DISPATCHES

Mazur

In the evening, the people at the Mountaineering Association became so frustrated with us they asked that we stop working long enough to go to a banquet. They wanted to to take us to racy bars and have us fall in love with beautiful Chinese women. But, we were under a schedule to proceed to Pakistan and Tibet, for we had planes to meet, and more mountains to climb. So, after a banquet with 12 dishes, we had to part company.

Jon, Anne and Yang headed to Urumqi, and Walter, Lakpa and I set off in the car again, back the way we came to cross the Khunjerab Pass into Pakistan. I toasted our driver, who attended our banquet but did not drink. I jokingly said that I would be the one who drove (at that point I had, I must admit, slipped a wee bit into my own cups).

Finally, after a trip to the hotel to round up the final baggage and write a few notes, we were headed south to Pakistan at 1am. The trip went smoothly for a few hours, and I caught a cat nap in the back seat, while Lakpa crashed in the front by the driver. Walter assumed an uncomfortable-looking perch atop the bags in the rear of the car.

I awoke later on when I noticed the car jerking a bit from side to side and detected the driver was falling asleep. Lakpa and I switched, and I was now in the front to be near the driver and monitor his wakefulness. At one point, we switched, and I drove, but that didn't last long, as I wasn't supposed to be driving anyway. Then the terror began.

The driver began to nod off, and the car would swerve wildly, then I would grab the wheel and pull us back onto the road. The situation deteriorated, until his head would drop onto his chest, and his arms would pull the wheel viciously, and I would try to wrestle it away from him. He still refused to let me drive. We were on a windy steep-sided mountain road, and I figured we had several hours to go, because our average speed was now dropping toward 30 kilometers per hour.

I began to count the mile markers and became extra alert, as there were all manner of stones and hazards to hit in the road, including men carrying shovels toward the dawn.

As the day broke, imagine how ludicrous our situation must have seemed, with me nervously steering 40% of the time, and the driver passed out about 35%. I looked over at him and he was a zombie, half-lidded eyes, arms twitching wildly, slumping down into his seat—not a pretty sight.

Finally, oh, finally, Tashkergan rolled onto the horizon, and we wheeled creakily (the springs were about shot) into the bus station. We parked in front of the gate, the driver passed out, and I sat on a wooden bus station bench, ever so grateful for small miracles. The gods had let us live this time.

The driver finally awoke with a crowd of people, vehicles, peddlers, and pushcarts oblivious to this sleeping man in the idling car.

Nevertheless, around 10am, he finally came to life, and we got our bus tickets. We loaded our nine bags into the bus, shook hands with our sleepy driver, and said our good-byes, now having forgiven all, and the bus took us over to the customs yard.

The customs man, in his white captain's hat and smart blue uniform, seemed to see us coming from a long way and motioned us and our luggage to the side. In the meantime, he carefully checked all of our Pakistani-trader companions' bags of shovels, boots and cassette players through the customs clearance-exiting procedure.

Finally he came around to us and he asked us who we were, and we said "mountain climbers." He raised a finger in a special awareness and disappeared into the office to find a form. He came out carrying a declaration that we had signed on June 10th, when we had entered Pakistan as a group of five. Now we were three and didn't have with us all of those items. He wouldn't hear any of it and insisted on seeing the items, especially four walkie-talkie radios, which had, by the way, gone to Lhasa with Jon.

Now, we could not do much to produce the radios from thin air, so we tried to tell him that others had taken the radios out ahead, but again, he wouldn't hear any of it. Walter tried to reason with him and talk nicely and clearly, and this seemed to soften him up a bit. But I went outside and watched our Pakistani co-passengers loading their goods on the bus and realized we didn't have much time, so I set out to try and find our driver.

I hopped in the nearest moving car headed toward town and shoved a handful of bills into the surprised drivers pocket. I started shouting out names of buildings I knew, and we did the rounds through town, trying to track him down.

He wasn't in the the Pamir Hotel or the Ice Mountain Hotel, he wasn't in the bus station or the Traffic Hotel. We started to return to customs, and I began to feel very dejected. And the driver of this jeep was getting ever more pissed off with me, when it occurred to me to check the gas station. That we did, and there was our driver, only the car was now filled with a Kirghiz extended family, all getting a ride back to their village.

I explained our customs problem to the sleepy (now awake-ish) driver, and I felt guilty that the family was immediately out hitchhiking because the driver was turned back to customs, with me in the car.

Throughout the rest of the day, our sleepy driver and Walter discussed our predicament with the customs man, and I think there was a bit of difficulty in knowing whose story to believe. But after a whole series of phone calls in Chinese to Kashgar, it was determined that a massive deposit would be paid, and the radios would be allowed to continue through Tibet and then the ransom returned at the the other end, by some other customs people.

It would seem that items brought into China have to be brought out, and if they are not, the tourist may have difficulty leaving the country. Walter put it well: it may be better to exit from a different border post than one entered from.

Well, suddenly they cleared us through the post in five minutes, and we boarded the bus 10 minutes after it was due to leave. Our fellow passengers hardly gave a grumble when we filled their aisles with all our luggage, except for one lady whose giant soy sauce can got a hole in it, and she had to hold it upside down beside her seat till the end of the journey... very sorry.

We came to Pakistan customs after a bumpy six hours, and they stamped our passports and smiled and said, looking at my burned lips, "You climbed Mustagh Ata, yes?"

We all had a good laugh at that, and they waved us through customs, too busy dealing with how much duty to charge all of the traders, with their bags of gardening tools, rubber shoes and cassette players.

— Dan Mazur, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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