 Flight from Gilgit
So the U.S. Consul's office had our names, passport
numbers, and next of kin. How comforting.
We went to lunch wondering
what would happen next.
A break came quickly. The buzz
swept through the hotel: "Gilgit would open between 2-4 P.M. Strictly enforced."
Almost immediately, our lunch was interrupted to take a call from our motherly Consul, who
gave us the same message and told us it would be okay to leave. "The roads will be
heavily guarded," she said. "Call me when you arrive in Islamabad."
Shortly after 2 o'clock we
tried to call Travel Walji's to book a car and get the hell out. But no one answered. We
looked at each other and knew our only choice was to leave our safe haven and find
someone. We hurried down the street and pounded up the stairs to the second floor office
of Walji's. No one was there but a small boy. Luckily, he understood when we asked for Ali
Akhbar and ran to get him.
We'd gotten Ali Akhbar's card
before we headed for Nanga Parbat. Remember that Najeeb was going to arrange a flight for
us from Gilgit to Rawalpindi. We tried to confirm it and pay for it that morning but PIA
had no record of our reservation and claimed to be totally booked for their Tuesday
flight. Our driver had taken us to Walji's to see if someone there could help. That's how
we met Ali Akhbar. Today it wasn't a question of fooling around with the thrilling
twice-weekly flight around the summit of Nanga Parbat. Today it was "Get us out of
here. Now. Please, please, please."
Ali Akhbar was a prince. In no
time we were sitting in a giant 15-seat minivan, with two drivers, headed out of Gilgit to
Peshawar.
But it didn't take long for us
to realize that our world had not returned to normal.
 First of all, our drivers were not the smiling, kind men we'd
grown accustomed to (without realizing it till now). If ever there was a Pakistani version
of Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet, they were it. The small one had all the false cheer
of a chimpanzee. His big buddy was dour and argumentative. They were clearly gleeful to be
getting out of Gilgit and were so shaggy and disreputable looking that Jim and I were
sure they must be escapees from the police roundup, definitely fitting the category of
"usual suspects."
They completely ignored us. Where
other drivers were at least attentive to whether we wanted to stop for food or photos,
these guys were on their own holiday and we were the goats they were delivering to market.
Outside Gilgit, they stopped
at a roadside stand to buy themselves big bunches of green grapes. Down the road a piece,
at a truck stop, they disappeared altogether, leaving us to swelter in the van.
Jim finally went after them. They were having a meal. Then at the next opportunity, they
stopped again, this time for tea. (We decided to have some tea too but couldn't make it
clear that we wanted just plain tea. The standard tea drink is tea, milk and sugar all
boiled up together and neither of us were willing to sacrifice our health for local
milk… nevermind that we'd been living on the insane edge of risk for days if not
weeks already.)
At twilight we found ourselves jammed
up at a police checkpoint, with all the other vehicles either escaping from or
circumventing Gilgit.
Here, the driver of an overloaded Jeep
asked up to take on a couple of his passengers because he'd just had a tire blow out. We
say sure.
The young British couple who
joined us hauled their stuff into the van looking pale and shaken and very grateful to be
out of the Jeep. "You very literally may have saved our lives," were the first
words out of Sarah's mouth. They'd been crammed into the Jeep with an arms dealer and
antiquities smuggler and had been driving with a flat tire for 20 miles or more.
But it wasn't like they weren't used to
hard traveling. They'd been working their way from Katmandu through China, on the
cheap. They described their overnight bus trip through Tibet: Their driver boarded with a
case of beer. At the first pothole, the headlights went out. At the second pothole they
flickered back on and he celebrated with a beer. This pattern continued all night long:
lights off, lights on, beer celebration, while the passengers could do nothing but watch
in horror and pray.
Rescuing them made us feel
like the Darlingtons. We got a nice feeling of harmony with the world in being able to
invite them aboard our luxury craft.
Night fell and we were deep
into the stark bandit territory of Indus Kohistan. In the village of Kolimas we were
stopped by police for unknown reasons. Our drivers parked the van and after some
incomprehensible conversations with the local officials surrounding us, they disappeared.
We were left to wonder what the hell was going on.
We found a place to buy warm sodas.
Sodas and our stash of stale bread constituted dinner. Our drivers were discovered in a
restaurant enjoying another meal for themselves.
It turned out that the local
constabulary was putting together a caravan of passenger vehicles going to get us safely
through the night drive in Kohistan. At the checkpoint outside of town 4 soldiers got into
the van with us. Our luxurious van was now packed with 2 drivers, 4 travelers and 4
soldiers, along with our luggage. The soldiers squeezed themselves into the back seat,
their long rifles between their legs, pointed at the roof. Our humor grew black. What if
we were ambushed? How exactly were our guardians going to use their weapons to defend us?
Blast holes through the roof? We were giddy and fatalistic as we rumbled along in the
darkness.
We arrived in Besham at 12:30
A.M. But — of course — the PTDC hotel was full. We backtracked to the Abassin,
the Taj Mahal, and finally wound up at the International. We were too tired to be fussy.
It was here that I realized that the many native drivers who traveled the Karakoram
Highway simply slept on charpois (a wooden frame strung with woven fiber of one sort or
another) out on the street. At least we hadn't been reduced to that. In our bathroom,
something scurried out of sight when I switched on the light. I didn't want to know about
it, so I took a sleeping pill and stretched out on top of the bed covers and slept fully
clothed. Hard to believe that only 2 nights before we were under the stars on Nanga
Parbat.
*
From here, we have a comic interlude
as we try to finish the next leg of our journey, to Peshawar. (Not that we were laughing.)
Our drivers — if you can
forgive a burst of ugly Americanism, after all we'd been through — were idiots. As
soon as we got to Islamabad (the capital of Pakistan and a large modern city), they were
lost.
We wanted to go to the American Express
office to get some more money before taking the Grand Trunk Road west to
Peshawar. Jim had the address and found the location on his map. They didn't have a
clue what we were trying to tell them. They stopped at every street corner to try to get
someone to interpret what we wanted and where they were supposed to go. Many of the folks
we stopped understood just fine and gave the boys directions. But they were completely
incapable of following them. Even through the language barrier, Jim himself usually
understood the directions and wound up practically in the driver's lap using sign language
to get him to make the damn correct turns.
Finally, we arrived at the
massive white American Express building, where we got resupplied with cash and where we
called the Consul to tell her we were safe, if not entirely sound.
We were wondering how in the
world our country boys were going to get us to Peshawar when fate intervened. Outside the
American Express building we found our drivers and a young man shaking their heads and
clucking over the van. The young man turned out to be a cabby who had noticed a
"defect" — a small puddle of oil under the vehicle. Our drivers had
"sold" us to him for the ride to Peshawar.
Who knows if there was a
"defect" or not. Our boys may have been just as rattled as we were by
their incompetence at city driving. Everyone was thrilled and we parted with a great burst
of hand-shaking and smiles as if our journey together had created a bond of friendship,
then we turned away, each of us, I'm sure, thanking Allah for the intervention.
But alas, this was Pakistan,
so the hand-off didn't go smoothly. The cabby was congenial and spoke a few words of
English. At first he tried to convince us to stay at a little guesthouse and leave at 9
A.M. the next day. We said no. This led him to rush us to "the office" for
"special boss." The office was closed. He seemed distracted as he slowly headed
toward the Grand Trunk Road. The slowness of his driving — so uncharacteristic in
Pakistan — was unsettling. He flagged down another cab. There was a quick
conversation and exchange of money. We would go to Peshawar in the other cab, he told us,
and admitted he didn't have the right papers to drive to Peshawar. We realized the
"special boss" he was looking for was a "special pass."
The new cabby smiled and took
our bags. Next stop: Peshawar. |