 Hitting the Road
We were under the
impression that it would take us 3 overnights to get to Kashgar from Rawalpindi,
even though the entire distance is probably less than a thousand miles. Mr. Sayad, our
driver (if he spoke 10 words of English, I never heard them), was told to drop us off at
PTDC (remember, Pakistan Tourist Development Center?) hotels in Besham, in Gilgit, then in
Sust on the Pakistani side of the 16,000-foot Khunjerab Pass (the highest bus-navigable
mountain pass in the world), after which we'd be put on a bus into China. I think the plan
was that he'd wait for us in Sust till we came back. No problem.
No problem. We had our
backpacks and our guidebooks. The Karakoram Highway began in Rawalpindi and ended in
Kashgar — a straight run — we couldn't even get lost. What could go
wrong?
We spent our first day on the road agape at the mountainous beauty
around us. Once out of the city, civilization is a postscript, an afterthought. The shabby
little villages squat uncomfortably wherever the rock will let them. The buildings are rebuildings
-- always in a state of reconstruction. Curious. It was only later that I realized just
how uncomfortably those villages perch on the shoulders of rock and just how often the
rock shrugs them off.
Just north of Rawalpindi and Islamabad is the western tip of the
Himalayas, which arc across India to end here with the killer mountain Nanga Parbat, the 8th
highest mountain in the world. Mr. Sayad pointed out glimpses of the snowy peak as we
skirted it. The mountain was the Big Sight of the day and the extent of his tour guiding.
But more impressive than craning my neck to see Nanga Parbat was my
first vision of the Indus River. The highway joined the river at Thanot and crossed it
repeatedly through most of our journey north.
Now anybody who managed not to sleep through grade school geography
has heard of the Indus River. Like any of the great rivers around which civilizations
arose, I imagined it to be broad and old-man-riverish, with lots of agriculture on its
fertile plains and women bathing and washing clothes along its banks. Maybe that's how it
is down south near Karachi, where the wide delta meets the sea. But in Thanot and points
north there are no fertile plains, no agriculture, no human being within yards of its
banks. The Indus is a monster -- a boiling cement-gray monster, scouring its way through
rock, thick with pulverized minerals. It's fed by thousands of high altitude glaciers in
summer spate. I couldn't take my eyes off it.
We followed the river to Besham. By that time we understood why the
short mileage to Gilgit couldn't be made in a day. The highway was a crowded,
winding two-lane ribbon through the mountains. And even by that humble definition, it
still qualified as a grand feat of Chinese engineering.
The PTDC hotel in Besham was full. Poor Mr. Sayad had to go searching
for us in an area that served the local business travelers. We wound up at the Abassin,
which, like everything else was undergoing reconstruction, but did boast of "flesh
toilets." These "flesh toilets" were also "flesh" to the floor --
the kind you have to squat over. I wasn't real thrilled about it. But Jim always makes
the best of these situations. He found some glasses and made cocktails for us from a
packet of Sugar-Free Koolaid (don't leave home without it) and Pakistani gin.
I didn't tell you about Pakistani liquor. Drinking is strictly
forbidden in Pakistan, but they do make concessions for foreign travelers. We were able to
buy a bottle of Murree gin in Rawalpindi only after a furtive conversation with the hotel
restaurant manager, who made us fill out what amounted to affidavits that neither we nor
our parents or grandparents were Moslems. A bottle was then discreetly delivered to the
room.
So Jim made our Koolaid cocktails and we enjoyed the twilight view
of the town and river from the flat roof outside our room.
What also happened to me about this time in our trip is that I became
a vegetarian. It's not that every meal isn't a scrumptious concoction, if you don't mind
your vegetables cooked to a paste. It pretty much doesn't matter what you order, the
flavors are all lip-tingling delicious. However, the meat is inedible. You get your
choice of mutton or chicken. They are equally unchewable to the underexercised U.S. jaw.
So in Besham, I put my foot down. No meat. It took nearly all the
non-English-speaking men in the restaurant to figure out the one vegetarian dish for me:
okra. I'd never had okra and knew it only by its bad reputation, but that night it was
slimy wonderful.
The roof outside our room was littered with charpoys, cots made
of woven leather on wooden frames. They were piled with dirty, rain-soaked blankets. By
morning there were dozens of sleepers wound up in these blankets. Our rooms were
immaculate by comparison, but I was still itchy, so I took a Halcyon and stretched out
fully clothed over the sheets.
Bright and early, back on the road. The world is increasingly
vertical. A town might look pretty normal as you drive through — small shops lining
both sides of the road, but when you look back you find that the rest of the village,
behind Main Street, tumbles vertically down the side of the mountain — a
cliff-dwelling community. Green growing areas are tightly terraced into the hills. Except
for the ribbon of road, there are few horizontal surfaces. The landscape flows and swirls.
The women we see reinforce this image: they are veiled from head to toe in fluttering
purple or black, carrying big silver pots on their heads as they work their way across the
steep diagonals.
The scenery changes dramatically at Chilas, as we enter Indus
Kohistan. We are past the Himalayas and into the Karakoram mountain range. (K2 is part of
this range.) Except for the odd, distant burst of green where someone has tamed the
glacial run-off, the landscape is barren, the mountains so immense that I lose all sense
of proportion. I look at the banks of a dried river bed, then suddenly discern teeny
little telephone poles and trees along the edge and realize I'm looking into a canyon.
Here's where you have to confront your fear of height and lose your
need for control. We are traveling at about 4000 feet up on a winding 2-lane highway.
Buses and trucks pass on curves. The lips of the canyon I see are maybe a mile away,
straight down. A wrong move by Mr. Sayad or any number of the surrounding drivers means a
launch into eternity. But what are you going to do about it? There's no point in being a
back seat driver or getting that little twitch in your right foot as your reflexes long to
be in control. Relax. Look over the edge. It's fascinating.
 But I guess there's another problem in Kohistan: bandits. Five times
between Besham and Gilgit we were stopped to register at government checkpoints (see photo
above). No one could speak enough English to explain this to us, but we figured that,
should we disappear — victims of the road or the bandits — the government would
know which checkpoints we disappeared between. Somehow this didn't give us much comfort.
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