The Adventure of a Lifetime: Part One
“I wasn’t thinking about death-by-avalanche when I signed up for the trip. I only knew that I felt impelled to do it – I wanted an adventure. And an adventure is what I got.”
WE SAT AROUND the table in the dawn-lit dining room at the Shangri-La Hotel in Chilas, Pakistan, a decidedly unparadisaical 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 48 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 32-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’S HOW I began my account, published in the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle in 1990, describing the first trip I ever took with Geographic Expeditions: an adventurous journey up the Karakoram Highway from Islamabad to the Chinese border.
As that moment in Chilas encapsulates, this adventure trip really was an adventure. During our three weeks on the road, avalanches and rockslides closed numerous sections of the highway – at one point we were marooned between avalanches — and political unrest was erupting. Adventure travel is an exciting concept when you’re contemplating it in the comfort of your living room; it’s entirely different when you’re living it in a ragged dawn dining room, weighing the possibilities of death-by-avalanche.
But of course I wasn’t thinking about death-by-avalanche when I signed up for the trip. I didn’t know what to expect; I only knew that I felt impelled to do it – I wanted an adventure. And an adventure is what I got.
IT ALL BEGAN with a 27-hour journey from San Francisco to Islamabad International via New York, Paris, and Frankfurt. From there our group overnighted in Rawalpindi, then flew to Peshawar, where we made a couple of forays, one southeast to the gun-selling center of Darra Adam Khel and another northwest to the legendary Khyber Pass. On the latter, at one memorable moment, Asad stopped our van, pointed to the ribboning road we had just traveled and said, “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 in the 19th century.”
As we drove we passed the remains of a Buddhist stupa, and tank barriers built by the British during World War II; we saw brown, baked tribal settlements and Afghan refugee camps; trucks laden with wood, metal drums of fuel, tires; pedestrians and goats and cows; buses bulging with passengers; and pickup trucks bearing grizzled men with rifles slung over their shoulders. Like the dust that clung to our mouths and coated our clothes, we were covered in history, from ancient times to tomorrow’s headlines.
The next day we set out for the Swat Valley and Saidu Sharif, ancient capital of the Kingdom of Swat. Because of rains that pounded incessantly, we spent our day and a half in Swat shopping. I’m normally not a passionate shopper, but in a bedraggled hamlet called Kwazakhela, our shop-hopping produced an unexpected souvenir.
There, in a dark, dingy closet of a shop, maybe 8 feet deep by 5 feet wide, we discovered a wooden and leather arrow quiver, with the arrows still inside; both the shopowner and Asad said they were 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. 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, leather disc – about as big as a woman’s floppy Sunday hat – the only thing between him and death. The shopowner 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.
Later that day, at a fraying, frontier-feeling truck stop called Besham, Tom Cole, who proved a fount of information and inspiration throughout the trip, announced that we were now traveling along the Karakoram Highway proper, “one of man’s most magnificent and stupefying feats of engineering and endurance.” The two-lane, 730-mile highway took 20 years to complete, he said. Some 15,000 Pakistanis and from 9,000 to 20,000 Chinese were employed on the project at any one time, dynamiting and digging the trail out of the mountains.
From that point on we wound through as wild and uncompromising a landscape as I had ever seen, the highway a filament of pavement that nature could reclaim at any moment. Asad and our driver, Ali Muhammad, kept vigilant watch for rockslides and mudslides and for places where the rains had simply washed the road away. Whenever we reached one of these, Ali would gingerly prod and caress our van over the muddy, slippery, rock-strewn rubble-road – as we strained not to look out the window all the way down to the gray-green squiggle of the Indus River far below.
In Part Two: An unforgettable encounter in idyllic Hunza
#####For information about Geographic Expeditions’ more than 150 journeys around the world, visit the company’s website.
