DISPATCHES

Mazur

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I am going to roll back the clock now to June 5th, when we we left Rawalpindi. Three members, Chris Zimmer, Conrad, and Krzysztof Berbeka, arrived very early in the morning, and Lakpa, after picking them up at the airport, decided he would remain crashed in bed while they roamed the smoldering streets of Rawalpindi.

I had arranged our own privately hired 19-seat bus to pick us up at the hotel at noon. So there was time to take care of last-minute shopping and arrangements, like hiking over to the public call office to make that final callback to the loved ones at home.

As I mentioned earlier, Walter Frehner's luggage had not arrived and he was still out at the airport trying to retrieve it. Knowing that we had a very tight schedule to keep, I told him that he should wait one day, then take the public bus and catch up to us in Gilgit.

Andy Hilton, as I noted before, failed to materialize and it turned out he was busy with some of his qualifying exams. This was to be a major disappointment for us on the new route, as Andy is highly-skilled technically, in addition to be being a superb high-altitude climber.

Well, before setting off I worked together with the other team members and completed sorting and locking our now 26 bags, together with Walter Keller and Krzyzstof Berbeka.

Walter Frehner returned from the airport with no luggage, looking incredibly dejected. He started blaming the airlines, and I bit my lip, imagining what the people in London must be thinking, with his bags and skis in a heap on the floor, with the passenger, having abandoned them and boarded a plane days before. I encouraged Walter to stay with us, but he resisted, saying he thought his bags would arrive the following day. So he would catch the public bus and meet us in Gilgit in several days. I went to my room to fetch Walter Frehner a guidebook to ease his journey up the Karakoram Highway, but when I returned, he had apparently already departed in a taxi to visit the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad. I wondered if I would ever see Walter Frehner again.

Before we left, my next task was to go over to the chemist's shop and purchase our medical kit for the expedition. I have been using the same chemist shop near to our hotel for the last 10 years.

By now they knew my routine: I would point to a place on my body, and say "heavy" and "light." In this way, I was able to purchase every kind of medicine and a modicum of medical instruments to treat nearly any disease to which a team member might succumb. Our kit contained mild, symptom-reducing drugs, as well as more powerful curative drugs. Nearly everything is sold over-the-counter without a prescription in Asia, and the cost is less than one-tenth of what it would be at home in the West.

Simple as it might sound, the process of purchasing our medical kit took quite some time, as there was a crowd of gaping onlookers and legitimate customers, each coming in to buy their two aspirin, or whatever their doctor ordered. By the time the purchasing was finished, I had accumulated a huge box of medications and medical instruments, as well as a six page bill.

Finally, preparations were completed and our bus was loaded and parked under a shade tree, just down the road from our hotel. We ate a quick lunch in the hotel dining room before climbing aboard for our journey up the Silk Road into the higher reaches of Pakistan and into the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Our bus churned across dusty fields of short grass, dotted with skinny cattle. We crossed through salt hills and channeled through the smoking brick kilns and baked, bitter, brown earth. We passed Taxila, site of the 3000-year-old Moenjodaro civilization. As we rolled around a curve, Walter Keller crawled out the bus window to the roof for a better view.

Our bus wound through the chicken farms of Swat and into the Indus foothills. Long, open valleys with the bubbling, gray Indus River welcomed us into Kohistan, land of the ungoverned. We came to our resting point, the town of Besham.

Besham is in the Pathan area, and the people speak Pushto. Our driver, Abdul Hamid, who had up to now been filled with a banter of pidgin, English-Urdu guy-talk, suddenly became quiet. He was Gilgiti by origin, and staying with some of the enemy tribes did not appeal to him. Nevertheless, we pulled aside at the Abasin Hotel, a grand pile of concrete high over a bluff where the simple rooms and grand-arched verandas overlooked the great Indus Valley.

Our host greeted us with a great deal of aplomb and confusion; I noted that his English had not improved much over the 10 years we had been staying with him. However, to his credit, my Urdu had not improved either. I also noted that his son was older now and carried a larger pistol strung around his neck.

The father and pistol-toting son prepared us a fine dal and milk tea, and we crawled into our cotton sheets and slept well, beneath the whirling ceiling fans, happy to be away from Rawalpindi.

The morning of June 6th was clear and warm and we piled aboard our bus, it rolled on through the windy gorges of Kohistan in the Indus Valley, and we trickled through the little towns in our little Japanese bus. The kids sprang out from behind boulders with plates of apricots, screaming, "Das rupees, das rupees!"

Hamid shouted back, "Ten rupees, too much. Panch rupees!" And there we went, through the orchards and boulder fields, beneath the roaring falls of the Indus tributaries. We passed checkposts where everyone piled out and filled out little boxes in little books (passport number: k32567lt89; home address: Krakow, Poland; occupation: astronaut) Astronaut?! Ah well, a little fun amidst the boredom.

I noted the mood at these checkposts had changed greatly since our first visits in the early '90s. There were no longer any military or uniformed personnel. In fact, it all seemed to be a rather civilian affair now.

Morning rolled into midday, and we tumbled into the horrible little town of Chilas. We ate a delicious lunch of pulao, subzi, dal, ladyfingers, and chapathi, in a fly-infested driver's cafe overlooking grand and mysterious views of a cloud-obscured Nanga Parbat. Chilas claims to be the hottest town in Pakistan, but in a country that is two-thirds desert, this is not a unique claim. Just as Eagle River, Wisconsin, my childhood winter-holiday town, claimed to be the "Snowmobile Capital of the World." It was certainly at the time, and surely remains, unsubstantiated.

I must be honest and say that my lack of love for Chilas is biased. I mean, come on, the place does have a unique type of flying squirrel (we met a researcher here in 1998 who asked climbers to join him in rappelling down cliffs in a quest for samples from the nests of these apparently ferocious and sharp-clawed little beasts). And Chilas does have some of the oldest pre-Buddhist carvings visible in the area.

But my love for Chilas has not been growing rapidly — just the opposite in fact. I was bitten by bed bugs here in 1992 and got sick in a restaurant here in 1993. Then, in my mind, the town's fate was sealed in 1998 when my friend, Patricia Peterson, stuck her hand into the spinning ceiling fan in the restaurant and blood sprayed around the room. Then Michel Hedouin drank a bottle of dirty, unsealed mineral water and proceeded to become violently ill. Also, we were taken to help a half-paralyzed man who laid near-dead on a cot in tiny cell below the kitchen. We found him with a fast and shallow pulse and he said he hadn't urinated for three days, so we tried to give him some rehydrating salts in a glass of clean, iodine-sterilized water. He reached under the bed and produced some filthy intravenous feeding bags, complete with tubes and bloody needles. He showed us his arms with needle tracks inside each elbow. He then mentioned that his doctor would be back in 20 minutes, and we should speak then. We waited for one hour before we finally left, feeling that the medical attention he was receiving was far in advance of anything we could offer. Ah, Chilas!

Our love for Chilas abated as we pulled out and continued up the Karakoram Highway in the boiling heat. We passed the junction to the road to Skardu, the turnoff to K2, the Gasherbrums, Broad Peak, Trango Towers and other old friends.

We tumbled into the hustle and bustle of Gilgit town. Pajama-clad, bearded, and almost Italian-looking men scurried to get out of the way. There were even a few girls walking along the streets carrying bags of books on their way home from school. Our driver wanted to drop us at the posh new hotel in town, but instead we chose the winter palace of an ancient prince in old district of the town.

When I went inside to inspect the room, the antiquarian, geriatric prince himself was crashed out in one of the beds. The hotel keeper explained who the bedridden man was and said that the elderly gentleman would move to the new wing of the hotel. I protested, but the hotel keeper said that this was his only room for a group our size. He explained that the elderly gentleman was called "Mir of Nagar," and he used to get drunk and pass out in this room, which used to be his bedroom when he still had enough money and didn't have to sell rooms in his castle. It took them an hour to clean up the room and change all the bedding, but the old palace had lovely grounds, and we relaxed in chaise lounges all the while.

The owner, who looked as if he was from Italy or Greece (it is claimed that Alexander the Great's army stopped here for several years), said he would prepare us a sumptuous Western meal including peas and Spaghetti Putanesca. We threw ourselves upon his culinary mercy. The meal was one of the worst ever, lacking certainly for oregano, but even for a hint of salt. The old maxim, "never order quiche in Quetta," certainly was put into play in this case. Nevertheless, the evening was pleasantly clear and cool. We piled into our clean sheets in the old castle, beneath a starry sky, amidst the chirping of crickets, and I dreamed of carriages and old troops of Hussars.

— Dan Mazur, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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