DISPATCHES

Mazur

I had been climbing up and skiing down the volcano of St. Helens, back in the states in May, when the hinge bolt had popped out. Well, it was a bit of a laugh being down at the spares shop, and showing them my boot, and trying to explain in my less-than ample Urdu and sign language. After we located the parts, then we had to find a machinist with a grinder because the bolt head had to be lowered, lest it carve a bloody, ragged hole through the boot liner and into my anklebone.

Finally we were on the bus and rolling out of Gilgit town. Suddenly, I remembered to stop and leave a message at the JSR hotel for Walter Frehner, who we assumed would be arriving in Gilgit very soon. Our plan was to cross together into China on June 9th.

Well, our bus trundled up the beautiful Gilgit valley and into the district of Hunza. The people's faces changed and some of them came to look quite Macedonian, or even Tyrolean. The place had a sort of alpine air about it, and there were loads of uniformed school kids about, swinging their book bags, singing, chattering.

Abdul Hamid, with some protestation, guided our bus up into the town of Kareemabad. We drove all the way up to the palace of the Mir of Hunza, a grand affair, complete with a large croquet/boules pitch. I had stayed in the palace in 1998 with friends Michel Hedouin, Patricia Peterson, Andrew Dunn, and Bill O'Neill. This time, however, the guard at the hotel explained that the Mir was out for his daily constitutional, and we were not welcome. After some dialogue and more friendly banter, the guard explained that the Mir had built a new hotel, and that we could find our spot in the palace by contacting hotel reception.

So we wheeled our bus back down the hill and found the Mir's hotel, which was actually, newly built at the foot of the palace, down on a trail off the Mir's land, girdled by a switchback in the road to the Altit fortress.

After some discussion with hotel reception, it was determined there were no guests, and that the prices had been lowered substantially due to the slowness of the season. This story had been repeated several times throughout our journey, and I leave it up to the reader as to why the tourist traffic on the Karakoram highway might have been light at this time. Perhaps it was because we were early in June, perhaps because of another reason.

In any case, the upshot of it was, we opted to stay in the hotel, rather than in the palace, mainly due to the issue of hot water. The hotel had it, the palace did not. The palace was a charming place, but the thought of another cold shower was not appealing. And besides, this would most likely be our last hot shower before returning once again to Pakistan, after climbing our mountain.

Walter Keller and I set up the electronics equipment, Lakpa slept, and Kzryzstof and Chris went for a walk up to the fort. Chris was sick, and looking quite pale. I asked him if he needed any medication, but he swore off it, saying that he was against taking any medicine of any kind. They returned from their trek in the evening in time for dinner. Chris went directly to bed, and it was just Krzysztof, Walter Keller, and Lakpa and I at dinner. It was the usual very ordinary dinner of Dal, rice, vegetable, and Chapathi. Walter and I stayed up late that evening, sending transmissions, and trying to understand how to make his digital camera work.

The next morning, June 8th, we were up early, and I was again out on the patio, working on the computer equipment. I had discovered a blockage in my email box. Someone who I did not know had sent me a picture of his dog on top of a 4000-meter rock pile in North America. Apparently, judging by the kilobyte-size of the file, this photo must have been about nine miles wide by six miles high. Now, every time I tried to read my email, the computer would crash, and it was frustrating to say the least. We finally did get past the problem, although it took some clever maneuvering on the part of our tech department out here in the field. We enjoyed the superb view from the hotel's veranda for the final time, then boarded our bus for the last drive up to Sust, the end of the road in Pakistan for us.

It was sad to be leaving the region of Hunza, and the town of Kareemabad, with such a marvelous charm, and ever-sweeping views of Rakaposhi, Bubli-Mintang, etc. Although, I must say, Chris, who had been ill just outside the Altit fort at the top of the town, said, perhaps not in full irony, that "...it was a great place to vomit in."

We tooled into Sust the afternoon of June 8th, after getting a few flat tires. The bus was laboring a bit, and the driver decided he should fix it for our next day's journey up and over the 4700-meter Khunjerab Pass. So we rolled through town, making a beeline for our hotel.

Sost was really a god-awful place, a gravel pan, situated in the bottom of a deep valley. The old town was a bit more pleasant, a rural village of the Wakhi people, upon the western slope, above the new town. New Sust was more of a cluster of half-finished warehouses...horrible little garage door-fronted shops selling all manner of Chinese imported rubbish (like socks you could blow a hole in if you used them for a handkerchief, wrenches that were so badly casted that no two were exactly alike). A few tourist hotels lined the road, and, as our bus rushed past, the pajama-clad Pakistani proprietors fell over themselves running out into the road, waving us down, and shouting for us to stop and stay. Instead we proceeded to a hotel which we had been using for many years. It was a comfortable place with a pleasant architecture, and somewhat green grounds surrounding it.

After dark, Sost became a sort of wild frontier town and really lived up to its geographic identity as a border town. The power went off frequently, perhaps 20 minutes out of each three hours, and there was no moon, so the entire place would plunge into a deep, inky black, like someone throwing a blanket over a bird cage. I am never one to trifle with the structures of justice in this part of the world, but it seemed as if the locals might have been tempted by their proximity to perhaps the largest whiskey producing nation in the world, and had proceeded to imbibe that horrid Chinese window cleaning solvent known as "buy-joe." Little campfires were burning in alleys, people shouted, a Michael Jackson tape was playing on a scratchy cassette player, men were dancing, tripping over their pajamas, an angry grunt, a scuffle in the broken bricks of half-constructed trader's quarters, the ringing sound of metal on metal, a moan coming from a swollen cheek pushed into cold, hard concrete.

The morning of June 9th found us up early, ready to clear the Pakistan border formalities, cross the pass, and to finally enter China. We had met a Danish family in our hotel, and we had invited them to join us for our journey into China, mainly based on the fact that they had a lovely 22-year-old daughter who had clean brown hair, an appealing figure beneath layered brown tourist clothing, a rakish haircut, cherub face, and smoked horrible, unfiltered galois, with a daring, devil-may-care attitude.

We climbed aboard our bus and Abdul Hamid, who had spent the entire last day trying to get the tires fixed and the engine tuned, and had been test driving the bus by tearing up and down the main street of Sust, proudly wheeled his newly calibrated machine the 200 metres through the locked iron gate and into the Pakistani customs and immigration compound. It was 9am, and there were the vehicles of other groups of tourists and Pakistanis who wished to go to China in there. After about 40 minutes, a few uniformed officials appeared, carrying dog-eared note books and cups of tea, and then sat down at open air desks in the middle of the compound, which was really just an open field strewn with crudely crushed rock and surrounded by a few dilapidated walls of rubble. There was a cursory look at our bus, stuffed with luggage, and a request to see our "packing list" for our now more than 40 bags. When I was unable to produce such a list, they flipped over a customs document, and asked that I write on the opposite side: "40 bags containing personal effects only, no illegal contraband." I duly signed my name and dated it, and the sheet was shoved into an already looking-to-burst folder (likely to be fed to some goat one day soon).

The immigration exit visa procedure was slightly more formal, with each passport being checked that it did indeed contain a Pakistani visa. During the process, the iron gates screeched open, and a shiny new bus roared in. The doors popped open, and a gaggle of 60-year-old men and women hurled forth from the gaping bus steps. They were babbling in a European language (which I will not mention, but I can say that their behaviour was despicable, and their clothing was immaculate). They were more dressed for a day of bird watching on the fells than for a rough crossing of the Khunjerab Pass. They pushed and shoved their way to the front of the line, and, when I objected, one of them said in a heavy accent: "We are here before you, so please move out of zee way."

They obviously weren't there before us. I raised my arm to club the man to his knees, then kick the teeth out of his head like a soccer ball, and grind mud into his shirt, and yank the gold chain from around his neck, pulling out a handful of grey hairs from his chest in the process. However, I came to my senses when I saw the look of warning in the immigration officer's eyes, and I also noticed that the immigration officer was shunting aside the little man's passport, and working on ours instead. Besides, the little man was only 1.6 meters tall, and he was probably 62. It would have been like having a go at the news agent on the corner.

Eventually, we escaped from customs and immigration, and were on our way. However, we had a new driver, Mr. Walid Shah. He was a much more stylish character than our old reliable Abdul Hamid. Walid Shah had some fairly classy pajamas, and Ari Onassis sunglasses. Abdul Hamid, who's assigned bus we were in, took the co-pilot seat, and we carried on up toward the Khunjerab Pass.

— Dan Mazur, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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