 Gilgit
We
arrived in Gilgit and once again the targeted PTDC hotel was filled. It was still
early enough for Mr. Sayad to bring us to the PTDC office. After much consultation we were
delivered to the Hunza Tourist House, a pleasant enough motel with a flowery courtyard.
It's one thing to travel passively and fatalistically in a car,
hypnotized by the view. It's another to be dumped out and left on your own.
It was only our second day on the road
and already I had a reference in my diary to Sheltering Sky (that Paul Bowles novel
of a couple's relentless journey deeper and deeper into the Sahara). In Gilgit we were one
step deeper into a journey I was quite unprepared for. It was hot. Even
though we were at about 4000 feet, the barren hills radiated heat like a brick oven, under
a gas-flame sky. The air conditioner in our room worked only intermittently as the power
cut on and off — just enough to make us crazy over it. The shower water was ice cold.
And the toilet… It wasn't a squatter like the one in Besham, but the flusher didn't
quite work. We were already in a degraded enough state of mind to simply plunge our hand
into the bowel and push the toilet paper and whatever through the drain. It had to
be done.
Gilgit is famous. I would have heard of it had I read my Rudyard
Kipling or been a student of British colonialism. Our walk through the bazaar revealed
only a dirty, inhospitable place. What was I expecting? Sidewalk cafés? Clean, appetizing
food stalls? The food was covered with flies and a lot of the fruit was rotten. The men
handling the food… even less appetizing. No place was inviting. There appeared to be
some kind of tea houses but they were dark, windowless caves for men only.
In general, we found an air of mystery. The houses were walled
fortresses: endless rock and cement walls, broken only by the occasional small door. (A
woman in black would quickly slip through, barely seen out of the corner of my eye.) No
windows. Was this cultural (the need to protect the women from prying eyes) or
environmental (the need to protect the family from the baking sun and the freezing winds)?
Everything was impenetrable. I hated it. Why was I here? Why couldn't
I have planned a fucking vacation instead of some kind of existential confrontation
in an impersonal universe?
It was 7 PM and getting dark. Jim and I argued. I spotted a
Chinese restaurant and wanted to go to dinner to "get it over with." He wanted
to go back to the motel, have our Koolaid cocktails, and worry about dinner later. I gave
up and trudged with him back to the Hunza Tourist House.
As I may have said, Jim is more comfortable in the impersonal
universe than I am. He doesn't have to fight that urge to crawl between the sheets that I
do. He sat me down at one of the nice little tables in the flowery courtyard where I
started to bawl, feeling doubly bad for being such a drip. Jim was a sweetheart. He
plied me with sweet liquor and before long the motel staff was bringing a savory dinner
right to our table.
We set out the next morning at 6 for our trip to the Chinese border.
But about a half hour out of Gilgit, traffic came to a halt. Oh-oh. Landslide. We got out
of the car to reconnoiter.
Being a native of the great midwestern plains, I am not a student of
mountains. They're made of rock, right? And rock is solid, right? Yeah, I read all about
how India rams itself into Asia, with the mountains being the offspring of this union. But
it's two tectonic plates crashing, right? I imagine two china plates colliding,
with the resulting shards being the Himalayas and Karakorams. They may be shards but
they're still solid, right?
I looked at the terrifying sight of the landslide. (See photo above.)
The damn mountainside just fucking fell apart. It plum gave out. The rock collapsed
into a giant pile of dust and stones, obliterating the highway. There was no glue
holding it all together. We were surrounded by gigantic piles of ground-up rock
just waiting for the least little tremor to shake it lose.
 What were we going to do now? It's not like there's an alternate
route.
Mr. Sayad just shrugged and turned the car around back to
Gilgit. |