In the spring of 1990, I was feeling restive, in need of some deeply personal-envelope-pushing adventure. The Bay Area was the center of the burgeoning adventure travel industry, and I contacted a local company called InnerAsia Expeditions (now known as Geographic Expeditions, and happily, still a part of my life a quarter-century later). I had long heard rumors of a fabled place in northern Pakistan called Hunza, and InnerAsia had a three-week adventure that went to Hunza and beyond, high into the Himalaya along the equally fabled Karakoram Highway. It sounded like the stuff of dreams and I signed up eagerly. The trip turned out to be even more of an adventure than I had hoped for, and the only way I could do it justice in my articles, I felt, was to break the trip into three segments and write three long pieces for the travel section. Taken together, this is the longest article I have ever written about a trip—but in many ways, this was the most epic trip of my lifetime, and when I reread this account, even a quarter-century later, all the fear, discomfort, wonder, and exhilaration of encountering that unfamiliar world come surging back to me.
Part One: Rawalpindi, Peshawar, and the Khyber Pass
We sat around the table in the dawn-lit dining room at the Shangri-La Hotel in Chilas, Pakistan, a decidedly unparadisiacal place where a policeman had been shot during a public protest two days before, and debated what to do: It had been raining hard for at least forty-eight hours, loosening the rocks above the Karakoram Highway and increasing the possibilities of avalanche and flood. We could risk the highway and reach Islamabad by midnight, which would give us a full day to recuperate in our luxury hotel before the thirty-two-hour journey back to the United States. Or we could wait in Chilas, hoping that the rain would let up so that we could make the trip more safely the following day and drive straight to the airport.
“I don’t think we should go,” said Tom Cole, the trip leader from the United States.
“I think it will be all right,” said Asad Esker, the leader from Pakistan.
The remaining four of us looked at each other, and the prospect of death—imminent death, actual death, death not as a benign abstraction but as a visceral reality—hung palpable in the air.
That dilemma was far in the unimaginable future, however, when I arrived in Islamabad on April 2 at 2:56 a.m.
I had left San Francisco at 11:00 a.m. on March 30 and flown a total of twenty-seven hours—via New York, Paris, and Frankfurt. Now, at last, I was in Pakistan: Hot white letters spelling “Islamabad International” blazed in the darkness, and all around them the same words danced in neon blue Arabic script.
Five of the nine total members of the tour, plus trip leader Tom Cole, had been on the same flight from New York, and we introduced ourselves, stretched sore muscles, and rubbed bleary eyes while waiting for our bags to appear. Soon they did, as did our smiling local guide, Asad Esker, and driver, Ali Muhammad, who whisked us through the dazed and humid night to our luxurious recovery rooms at the Pearl Continental Hotel in nearby Rawalpindi.
I slept fitfully for a few hours, then was awakened at 4:30 by the distant wail of a muezzin calling the Muslim faithful—who comprise 99 percent of the population of Pakistan—to prayer. Raucous crows’ caws filled the air, and the rising-falling song of another muezzin braided with the first. Then sirens blared.
What’s going on, I wondered. A fire somewhere? Or maybe just the impending sunrise—for we had arrived during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are not supposed to eat or drink between sunrise and sunset.
The dull cacophony continued, muezzins and sirens and crows wailing and blaring and cawing until it seemed as if the whole country was speaking with one voice, and the just-waking day soared and swelled and echoed with the sound of it.
Then a solitary soul, much closer, began his plaintive call. The voice rose, held, and fell. The words were clear and strong and imbued the air with a strange and powerful fervency and mystery. I thought it was a song of supplication and hope—but who was I to say?
I knew nothing, understood nothing; everything was unfamiliar. I was a blank map, onto which Pakistan had just begun its artful scrawl.
After an orientation session in the hotel lobby, our group set out to visit downtown Rawalpindi. This first excursion introduced urban emblems that would reappear throughout the trip: dusty streets loud with horns and crammed with buses, cars, carts, and bicycles. And people! Bearded, fierce-eyed men in turbans and shalwar kameez (the light and loose Pakistani suit that combines a knee-length shirt with drawstring pants); little children in dusty clothes, all big eyes and quick smiles; women wrapped in gorgeous veils and scarves and shalwar kameez, some covered completely from head to toe, others with only their faces exposed.
Children stood behind carts piled with pyramids of figs, oranges, or grapefruit; men sat in storefront shops selling electric fans, shoes, underwear, sewing machines. Alleyways twisted past stalls displaying jewelry, bright bolts of cloth, fantastic colored mounds of spices.
As we wandered, I quickly realized that my fundamental preconception of Pakistan was wrong: I had expected a miniature version of India, but unlike the Indian cities I had visited, here there were no beggars, and none of the vaguely menacing atmosphere of poverty, decay, and hopelessness I remembered from Calcutta and New Delhi. Wherever we went, we were either ignored or greeted with hearty smiles and hellos. And even in that chaos and cacophony, there was a sense of order and purposefulness; the shops seemed well maintained, and the adults seemed markedly attentive to the cleanliness of their clothes and the neatness of their appearance.
Early the next day we flew to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Peshawar has been in the international spotlight in recent years because it is the headquarters-in-exile for the Afghanistan guerrillas who have been fighting the Soviets and the Soviet-instituted government in Kabul. Unlike Rawalpindi, Westerners were in evidence throughout the city—most, Asad said, either journalists or workers with one or another international aid organization.
The Peshawar bazaar revealed the same wonderland of colors, smells, and sounds as Rawalpindi’s, but made even more complex with the addition of the people and products—the subtle but penetrating presence—of Afghanistan. In the bazaar, men occasionally tugged at our arms or pointed at themselves and said, “Afghanistan, Afghanistan,” and the shops were filled with Afghan-made rugs, jewelry, and metalware.
Especially riveting were the unexpected reminders of the Afghanistan war—soldiers’ caps with the red Soviet hammer and sickle, uniform buttons and insignias. When I turned one such hat in my hands, the thought came to me that a young man had once worn it, a young man probably not so different from me, with loving parents and siblings and perhaps a young wife who even now recalled with bitter tears his vow that he would return from the war alive.
Being here, near the figurative front lines, brought the news to life—or death—over and over again: Asad applied to the Tribal and Home Affairs Department for permission to go to the Khyber Pass, and was told that the day before, Afghan helicopters and planes had been flying low over the border area. They hadn’t done anything, but they had unsettled the authorities enough to deny our request.
So instead we set off for Darra Adam Khel, headquarters of Pakistan’s burgeoning gun-making and gun-smuggling industry.
The dusty road to Darra unfolds in memory as a series of snapshots: rough, mud-walled settlements that Asad said were Afghan refugee camps; women in flowing red and white robes balancing bright green packages on their heads; donkey carts bearing bricks; barefoot children in ragged clothes skittering through the dirt or hoisting slingshots, stopping to cry out and wave when they saw our foreign faces; eye-relieving splashes of green fields—wheat, sugar cane, and sugar beets—and stands of trees; scraggly cows and burros and sheep by the side of the road.
At some point Asad explained that we were passing into tribal territory, where Pakistani law stopped and local law took over. The tribes elect their own councils and representatives, he said, and essentially police themselves. An invisible corridor that extends forty feet on either side of the road is considered Pakistani territory; venture beyond that, and your fate is in the hands of the local tribes. “The gun is the law of this area,” he added.
As we continued we passed long, dun-colored mud complexes with towering walls that looked like miniature fortresses. Asad explained that these were family dwellings. In the tribal territories, every house has its own watchtower, so that in times of tribal conflict, vigils can be kept around the clock.
And then we reached Darra. At first it looked like any other dusty town, one main street and a few side streets lined with small shops. But something heavy hung like a shroud in the air.
As we walked, we saw storefront after storefront glistening with pistols, rifles, bullets, knives. It was a little boy’s fantasy world, a gun nut’s dream come true—every variety of weapon you could want, right there in neat display. It was also the classic cottage industry, except that here the ultimate product was death.
“You want to try one?” A grizzled shopkeeper held out a rifle. “Shoot! Shoot!” he said, then stepped into the street outside his shop, pointed the barrel into the sky, and fired. Boom! I jumped.
“You want to try?”
After some prodding, I and a few other members of our group followed him to the “firing range,” an area well beyond the shops with a dusty flat field that ended in a hill.
He held out a Russian-made Kalashnikov automatic rifle. The shopkeeper steadied the butt against my shoulder, then stepped away and put his fingers in his ears. I squeezed the trigger. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! The butt slammed into my shoulder, and little pings of dust traced the bullets. Weird feeling.
Again I squeezed. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! I felt awful and giddy at the same time—amazed at the pure power, the deadly power, I could unleash with a little twitch of my finger.
While others in our group were firing, another group of men bearing three rifles approached. A hawk-nosed, fiery-eyed man in an elaborate tan turban and draped in a bright blanket, separated himself from the group, crouched, aimed carefully, and fired. He tried each gun, and each try was followed by a burst of excited discussion and dispute.
I didn’t know what tribe he was from, but I did know he wasn’t firing those rifles so that he could write about it back home.
Later, as I walked through dusty back alleys and watched old men and young boys patiently tapping and tinkering and polishing their creations like kindly Swiss toymakers, the unreality of it all overwhelmed me. They didn’t look like monsters; they were just brothers, husbands, and fathers making money to buy flour and fruit and shoes. And yet I felt that I had touched the heart of some immense evil, the vital nerve center of a sinuous and shadowy network of smuggling/oppression/conflict that operated all around the world and was vastly more powerful and pervasive—and perverse—than I had ever imagined.
On the following day we learned that we would have to alter our itinerary: We could not fly to Chitral, gateway to the pagan Kafir Kalash people of Kafiristan, because seasonal thermal updrafts—that would last about five days, Asad said—had made it impossible to land there. This was the first indication on the trip of the manifold uncertainties that come with the territory of adventure travel—obstacles that sometimes no amount of money or preparation can overcome.
After a group discussion, we decided to add one more day each to our stays in Gilgit and Hunza. I was deeply disappointed that we would not be able to see the tribes of the Kalash, who reportedly have managed to maintain their own pagan beliefs and distinct dress, speech, and other cultural practices through two millennia of passive Buddhist belief and, later, aggressive Islamic rule all around them.
Then we heard the good news: Asad had somehow secured permission for us to visit the Khyber Pass!
Martial music played and images from Gunga Din marched through my head as we wound due west toward the border. We passed two sprawling Afghan refugee settlements—temporary structures of mud, bamboo, and straw, stretching across the dusty flatlands—and Asad said that 35,000 people lived in one and 28,000 in another. He added that Pakistan supplies three-quarters of the cost of supporting all the camps.
Until this time, my sense of the Afghan war had been confined to television and newspaper reports viewed or read in the comfort of my living room. Now the picture had changed. “Try to imagine all the inhabitants of Burlingame, say, or Los Gatos,” I wrote in my journal, “living in these patched-together structures, laced by dirt lanes on a parched plain; then try to imagine providing for all their needs in a country that is already strapped meeting the needs of its own inhabitants, and then try to imagine the sufferings of the refugees themselves—from maimed limbs to splintered families to profound psychological displacement. Imagine all these, and you begin to get some sense of the scale and depth of the problems the Afghan war has created.”
As long-prowed, brightly painted trucks bearing lumber, bricks, tires, and cows honked their horns and ground their gears around us, Asad summarized the history of the region: “The road we are traveling now is a continuation of the Grand Trunk Road, which was originally built in the 14th century connecting Kabul to Delhi. It was improved on and expanded through the centuries, but most importantly by the British in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The route passes through Europe into Turkey, then Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.”
For a moment the “magic buses” I had seen crammed with long-haired hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts in Istanbul in the ’70s came to mind, and I remembered the exotic tales of Kabul and Kathmandu. How far away that whole world seemed—and yet how near.
“So many armies have passed this way,” Asad continued, “beginning with the Indo-Aryans in 1500-1200 b.c., then Alexander the Great and his troops in the 4th century b.c., and through the centuries the Tatars, Mughals, Afghans, and English. . . .
“The mountains we are traveling into are part of the Hindu Kush. The Khyber Pass itself is thirty-three kilometers (about twenty miles) long; 98,000 people live in the area, and three different tribes control different areas of the pass.
“The main industry here, to tell you the truth, is smuggling. The tribal chiefs have huge complexes that are well guarded, and the tribespeople pass back and forth over the border at will; there are many unsupervised points where they can cross at night.”
The road twisted and wound past rocky, barren bluffs with forts the same bleached color perched on their tops, etched against the cloudless blue sky. Naked children jumped and splashed in streams, and women led straggling strings of children, or balanced bulging bags, or talked in groups away from the road—their brilliant robes catching our eyes even as they hastily drew their veils around their faces to avoid our stares.
What kind of life do these people have out here? I wondered. And yet this is where they grew up, this is all they know of the world, an inner voice replied.
At one point we stopped and got out, and Asad pointed to the ribboning road we had just traveled. “If you look closely out there, you can see three roads: On the top is the road the Mughals used in the early 16th century; below that—see the dirt trail—is the path the Greeks used under Alexander; and then there is the Grand Trunk Road the British made.”
At another point he motioned out the window to a grassy, depressed plain. “This was the site of a bloody ambush during the third Afghan war in 1919. The British and the Pathans fought fiercely throughout this area for more than a century.”
At this Tom Cole said, “Of all the peoples the British encountered in their 300-odd years on the subcontinent, they admired the Pathans the most.” And then he quoted the words the Pakistanis had chiseled in stone at the gateway to the pass, in commemoration of the end of British-Pathan conflict: “According to the British, it was here that they met their equals, who looked them straight in the face and fought against them up to the last day of their rule. But when the British quit, after a rule of 100 years, the two great peoples parted as friends.”
Later we passed a honeycomb of small shops, and Asad said, “This is Ali Mastid bazaar—from the earliest days of the Silk Route, this is where the camel caravans would stop for the night. In fact, nomad caravans still do stop here.”
We saw the remains of a Buddhist stupa, and tank barriers built by the British during WWII, and always the sere, steep, craggy rocks; the twisting road; the brown, baked tribal settlements set into the hills; the trucks laden with wood, metal drums of fuel, tires; pedestrians and goats and cows; buses bulging with passengers; pickup trucks bearing grizzled men with rifles slung over their shoulders; and the dust, in my mouth and on my clothes, coating everything.
As we bumped along, I realized that I had been given a great gift: In the accumulation of images and encounters, as my feet scuffed that parched ground, as I nodded at Pakistani soldiers, shook Afghan hands in the bazaar, and waved to children in the settlements, the war was becoming personalized—it was no longer their war, but my war, too. And as the sun glowered down and the earth baked as it had when Alexander’s soldiers walked this way, I thought of how all wars are just people fighting people—and of how just as sun and wind inevitably shape landscape, so too do climate and countryside shape human character and culture.
We reached the last checkpoint before the border, and there we had to stop. Ahead, clearly visible less than four miles in the distance, was Afghanistan. Through binoculars we could see the row of white markers strung out along the hills that represented the border, people moving at the border crossing, and trucks, and then the sere hills stretching into the distance.
Afghanistan! It reminded me of stories I had heard of people in the days before China was open to visitors, driving to the New Territories and peering off toward the misty fields of Canton. Those far mountains were in fact no different from the very mountain on which I stood—except that at some point in the minuscule moment of human history someone had decided to lay an imaginary line between them and call it a border. What chaos that caused, I mused, and the pickup trucks with their riflemen bouncing in the back sped by, bound for—I didn’t know where.
And the scrape and trudge of all the feet that had raised dust on this inhospitable path—Aryan feet, Greek feet, Mughal feet, British feet—echoed in my mind.
On the drive back to Peshawar, Asad pointed to plastic packets that were hanging along with cigarettes, oranges, and other everyday goods from just about every streetside stall. “See those packets?” he said. “They contain opium. Drug-selling is another very big business here. The tribal chiefs are very clever, and very wealthy and well protected. They sell just about everything,” he added.
“Even people?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, people too,” he said.
In a distant field children were flying white paper kites, and women in white robes trailed by children in red and purple shalwar kameez walked through waving grasses from one mud settlement to another. Eucalyptus trees and poplars—strange that I hadn’t noticed them before—lined the road, sighing in the breeze.
Part Two: High Road to Hunza
April 5 dawned dark and drizzly, and we splashed through the muddy, puddling streets of Peshawar bound for the Swat Valley and the city of Saidu Sharif, ancient capital of the Kingdom of Swat. As we wound north, roadside images revealed the presence of the past in this slowly developing land: cultivated fields crisscrossed by rough-dug irrigation trenches, occasionally punctuated by walled compounds of mud and straw; children gathering branches and twigs in the rain; yoked oxen snorting through the mud; carcasses hanging in a market; men huddled around a makeshift fire in a shop.
It was not propitious weather for touring the Buddhist ruins and Alexander the Great-related sites of Swat, so instead we spent our day and a half there shopping. I dutifully but dispiritedly hefted melons, admired earrings and necklaces, and trailed fine rainbow-colored scarves through my hands—until we stopped at the village of Khwazakhela.
There, in a dark, dingy closet of a shop, maybe eight feet deep by five feet wide, we discovered a wooden and leather arrow quiver, with the arrows still inside, that both the shop owner and Asad said was at least 100 years old. Then in a grimy corner, among lanterns and coins and cooking utensils, I found a 100-year-old drum and a 350-year-old leather shield.
I twirled an arrow and felt the prick of its cool metal tip. Then I turned the drum in my hands, studying how the leather had been stretched over the beautifully worked brass, running my fingers over the creases where the leather had been stretched, smelling the dust and sweat and age of it. I beat it—dust dancing into the air—and imagined tribal palms beating that same worn spot a century ago; the dull thonk, thonk and tum, tum echoed in my ears just as—I imagined—they had echoed in tribal ears through the years.
Then I took the rough shield and imagined a Pathan warrior 300 years ago gripping those same thongs, that musty, pocked, leathery disc—about as big as a woman’s floppy Sunday hat—the only thing between him and death.
The shop owner picked an old, rusted, curving sword off the wall and playfully swung it at me. I parried his thrust with my shield. His eyes were suddenly electric with mirth and interaction—understanding that spanned cultures, connections that spanned time.
The next day mists shrouded the Himalayan peaks that Asad said loomed majestic and snowcapped in the distance, but patches of clearing revealed an entirely different Pakistan from the dusty plains of Peshawar: hillsides terraced with row upon row of lush green plots (wheat at that time of year) bright with yellow mustard plants and white-blossoming pear trees.
When we reached 6,300 feet, snow and pine trees unexpectedly appeared, along with patches of pink mountain tulips. And as the countryside and climate changed, so did the inhabitants’ lifestyle: Now hillside clusters of brick and rock houses with tin roofs replaced the sprawling mud and straw settlements of the lowlands; and as the slopes grew increasingly steep, tiny terraces folded down them like the ribs of an emerald fan.
At a fraying, frontier-feeling truck stop called Besham, Tom Cole announced that we were at one of the most significant points of passage on our trip. From there on, we would be traveling along the legendary Karakoram Highway, or KKH, “one of man’s most magnificent and stupefying feats of engineering and endurance.”
Undertaken jointly by Pakistan and China, the two-lane, 730-mile highway took twenty years to complete, with 15,000 Pakistanis and from 9,000 to 20,000 Chinese working on the project at any one time.
The KKH was dynamited and dug out of the mountains, connecting Islamabad all the way to the Chinese border and beyond to Kashgar in the wastes of Chinese Turkestan. In some places the builders followed ancient trade routes that predated even the Silk Route; in other places, because of unresolvable property disputes, they simply blasted a way through virgin territory.
The landscape through which we now wound was as wild and uncompromising as any I had ever seen. The peaks rose steep and sheer—ragged in some places, sandpapered by colossal landslides in others—from the side of the road into the clouds. In all this immensity, the highway was a filament, a puny patch of pavement that nature could reclaim at any moment through any of the elements at its command: snow or mud, rock or flood.
When we saw nomads with sheep and cows walking by the side of the Indus River far below, they looked about as big as the period at the end of this sentence. In my journal I wrote: “This is a landscape for gods, not men.”
Nature’s raw power was manifest in much more mundane—and mortal—ways as well: The rains of the previous days had washed many parts of the road away. Whenever we reached one of these, our driver, Ali Muhammad, would gingerly prod and caress the van over the muddy, slippery, rock-strewn stretches—air whistling beneath our windows all the way to the gray-green squiggle of the Indus.
Asad and Ali kept a constant watch on the mountainside: Tumbling streams of small rocks, Asad said, often precede huge, highway-demolishing rockslides. Whole regiments of soldiers are maintained in camps along the highway just to keep it clear, Asad said.
Eventually we passed so many mudslides and rockslides—and soldiers in bulldozers and backhoes—that I lost count and stopped scanning the mountainsides. Instead I gave myself up to the sumi-e serenity of peak and cloud, the occasional apparitions of umbrella-toting villagers, and the throat-tightening sight of a narrow dirt track, perhaps as old as human settlement here, ribboning along a far mountainside.
Asad and Tom Cole used this time to present some background information: From the beginning of human habitation in the region, northern Pakistan had been composed of fiercely independent valley kingdoms. The leaders of these kingdoms, who went by various titles—rajah, mir, wali—subsisted for centuries in their mountain fastnesses, raising their own food and preying on passing caravans for ceramics, silks, spices, and slaves; at the same time, they used promises of allegiance to gain bounty and maintain independence from the emperors of China and the maharajahs of Kashmir.
This political balancing act reached its climax in the Great Game of the late 19th century, when Russia and England vied through emissaries and outposts—and, finally, armies—for the favor of the local rulers and the control of these remote but strategically alluring territories.
The rulers eventually relinquished their independence, but in essence they remained semiautonomous well after Partition and the creation of Pakistan in 1947. The wali of Swat gave up rule in 1969; the mirs of Hunza and Nagar surrendered their sovereignty only in 1974. (In fact, the current mir of Hunza, who was in power at that time, is the last of the former rulers allowed to use his royal title.)
Today in many ways these areas are still hardly part of Pakistan, Asad said. They don’t belong to any of the country’s four full-fledged provinces, but rather to an anomalous entity called the Northern Areas. The inhabitants prefer local dialects to Urdu, the national language. And the dominant branch of religious belief is not Sunni or Shia Islam—which prevail in other parts of Pakistan—but Ismaili, a somewhat mystic and less fundamentalist, more eclectic strain.
We reached Karimabad, the “capital” of the Hunza Valley, just before sunset. Of all the exotic stops on our itinerary, it was Hunza, famed for its apricot orchards, the longevity of its inhabitants, and its fairy tale setting of a verdant valley encircled by snowcapped peaks, that had most attracted me to this tour. In the far-off United States, I had felt that something was waiting for me in Hunza, that something would be revealed to me there.
No burst of epiphanic light or even partial parting of the clouds greeted my arrival, but my first impressions were still favorable: The people were healthy-looking, with rosy cheeks and bright eyes and sturdy, colorful clothes; the cold, clear mountain air rang with the cries of children at play; and the setting was indeed spectacular, a lush bowl surrounded by peaks, some jagged and distinct against the sky, others obscured by clouds.
We spent the following day touring the highlights of Hunza, starting with Baltit Fort. Built 550 years ago and inhabited by the mirs of Hunza until the present residence was built in the 1920s, this white, high-perched palace is a stirring sight, especially when viewed from a distance against a backdrop of cloud-piercing peaks. Close up, however, it seemed a dusty, neglected, mud-plastered place. Still, looking closely and imaginatively at its massive wooden beams and intricately carved doorways and columns, we could get some sense of its former magnificence.
We were told that UNESCO has been negotiating with the mir to take over the management and restoration of the fort. If an agreement is reached, the palace will probably be sealed off, or at least partly restricted to visitors, until the restoration is completed—but it was heartening to think that this precious, poignant symbol of Hunza’s history and culture might be preserved.
Altit Fort, Baltit’s predecessor, was in a similar state of disrepair, but presented from its tower an enchanting tapestry of rooftop life in the surrounding hamlet: Here was a woman doing the breakfast dishes; there another doing laundry. Three women chatted and crafted masterful crochetwork almost directly below us; another group sat sorting twigs. A mother appeared with a basin under one arm and a squirming naked child under the other, and proceeded to scrub him clean, much to his displeasure. Another adjusted a wooden carrier on her back before setting out for the fields.
In all, our wanderings revealed an underlying sense of prosperity and serenity in Hunza. Solid rock houses sat beside fertile green plots irrigated by an ingenious, extensive network of canals; and everywhere thin spring willows spired into the sky, and pear, apple, and apricot trees burst into brilliant pink and white bloom. Dusty, litter-free paths interlaced the hamlets of the valley, and I noticed an aural interlacing as well: Because of the area’s acoustics, a child’s cry or the clanging of a cowbell at one end could be heard clearly at the other. It was as if everyone was everyone else’s neighbor.
Contentment seemed to spring naturally from Hunza’s idyllic and isolated setting: The valley bowl imbued the place with a stabilizing sense of community, and the peaks, even when invisible, conferred a kind of high mountain peace. How could one not be happy here? I thought.
Such romantic speculations obscured the harsh realities of the situation, however—the inhabitants’ situation and, indeed, our own. We were staying at the guest house of the mir, on the grounds of the present palace, about as prestigious an address as one could hope for. But despite the name, there was intermittent electricity, little hot water, even less heat—and no mir, alas. (He was still at his winter residence in Islamabad.) Even more important, the clouds that had first appeared in Swat had steadfastly followed us up the KKH, clouding the mountains and our minds. It was cold, many in our group were sniffling and coughing, the food was mediocre and the pretty pictures the tour brochure had innocently painted began to seem malevolent mockery.
At an uneasy dinner, various discomforts were brought up, and the consensus was to cut short our stay in Hunza by a day and continue up the KKH a few hours to Gulmit. Some travelers who had just come from there had spoken glowingly of a lodge with abundant hot water, blankets, heat, and good food. So we revised the itinerary once more: The following day, we would tour the Nagar Valley, across the Hunza Gorge, and then leave for Gulmit the morning after.
I decided I would forgo the excursion to Nagar and wander Hunza’s dusty lanes, hoping they would reveal whatever it was I had come to see.
The next day dawned auspiciously clear, and at 5:30 Karimabad was surrounded by a spectacular panorama of peaks, each one glistening golden snow against the sky: Rakaposhi, Pari, The Throne, Ultar.
At 6:30 I walked alone down the main street, exulting at the invigorating air, the head-clearing silence, and the aloof but somehow encouraging solitude, serenity, and strength of the mountains. The entire valley seemed a soul-lightening composition of bold, basic colors: green fields, pink blossoms, white peaks, blue sky.
The day passed in a kind of counterpoint of reflective solitude and entwining encounter. Wherever I wandered, I was met with smiles and waves, but I was also left free to simply roam and reflect.
At one point a man strode up to me and said, “How do you do? I am very happy to welcome you to Hunza. Would you like to see my house?”
He gently took my arm and led me to a plot of land that had been leveled, where a cinderblock dwelling was sitting in stately half-completion. “This,” he said proudly, “is my house.”
He took me through it room by room, pointing out the electrical outlets, the living room’s airy view, and the kitchen with its fancy new fireplace.
At another point I saw two old men sitting by the side of the road, in toothless tranquility. A young boy was standing near them, and I asked him how old they were. He asked them, and they replied, “Eh?” He asked more loudly. Same response. He walked closer and asked in an even bigger voice. Same response. Finally, he walked up so close that he was shouting almost directly into one old man’s nose. “Ah,” they responded, and then sang out some sentences.
“They are not sure,” the boy translated. “Maybe eighty, maybe ninety.” They smiled great toothless grins, and I asked if I could take their picture. I don’t know what their answer was, but it sounded like, “Yes, of course, what took you so long? We have been waiting for you to ask us!”
Much later, after the others on our tour had returned from Nagar, three musicians bearing a horn and two drums arrived at the mir’s palace and began to play on the lawn. Asad had arranged a dance for us, and as the primitive, pulsing music floated through the village’s natural amphitheater, children began to gather from all corners; then grizzled men with canes and younger men carrying their work tools appeared as well.
First three elders in elaborate costumes presented a tale of some long-ago pilgrimage. Then two younger men with shields and swords enacted an epic battle. In the lull between performances, the children pushed and cajoled each other onto the grassy stage and danced.
Just as I was exclaiming at the wonder of witnessing this storytelling tradition that went back perhaps 2,000 years, a young man raced into the dancing area, his eyes bulging, and violently pushed away an old man who had been dancing. The children screamed and scattered.
This youth tore wildly around the grass a half-dozen times, then suddenly stopped and bent over the central drum, sweat streaming off his face, and began to call out words in a husky, disembodied voice.
“This one is a shaman,” Asad said. “He has been possessed by the spirit of the fairies, and is predicting the future.”
But the encounter that moved me most of all occurred earlier in the afternoon. I was returning to the mir’s palace when I saw a man in his backyard crafting a beautiful wooden door. He was working slowly and carefully, and seemed so entirely absorbed that there was no separation between him and the wood he was shaping.
Suddenly he noticed me admiring his work and beckoned me to join him. I slid down a small hill to his home. He grinned. I grinned. I gestured that the door was very beautiful. He called out something, and presently a gorgeous young girl shyly walked up to me bearing a plate of apricots.
The apricots were sweet and delicious and I tried to say so. Then I pulled out some postcards of San Francisco and tried to communicate that it was where I came from. Finally I pulled out some pictures of my family and asked if I could take a picture of his family to bring home to show to my family.
His eyes lit up, and he called out something, and presently his family appeared—wife, teenage daughter, one baby, second baby, mother-in-law—peering out from inside the house. I asked if I could take their picture—not being able to take pictures of women had been one of the great frustrations of the trip—and he enthusiastically motioned me into the house.
It was too dark and I didn’t have a flash, but I did have a chance to see the inside of a traditional Hunza house: We entered into the living room, which had a carpet and window at one end, a door leading into what I took to be a bedroom in another wall, a fireplace in the wall opposite the carpet and a hole in the ceiling above the fireplace, the perimeter of which had been blackened by smoke. Curtains of some rough cloth framed the window, but otherwise there was almost no ornamentation, nothing on the walls and no furniture save for one low chair.
After I had taken a photo inside, I asked if I might take their picture outside as well. They posed patiently and sweetly—the babies taking turns crying, drooling, and cooing—and when we had finished, the carpenter said something, and after a few minutes his elder daughter brought a plastic bag bulging with dried apricots and kernels.
These are for your family, he said, pointing to my pictures. I thanked him as profusely as I could, and handed him two of the San Francisco postcards I had brought. Please hang these on your wall, I said. He said thank you, then asked to have one of the pictures of my family as well. I hesitated—I didn’t know what situation might arise where I would need those precious pictures—but he was so kind and friendly and I was so moved, I relented and gave him his choice.
He chose a Christmas picture of us standing in front of a brightly decorated tree and told me that he would hang it proudly on his wall between the two postcards of San Francisco. He then clasped my hand warmly and said two words that I later found out meant “family” and “brothers.”
Now, half a world away, I think of that singular encounter and a whole gallery of images comes to life within me: the sword-wielding shopkeeper in Swat, the immortal mountains, the shaman’s frenzied dance.
I wonder if someday my daughter will journey to Hunza and find that same carpenter’s house, and our photograph still on that rough wall. And I think that time flows backward and forward, and that once in a rare while—if you are lucky and it is cloudy enough to make you see beyond your preconceptions—you stumble onto a connection that transcends it all.
Part Three: The Epic of the KKH
The adventures intensified after our Contac-quaffing, Maalox-munching, cloud-weary group left Hunza for Gulmit and the hot showers and hearty food other travelers said we would find at the Silk Route Lodge. The journey north was uneventful—skitterish rocks and precipitous drops had become commonplace by now—until we reached an avalanche about ten minutes from Gulmit.
The avalanche had buried the road long enough ago that a plow had already cut a corridor through its twenty-foot-deep drifts, but our steel-nerved driver, Ali Muhammad, feared the van would lose traction on the icy path and sit there, sandwiched in the snow, a fat target for a second avalanche.
So Asad Esker, our Pakistani guide, set out on foot for Gulmit to get a tractor that could pull the van through, and Ali backed the van up to a point on the road that looked reasonably secure. And we sat and waited.
Waiting for an avalanche or rockslide to sweep us into oblivion quickly lost its appeal, so after a while I decided to set out on foot for Gulmit, too. There wasn’t much chance of making a wrong turn—the nearest intersection was about four hours away.
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch went my feet, quickly along the snow-plowed path, then slowly when I reached the other side. There, beyond sight of the van, the notion of solitude took on a whole new, almost otherworldly dimension. It was just me and the mountains, and I tried to imagine what the traders and missionaries and adventurers who had wandered this way before me had felt.
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.
If I walk long enough, I thought, I’ll reach the Chinese border. And if I keep walking after that, eventually this same road will take me to Kashgar, where right now wild-eyed mountain men are sizing up camels and crockery, bartering for boots and broadcloth.
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.
This is one of the most remote and desolate places I’ve ever been, I thought. If I were traveling alone, I would probably think I had come to the end of the Earth.
Then I took out my tape recorder and said: “It’s not just that it’s an inhospitable environment—which it certainly is—but also that you sense the forces of nature and time grinding on all around you, and you feel like a grain of sand on the slopes of one of the mountains.”
My voice seemed like an intruder, and I stopped—and listened. The silence was so overpowering, so absolute, that it was almost like a vacuum of sound. Instead of sound, enormous waves of energy emanated from the mountains all around, so strong that I had to sit down.
Perhaps Marco Polo felt these same waves, I thought. Perhaps he called his fellow adventurers to a halt in this very spot, and sat on this very rock, and pondered—just like me—what an insignificant piece he was in the world’s vast puzzle, how easily he could be bent, or lost, or simply worn away.
I walked all the way to the Silk Route Lodge, and the others eventually arrived by jeep and pickup truck. Gulmit’s only tractor had been dispatched that morning to a town near the Chinese border, however, and wasn’t expected back until the following day, so the van remained marooned on the road.
After a revitalizing night at the Silk Route Lodge—where the meals were indeed excellent, although the hot water ran out before I could run into the shower—we returned by jeep to the avalanche and walked through it to our van. Then we rode south for about an hour—until we were stopped by another avalanche. This one had smothered the road like an overturned sack of sugar—a sack of sugar in which each granule was the size of a bowling ball.
This avalanche was so recent that it had not yet been plowed, but somehow the wizardly Asad had heard about it before we left the Silk Route Lodge, and had called his office in Gilgit to request that vans be sent to meet us on the other side of the snow.
We disembarked and hiked up, up, and over the avalanche—and lo and behold, two vans white as angels awaited us. Cries erupted from them at the sight of our group, and porters scurried forward to transport our bags over the avalanche’s hump. We chucked snowballs at each other in celebration.
On the rest of the long and winding road to Gilgit, we passed palaces, poplars, and petroglyphs, waterfalls and meeting halls, stupas and sheep, but for many the most exciting discovery was packets of British biscuits and chocolate cookies at a roadside stall.
After a heartening night at the Serena Lodge in Gilgit—heated rooms, delicious fried chicken, and custard desserts!—we journeyed on to Skardu. As it turned out, the weather began to clear during this all-day drive, and we were treated to spectacular vistas of brilliant snowcapped peaks and deep blue skies, puffy clouds and lush green terraced fields—the Pakistan of the guidebook pictures and tour brochure prose—before the end of the day.
This ride and the following few day trips to nearby villages and lakes afforded me ample opportunity to reflect on the trip, and on some of the complexities and contradictions of northern Pakistan and of adventure travel in general.
On the night before we were to leave Skardu, I tried to sort them out in my notebook:
The most troubling issue on this trip has been the role and presence of women in Pakistan. From the beginning, I have been surprised by how few women were to be seen in public places. Those we do see consciously avoid our gaze, and it is clear that we are not to speak with them or photograph them. By now this has grown into a subtle psychological oppression, a kind of spiritual heaviness; I feel worn down by the rough and rigid masculine energy that seems to pervade Pakistan, unleavened by any feminine softness or flexibility.
This creates special obstacles for women traveling in Pakistan, especially women traveling alone. The complaints I have heard range from the covert—the sense of constantly being on display—to the overt: being jostled or fondled in crowds, glared at in markets, and ignored in offices. “I can’t wait to get out of this country,” one Englishwoman told me in Peshawar.
Certainly women can lessen these problems by dressing like Pakistani women—wearing clothes that cover their arms and legs and scarves on their heads—and by adopting a certain aura of unaggressiveness. But the differences in attitude—and so the potential for problems—still remain.
Another fact that has become apparent is that despite the cost of the trip—more than $4,000 when you include airfare—rough conditions and travel unpredictabilities come with this territory, and so flexibility, tolerance, and good humor are absolutely essential.
Money does not buy certainty or guarantee comfort here. What it does buy is access, and that’s why people are willing to spend a hefty portion of their salaries—to go places they would have great difficulty going on their own.
The situation becomes especially irritating if you get sick—and so end up paying thousands of dollars to shiver in blankets or shuttle between bed and bathroom in some remote hotel room. Yet the lower standards of hygiene and foreign foods and germs you inevitably encounter on such a trip make sickness an inherent possibility.
And finally there’s the issue of mortality: I risk death every time I cross a San Francisco street or drive on a California freeway, I know, but the possibility of death by accident on Interstate 80, say, is familiar and so easier to ignore than the possibility of death by avalanche on the KKH.
Rugged, remote trips such as this one put the gift of life in a new perspective, and I guess that’s what it all comes down to: Every day in our lives presents dangers of one kind or another; some we challenge because they are expedient, others because we judge that the rewards merit the risks.
This last notation took on new meaning two days later, when we sat around a table in the troubled town of Chilas debating what to do.
We had driven to Chilas the day before from Skardu, after learning that the Skardu-to-Islamabad flight would not operate that morning. Heavy rains had been falling for at least forty-eight hours, loosening the rocks above the highway and increasing the possibilities of avalanche or flood.
If we risked the road, we could reach Islamabad by midnight, giving us a full day to recuperate before the thirty-two-hour journey back to the United States. If we waited in Chilas, the rain might let up, allowing us to drive more safely straight to the airport the following day.
Tom Cole said he thought we should stay in Chilas. Asad said he thought it would be all right to go.
Rain pattered on the roof, and the grimy light of a cloud-covered dawn smudged the windows. If we didn’t risk the road and the rains continued, we faced the distinct possibility of missing our plane in Islamabad and being stuck there for three days until the next scheduled flight—if we could get seats on that flight.
We thought of appointments and commitments, dangers and delusions, imponderables and percentages—and, most of all, loved ones anxiously awaiting our return. We looked at each other long moments and then, as if with one voice, said, “Let’s go.”
I have felt fear at various times in my life, but almost never as palpably and deeply as I did that morning. It sat round and heavy, a lead ball, in my stomach.
The van was silent as we drove slowly down the rain-slicked road out of Chilas. A coppery dryness parched my mouth, and for a while I had to grip the van seat to keep my hands from trembling. I wondered if there would be even a second of realization before the avalanche came, or if it would arrive in a cloud of instantaneous obliteration. I wondered if a search party would be able to identify our remains. I wondered why I had ever put myself in this stupid situation in the first place.
After some time, to take my mind off the slippery slopes, I took out my notebook and wrote:
We left at 5:30 so that we could get into Rawalpindi before nightfall or shortly thereafter. Now we have been bumping along through the morning mists for about a half-hour. We have not seen one other car or truck, and that is spooky.
The possibility of death by landslide is in the air, and the reality of the KKH hits home—it is not something to be trifled with. We are in an elongated life-or-death situation with no way of pinpointing if or when the life-or-death moment will strike. If we get through without incident, this will seem like so much groundless worry. If not, well. . . . Let us hope that at some point in the future I will look back at these notes and smile at the memory.
After about two hours the mists began to lift, and our spirits with them. A kind of exhilaration began to take hold, a feeling of exploring a world no one had seen before us. We were trailblazing, opening up the KKH. Adventuring!
Once again we began to exclaim at the vistas and peaks, at the trim stone houses and rock-bordered emerald terraces. The crescendo came at 8:07 a.m., when a red bus with “Rawalpindi” written on the front passed us going in the opposite direction. Cheers broke out in the van—the road was open!
From this point on, it was all downhill, so to speak. The sun shone, the peaks glistened, the clouds puffed, the road dried—occasionally waterfalls coursed across the pavement or we bumped over great gaping stretches where the road had been washed away, but these were trifles, good photo opportunities, footnotes to the epic of the KKH.
Morning slid giddily into afternoon, and at some point I took out my notebook and wrote:
Three weeks ago Pakistan meant nothing to you. And now it is all around you. Pakistan is burros burdened with fodder and wood; it is lush green fields dotted with big blossoms of color that, as you get closer, turn out to be women in red, green, purple, or blue robes. It is children with dark hair and big shining eyes who smile and wave and cry out, “Bye-bye, bye-bye,” and weathered men in white caps and dun-colored blankets, their stares like skewers until you smile and wave—and their wrinkles crease into smiles and they raise their hands in stately salute.
Pakistan is a string of camels plodding down the highway; young men in spattered shalwar kameez playing cricket in the rain. It is women washing their clothes in a river, and naked children playing jacks in the mud nearby. It is tiny, musty shops crammed with old artifacts and new handicrafts; open-air stalls selling oranges and dates, carpets and cloth, jewelry, spices, guns. It is painted trucks, horse-drawn carriages, battered bicycles, mountain palaces, and muddy refugee camps. It is white clouds and gray clouds; green fields and snowy meadows; dusty plains and snowcapped peaks; pearly mist and blue sky. It is all Pakistan. Pakistan!
I put down my pen and thought: Little did I know, three weeks ago, that I was beginning a journey that would have no end.