Scammed in Rawalpindi
By the end
of our third day in Pakistan, we'd been cheated out of $230. Not pickpocketed,
not mugged, not pilfered by the hotel staff.
No, we took two hundred and
thirty U.S. greenbacks out of our wallets and handed them to Dr. Igbal Alam. We thought he
was our friend and he promised us excitement. And then he disappeared It makes
us sound like complete idiots, but were we such gullible rubes? Were we like Jack
Lemmon and Sandy Dennis in The Out of Towners, where they visit New York City and
fall prey to every rude awakening in the book? Hell no, we were city people ourselves. We
hang up on telemarketers, we avoid eye contact in subways and we've never invested in a
time-share.
So why did we fall for the charms of Dr. Alam?
We met him at breakfast on Friday, August 7, as we were emerging from
the bleary state of jetlag.
On the previous Sunday, on the other side of the planet, we'd made a
two-plane hop to LA, spent the night, then boarded our trans-Pacific flight. Marginal
scribbles in my notebook contain the calculations as I tried to figure out our travel
time. LA to Seoul 13-hour flight, with 3-hour layover; Seoul to Bangkok 5 hours, with
3-hour layover; and Bangkok to Karachi 6 hours. That's 30 hours non-stop in planes
and airports — certainly enough to scramble the brains.
In Karachi, we should have immediately gone on to Rawalpindi some 300
miles to the north, but (apparently we'd been confused from the start) the flight wasn't
booked till the following day. It was 4 A.M. local time, the air heavy with recent rains,
the airport packed with Moslem travelers. We waited an anxious hour before our bags
appeared, during which the power kept failing. My talisman was the small flashlight that
hung around my neck with the luggage keys. (I'm much better on preparedness than I
am on planning.)
When the luggage came, two young men who'd mastered a few phrases of
English grabbed them and got us to the correct ticket window. They got ticked off that we
didn't tip them more than two bucks, but (see, we aren't such rubes) Jim shooed them
away.
Of course, we had no hotel, no one waiting for us in Rawalpindi, but
somewhere along the way we decided that Flashman's was our first choice for a hotel. It
was supposed to have "old colonial charm" at a moderate price. The guidebook
also indicated that there would be a Pakistan Tourist Development Center (PTDC) office at
the Rawalpindi airport and all our arrangements could be made there. But the airport was a
madhouse and there was no sign of the PTDC. Or, if there was, we couldn't discern it. All
the signage was in Urdu, which uses the Arabic script. Jim had assured me that English
would be common in Pakistan because, after all, hadn't they been part of the British
Empire? Sure. Fortunately (I guess), the airport taxi drivers descended upon us at that
very moment, demanding we use their services. Someone nodded his head when we said Flashman's,
so we were off. We must have paid him in U.S. dollars because we were too befuddled to
have found a currency exchange.
Beginners' luck: Flashman's had a room. (It was the last time in five
weeks that getting a room was so easy.) "Colonial charm" may have referred to
the fact that the last time the exterior was tended to was in the waning days of the
empire, but the room was lovely and clean and the bed soft and inviting for our first
shut-eye in 30 hours.
On Thursday we emerged from our sleepy cocoon. It's exciting to
venture out on foot for the first time in a new city, although Jim and I are very
different in our approaches. I am content to wander and absorb my new surroundings.
"Knowing my way around" means knowing my way back to the hotel. I'm a physical
learner. I get in touch with my world by walking it. Jim, on the other hand, studies
the guides and maps and decides on destinations: the English bookstore, the hotel with the
buffet lunch, and the bazaars with a chance of having beautiful rarities. When he asks me
where I want to go, I give the irritating response: "I don't know." He
wants to hunt and I want to hang out.
We aren't any good at bickering our way to consensus: we either have
to come up with clarifying principles or have an all-out this relationship is
over! argument. It took us a while to realize that planning of every little
move together was ridiculous. So, we got roles: I'm the strategist, designing and
initiating the overall shape of the journey. Jim is the tactician, planning
and working out the logistics for the day-to-day. I'm the one with the big bold ideas;
he's the one with the stamina and moxy to actually make them work. I'm the team leader
till we hit our destination, then we switch.
Rawalpindi struck me as a city on auto-pilot. Islamabad, 10 miles to
the north, must have scooped up all the city planners and urban developers in the 1960s,
when it became the new capital of Pakistan. The guidebooks say it's beautiful and I
suspect its beauty came at the expense of 'Pindi. Everything is in disrepair. You have to
watch where you're walking as crumbling sidewalks suddenly open up over drainage ditches.
It's dirty and colorless, looking better after a rain when at least there's a damp sheen
on everything.
Our first foray out we found the English bookstore, then got
hopelessly lost in the crowded Saddar Bazaar, among odd-angled streets labeled in Urdu
script — making our maps useless. It would have been too easy to hail a cab; instead
we said Flashman's? to anyone who made eye contact and we were eventually pointed
back to our hotel.
For our afternoon walk, we studied the map in more detail and brought
our compasses. We plotted a course back through the Saddar Bazaar, across railroad tracks
and the dirty little River Leh, aiming for the Raja Bazaar. As we crossed the footbridge
over the tracks, the Margalla Hills — foothills on the southwestern edge of the
Himalayas — reminded us that we needed to figure out what came next in our trip.
I also began to wonder if we should be afraid. I certainly would never
walk through an unknown neighborhood in any U.S. city. It was an unusual experience
walking through the sprawling bazaar — neither hostile nor friendly. We drew stares
and then the men — it was always men, no women — turned back to their tasks.
Make no mistake about it: Jim and I do not blend in. When I
was dreaming of a cosmopolitan life in high school, blending in -- becoming one
with the local culture -- was a high ideal. I loved the word Eurasian because it
was used in books and movies to describe the perfect spy, who could blend in anywhere. I
wanted my Spanish accent to be perfect so I could be mistaken for a native. But here's the
deal: we are both tall and blue-eyed pale. Our smiles are tributes to top-notch dental
care. Our feet are big and demand sturdy, no-nonsense footwear. And our clothes are always
way off the mark, especially mine.
I packed carefully, understanding that the culture demanded women be
covered as thoroughly as possible. My trousers were baggy. I bought extra-large,
long-sleeve cool-weave shirts from L.L.Bean in purple, teal, and hot pink. I had a scarf
to cover my head. I wore a straw hat against the sun. All I wanted was to blend in, but
wound up looking like a dowdy Katherine Hepburn instead.
The men — slender and lithe in their tan or white pajama-like salwar
kamiz — only stared, then turned away. Days later I learned that if I really made
eye contact they would return radiant smiles, but on that Thursday I was still interacting
by New York subway standards.
We floated along, the only two Westerners on chaotic streets, crowded
with an impossible mix of cars, trucks, motorized three-wheelers, and horse-drawn buggies.
The shops sold auto parts and sheet metal. We drew their stares and an occasional curious hello,
but we felt insignificant. We were two fleeting visions walking through someone else's
workday. It was like that famous painting where the farmers toil oblivious to Icarus
falling from the sky, his wax wings on fire. We were tense with wary alertness — we
were so outrageously alone and disconnected from everything familiar and anyone who knew
us. But for them, we were just a momentary flash of color.
Those Thursday excursions set the stage for our encounter with Dr.
Igbal Alam. We were acclimating ourselves to this new world, getting our bearings, but not
yet moving forward. We still had no idea how we were going to get to Kashgar. Rawalpindi
was not letting us below the surface. Our hotel was supposed to host a PTDC office but it
was as invisible as the one at the airport.
On Friday morning we walked around the corner to Kashmirwala's (a
small hotel whose restaurant was a cut above the Chinar at Flashman's). During our
breakfast, Dr. Igbal Alam materialized at the next table. He gave us the card that
identified him as Director of the Afghan Refugee Project. He got his medical degree in the
U.S. — Houston — and was married to an American pediatrician. His English was
fluent. Our conversation was lively.
 "Why don't you come with me to Kabul?" he
asked. The words struck me like lightening. Kabul? Afghanistan? Forbidden
territory? Igbal had many diplomatic ties so it wouldn't be a problem.
"Yes!" we said and I remember thinking that our parents would die if they heard
us making these plans. But he fit our aspirations so perfectly: an insider, a guide
to the mysteries of the territory, but not an opium smuggler or an arms dealer. Our
magical guide was a humanist.
Our day together is still vivid in my
mind. It was Friday — the Moslem holy day — and the town was closed
down. Jim was trying to figure out how we might get to Taxila to see the early
Buddhist ruins. Igbal had the day to kill himself so how about if we all shared a taxi out
to the site? On the twenty-mile ride, Jim and Igbal exchanged international doctor
stories and when Igbal learned of our plans to go to Kashgar he announced in amazement
that his wife and he were about to start their holidays and that's exactly where they were
headed too. They had arranged for a big Toyota Land Cruiser that certainly had room for
another couple and his wife was hungry for contact with Americans. We would travel back
with them to their home base in Peshawar, which is on the border with Afghanistan. From
there we'd visit Kabul. By the time we got back to Flashman's our
itinerary was planned down to the day. Since we were cutting it close with our trip into
Afghanistan, he would switch around our flight back to Karachi so we could depart from
Peshawar instead of Rawalpindi. And he would take care of picking up all the supplies
needed for the trip because he had access to diplomatic shops. He and his wife would pick
us up at 7 A.M. on Sunday morning.
I can't quite reconstruct how the money started changing hands, but
Jim was suddenly forking over U.S. dollars for the first leg of the trip (an airplane
to Gilgit) and for our share of the supplies and then another wad of bills for the air
flight from Peshawar to Karachi. It wasn't until Igbal offered to take several hundred
more to the diplomatic currency exchange that the little alarms bells started going
off in the back of my head. To my great relief, Jim politely declined.
Money in hand, our daylong companion — our magician, our fixer
— quickly left. He must have taken the supply of fairy dust with him because as soon
as the door shut behind him, Jim and I looked at each other and knew we'd been robbed.
Or were we? We laughed. When Sunday came, would we be riding like
kings to Kashgar or would we be feeling like fools? Nothing we could do about it till
then.
Our Saturday was a joy. We ate well, listened to the monsoon rains,
began taking pictures, and noticed that the giant banyan tree outside our room was
inhabited by hundreds of minah birds. I began to notice individual things and people
rather than the undifferentiated blur of our first days.
On Sunday morning at 7 A.M., we were all packed up and checked out. As
the minutes ticked by -- 7:15, 7:30, 8:00 -- we discussed how it really wasn't like us at
all to want to spend the next 4 weeks in close quarters with complete strangers… we
would be having their vacation, not our own… not having to do that
was worth the $230, wasn't it?
So, we figured we'd better start having our own vacation. We walked
outside and there, set up at a table on the lawn, was the PTDC guy. To Kashgar? No
problem! Within minutes we had a driver and a plan. Go as fast as you can to
Kashgar. Make next Saturday's market. Then take your time coming back. We agreed on a
price but guess what… no need to pay the driver till after the trip was
over.
We jumped into the car and headed for the hills. |
