Karimabad, Hunza Valley, Pakistan
So that bit of wisdom informed the shape of this trip and it worked well for Karimabad, heart of the Hunza Valley. The first time through we were fresh from being rescued from the landslide, newly attached to the Darlingtons and (as usual) faced with finding a hotel room. Najeeb walked us up a hill to an old fort. For dinner we ate with a group who pressed Najeeb to get us a bottle of the forbidden local wine. Reuben, Rueben, I've been thinking, what in the world have you been drinking? Tastes like whiskey, smells like wine. Oh my God, it's turpentine. Hunza wine was turpentine. Jim spent the rest of the night throwing up, which may or may not have been related. The next morning we took off for the Chinese border. So the Hunza Valley passed in a blur. But of all places, Hunza shouldn't be a blur. It is Shangri-La… literally the model for James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Hunza is an ancient kingdom, barely part of Pakistan, an isolated world that (the legend goes) survived through history by robbing caravans along the silk road. Actually, it survived by turning stony glacial chutes into gardens. Karimabad is on the steep side of a mountain at about 7000 feet, surrounded by peaks over 20,000 feet. Their life comes from Ultar, a peak that (as of 1992) no one had summited, though many had died trying. The runoff from its glacier is carefully directed into centuries-old irrigation canals -- a whole capillary system of them for every shallow terrace. These canals have turned the vertical community into a cornucopia of fruits and grains. They are famous for their apricots, which you see drying on every rooftop and which sustain life through their long winters. (Did I eat any of these mystical apricots? Well… no. As someone accustomed to plump sulphurated apricots from the supermarket, they looked all dirty and wizened to me. Sorry.) Our 72 hours in Hunza turned out to be the most social interlude of our journey and, little did we realize, the last sane place. After hiking up to the glacial spate, we ran into Najeeb who was taking a break from escorting a Italian group and who was (as usual) picking up strays. He introduced us to a British threesome who invited us for tea on the porch of their hostel. Very unlike the Darlingtons, they were wanderers in their twenties, soaking up the world on the cheap, wondering who they'd be when they grew up. Hugo was one of those arrogant young men, tall, blond, and full of his own adventures, who set out immediately to impress Jim. The women were more interesting. Catherine was raised in Ghana, had worked for CNN in Hong Kong, and was aiming for a career making travel documentaries. Jenny was a professional photographer on her way back to school. She was also the great granddaughter of Winston Churchill and the granddaughter of Pamela Harriman. We had dinner together (with Najeeb and his Italians) and we invited them to our place the next day. Our guest of honor was Jan Sakih, whose family owned our hotel and who was a passionate mountaineer. His English was good enough to talk politics, to comment authoritatively on a painting Jim bought in China and on the beads I bought down the street ("sorry, not local… from Afghanistan"), and to relate the story of his love life. For 3 years he'd lived with a girl at the university in Lahore, but she ran off to Canada. His broken heart led him to quit school and quit the Olympic soccer team. He finally found true friendship with his current wife, whom he was sending through medical school. (Even though a sign asked us foreigners to kindly not take pictures of the women and they were nearly as invisible as elsewhere in Pakistan, Jan's story told me all was not bleak, at least not for upper class women, and that women are equally able to break hearts in any culture.) When Jan discovered my interest in jewelry, he brought out his wedding ring to show me. It was a great chunk of silver, inlaid with lapis lazuli, including two rows of hearts — manly but powerfully sweet. He'd worked with an Afghani jeweler for a long time over the design to make it just right, but when he started to wear it he fell sick. Oops… his local folk doctor/shaman told him the problem was the lapis… not his stone at all. I bought it from him for $24. A year later when Jim and I got married, I gave it to him as his wedding ring… so far so good with the lapis. Later we bought some local moonshine from Jan. It came in an old Jack Daniels bottle and mixed just fine with Koolaid. We also had drinks with Akhtar Karim, a guide dressed in blue jeans and a leopard-skin shirt He was taking a break from his very demanding Japanese tour group. He'd lived in Japan but polished his English by hanging out with Americans in bars, so his English was very colloquial. (Jan: "Is your tour group happy?" Akhtar: "If I'm happy, they're happy.") Ominously, he told us that the diversity of languages and sub-cultures in Pakistan was tearing the country apart. Even the Muslim religion was splintering into factions. We were to remember those words days later… continued>>> |
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I love circling back. The classic road trip goes on and
on and then you're home (or somewhere completely new -- or dead). But when we went to
Thailand in 1990 I learned a great lesson: during the first few days of our visit Bangkok
was an exhaust-choked hell hole, where I was always confused and afraid to go anywhere
without the guide. Fourteen days later, when we finished our tour of the north, Bangkok
was suddenly doable. We found all the antique markets on our own, bargained with taxi
drivers, and braved restaurants… perfect cosmopolitans.