monk's stomach. Whichever one is doing the daily collection, he is accompanied by a youngster who, in addition to carrying an overflow rice pot, is responsible for identifying those households with rice to give: traditions holds that a monk mustn't look up from the path ahead on his/her (not sure 'her' is actually allowed here) journey. The monk in the picture was immediately identified to me as 'pout sien' - 'wood chopper' - an unendearing name ascribed to him by the folk of Section 13 because (following a stint as an ABSDF soldier and after receiving a serious gunshot wound to the bum) word has it he's become an exceedingly grumpy monk.

A young mum makes her way through the pasture-like greenness at the foot of the mountain after crossing a bridge (that's the tree trunk behind her) over from COERR and the hospital. Most likely they've been on an adventure to get immunised against one or two of the nastier bugs around - the hospital does carry some essentials, and invitations to bring infants for this or that jab are regular occupiers of the early morning loudspeaking airwaves.

Looking up on a Section 13 showered in the morning's hazy sunlight, from down by the new tea shop. The boarding school compound is on the left (you can see the canteen / dining room about half way up) while people's huts litter the slope on the right. The large-leafed tree in the foreground is a papaya tree - eaten as a fruit after boiling or turned into a delicious hot curry.

Mae La Oon slopes as the morning sunshine begins to kick in. At night this slope is totally dark bar a few isolated family fires - each section is responsible for its own management and only a couple of the thirteen (plus the hospital and most churches) have generator-driven electricity. Section 13 is one with some electricity so is well-managed and/or reasonably funded - difficult to determine which when you can't compare.

Here's the big dusty round patch at the bottom of the Section. It's horizontal surface amongst the steep valley walls is extremely rare, and is so the very definition of something multipurpose: officially a Thai helicopter landing pad, it's also a playground, stadium, cinema, athletics track, park, football pitch, mass meeting place and bamboo storage facility. Most of the time it's a wonderful playground - allowing kids to stretch legs and run a bit freer in this enclosed environment. It's also the sight of many celebrations and festivals (most recently the Christmas and New Year's parties took place there, with half of the area you can see swelled by masses gazing at films on a single 20-inch TV hooked up at the far right-hand end). The houses you can see below are totally covered in dust each time a helicopter descends from on high.

Sometimes when busy with the teaching of a language and camp life in general - where the ABSDF soldiers come to take rest from the front line and spend time with their families - you can forget that you're in the middle of a very real war. Yet here is an example of a stark reminder - a journey to Mae Sot revealed an office supported by 5 amputees - whose young lives were changed irreparably by a chance meeting with a landmine, and who now face life with determination and bravery, but whose confidence can be shattered by the loss of a limb. Posters warning of mines adorn the camp's bigger tree trunks. Ten years ago, with Manerplaw under attack from the SPDC, the site of Mae La Oon was massively dangerous and festooned with soldiers moving this way and that - so landmines laid by any of the three sides (SPDC, revolutionary forces and Thais) could be nestled close by and drastically change the life of any unsuspecting child who strayed off alone into the nearby jungle. I wish the ABSDF could be supported in efforts to become a less hierachical organization - to enable these men to use their inquisitive, enthusiastic minds with more than menial tasks or the execution of someone else's decision (capacity building is the word - but it's much more than that). I stayed in Mae Sot for four days and on each day each man replied he was doing nothing that day - bar filling heads with (albeit incredibly funny) bootleg Burmese TV.

Building the new Section 13 store - you've gotta be strong and you've gotta be tough and you've gotta be smoking a cigar while you're there...

The new store, approximately half way to completion, built on the sight of the old school and my old classroom. This year, in an effort to make well-used buildings more durable and safe through the rainy season, most of the camp's rebuilding of its bigger structures has utilised the solid concrete pillars you can just see poking up through the horizontal wooden trunks. All the work (bar some drilling from a hired mr drill owner on one day) is done by hand (so these concrete things were a particular challenge) - and the whole process it's an incredible team effort from all the community. The mums and kids come down to lend a hand, everyone mucks in and by the end of each day real progress has always been made (I joined in the dig and the bonding on one blistering (in more ways than one) Sunday, my teaching rest day). Its epicry reminds me of that scene from 'Witness' with Harrison Ford, where he joins an entire Amish village in the building of a new barn: selfless and great.

The men are extremely efficiently organized - some working, some resting out of the piercing heat in a self-regulated cyclical system. Here one of my former students Sai Aung Win (tut tut you know he really should be in class doing something a little more civilised...) leads the rest by the side of the mountain as others continue to work. Usually things start happening from about 7 in the morning, finish at 11 when there's a four-hour midday siesta, and then begin again at 3 until 6 or when darkness falls. I arrived at a 'finished' Mae La Oon nine months after it first came to be, and six months after it was completed - so it's wonderful to see and get a feeling of all that must've gone on in the first few tumultuous months on the site, with eight thousand side by side attempting to carve new homes and hopes out of the forest.

One of the many fine contradictions to my view of life here - no sooner have I marveled at the family of folks working to build the new store, than a group of men collects and huddles at the roadside during siesta time, and half distracted from the lesson I am teaching, the sighting of an feathered animal in the hands of one man confirms my ugly suspicions: there is to be a cock fight. I'd only heard about this, never seen it, and was glad (as a vegetarian-where-sensible) I was a long way away -my camera zoom worked overtime to draw me close. It seemed to go on for an age, but thankfully I think there wasn't an outright loser (a dead cockerel). I'm told money changes hands on such occasions; on the day it was also a 'sport' of men-only perpetration.

This is the scene looking down from my hut on a Saturday morning. Students adorn this small patch of slope next to their dorms (on the right) and the canteen (top left) - it's the spaghetti junction of the boarding area, a regular hive of activity. There's body washing, violent clothes scrubbing, hair cutting (including mine, to the amusement of the watching throng), dining-room dashing, clothes drying, Saturday spring-cleaning, pet feeding (the students are looking after two kittens and three new puppies), guitar playing and singing, valley-viewing and shouting and (for me, not the students who are the ultimate skilled professionals) there's a load of midnight path searching and often considerable steep-slope slippage (I'm getting better, but lord knows how they managed in the rainy season). It's a good slice of life.

Here's the students polishing off the morning's curry in the sa'po... steaming rice, fish paste and piping hot yellowbean soup - they're all gone in seconds. No time (and privilege) to think of what you might prefer instead. The guy in the yellow third from the left might just be thinking otherwise.

A special action-photo capturing students engaged in some serious play on one refugee camp football ground: the dirt road going past the boarding area. As with work, if there's physical exertion happening - football or Kanball - it's either in the morning or evening (anything after 4pm) before and after school. The ball is as hard as stone, students kick it nonchalantly about wearing just flip flops: these lads have strong toes. The football shirts many of them wear are donations through the Burmese Border Consortium (BBC as it happens, confusing for one who knows of this acronym to mean the bastion of reporting fair play) - responsible for the welfare of all Burmese refugees along the Thai-Burma border.

Not the big hulky guy from WWF but my haven, my sunny-time salvation: the rock. It was here to which I graduated after my afternoon stump became just too uncomfortable to read on anymore. I found the rock after a little adventurous exploring - it presents an almost totally secret world and gives a glorious overview of Mae La Oon life in my afternoon break from classes. Here in this hot but peaceful world (it's quiet, all students and teachers are away at school) I am transported away by my books (most recently 'The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank' - inspirational and phenomenal, please read it; now 'A History of Britain' by Simon Schama, great for an insight into all those historical names you recognize but don't quite know why they're important), the marking of homework and reading of English language storybooks for classes, efforts to get some kind of sun-tan before it gets too hot to move, and bare-chested dreams in the midday heat.

And this is the bench which perches on the rock: a little knobbly due to its Bamboo construction, but my versatile ally in secret serendipitous sojourns.

View from the rock and the bench looking right. Can they see me up here as well as I can see them?

This is U Soe Toe, the businessman of Section 13 and owner of the new tea shop and at least one other general store. Really nice guy, speaks good English, but is prone to snoring extremely loudly when in the Mae Sariang office (when sleeping in it, that is). He, like Red, is the kind of man that can get things - an extremely useful acquiantance. Here I've captured him doing what we'd probably consider slightly odd: watering the road (that there is a hosepipe I promise). Why is he doing this? Answers on a postcard please... winners receive a BBB badge. wearers get in (to Mae La Oon) free!

Slowly you begin to make out a distant rumble. Its coming from all around. People on the ground below rush towards the open patch of circular dust up by Section 13 - in fact, everyone seems to be headed there. Fingers point skyward, and you begin to realise why there were people out watering the dust earlier in the day. With the sound increasingly thunderous, it swings into view - a helicopter transport silhouetted against the Manerplaw valley, drawing rapidly closer, and instantly reminding you of all those Vietnam war images you've taken from books and TV. This time, it's live.

Then it descends sharply, headed for the dust. You scrabble to keep your camera in contact through the trees. The whirlwind begins, the ranks of bystanders who once in a blue moon see such mighty technology race back from their positions as the dustclouds chase and envelop them. A lone figure in the middle of the landing pad guides the 'copter down…

And, amongst rotating blades and swirling winds, its shadows offload into this disconnected world.