CYCLING WITH THE TALIBAN

Out of the blue Roger dropped a bombshell. It stopped me in my tracks.

“How do fancy doing a long cycle ride?”

We were trudging through the Fish River Canyon in temperatures so high that even the lizards had ducked for cover. Roger’s question didn’t sink in at the time as I was frazzled with dehydration and battling severe heat fatigue.

I was more concerned about the painful blisters on my left foot. I told him I’d think about it. What did he mean by long? We trudged on for another couple of hours and reached our overnight camp spot in the gathering gloom.

Dinner wasn’t (even if you had a vivid imagination) a culinary masterpiece. A bottle of chilled Chardonnay wouldn’t have gone amiss but space in our back packs was at a premium on our five – day hike. We made do with baked beans and rice.

I poked at the glowing embers of the campfire and mulled over the idea of doing a marathon cycle. When I got around to discussing it with Roger he’d moved on – forgotten about it.

Over the next few weeks I began to toss a few ideas around in my mind. I was clear on one thing – if physical pain was involved I preferred to suffer in some exotic locale – somewhere with street credibility. It would have to relegate Roger’s cycle from Hanoi to Saigon to the nursery school league. After all Vietnam on a bike was a piece of piss. Far too easy.

Months later I was tagging along behind my wife who was enthusiastically hunting for a wedding outfit and I was doing my best to show her how much I enjoyed feeling and touching the fabric. I recall making some sort of lame excuse before ducking into a bookstore.

I made a beeline for the travel section and stood paging through books about rugged adventurers that had survived blowpipe attacks, amputated six of their own toes after frostbite, eaten live scorpions, survived every disease known to man and shacked up with an Amazonian Indian girl for a year. My eye was drawn to a coffee table volume on China. I picked it up and began idly paging through it. Soon I was engrossed in an epic story about a heroic 5^th century explorer named Faa Sien.

I was in awe of Faa Sien’s exploits and inspired by his long hard slog through the Karakoram Mountains. Trouble was, at first glance, he didn’t appear to have found any good hotels.

I only had a vague idea where his peregrinations had led him, I just knew that it was somewhere in Central Asia.   One thing I was sure about – it was desolate, remote and rugged – ideal for a cycle ride. I was pretty sure that I could sort out the trivial details of the geography and work on the logistics later. I was excited at my discovery and my imagination ran riot – fired by his odyssey, not least because it was laced with hardship and suffering!

The thrust of the story, without giving too much away, was that the Emperor of China summoned Faa Sien and hit him with one of those “Do you want the good news or the bad news” type of offers – it was more of an order really. Obviously I can’t vouch for his exact words or whether he really said,

“I have good news and bad news” but essence of his request was something like this.

“I’ve assigned two thousand fit, strong young men to be under your command. You will leave for India – let’s say within the next week or two”. “I believe that there are beautiful Buddhist scriptures floating around and if you don’t have any pressing engagements I’d like you to put a couple of years aside to nip down there and bring back a few for my collection”.

“It is uncharted territory, Faa Sien, there are impassable mountain – ranges and raging rivers. Your men will endure incredible hardship but I have absolute confidence in you”. “Now, do you have any questions?” “Maps?   You must be joking; nobody I know has ever come back”

I filed the rough details of Faa Sien’s exploits in the dark recesses of my mind and didn’t give them a second thought until I met a cyclist named Growler.

I was on a bus winding through the highlands of Laos. I was squashed between a dozen chickens and a sack of rice when I spotted him. Our bus almost knocked him into a deep abyss. Growler was on his bike and was heading towards Beijing.

We met for a beer in Vang Vieng later that evening.   Without hesitation, Growler said that the Karakoram was the big one. I still wasn’t exactly sure where it was, but I recalled that Faa Sien had been there 1500 years before. I stuck Growler’s advice in my memory bank.

Months later I said to Roger. ”How do you fancy cycling the Karakoram Highway?” I could have bet my life savings on his response.

“Where the hell’s that?”

ooooooooooooooo

I wasn’t sorry to be getting out of Johannesburg. I needed to forget the gloomy news bulletins spewing out non – stop accounts of brutal crime, violent rapes, political – infighting and government corruption. It was almost as if the newsreaders were saying, “I told you the country would go to the dogs when the ANC took charge”

From the air the shimmering swimming pools and rambling gardens of the affluent parts of Johannesburg are in sharp contrast with the squalor of the sprawling shanty – town of Alexandra. You can’t ignore the difference. It makes you feel uncomfortable. People flying over the city mockingly refer to the posh suburbs as the Lake District. They are the “haves”. The “have – nots” live in tin shacks and have runny noses not running water.

The opulent mansions reflect a privileged lifestyle enjoyed by wealthy whites and a few nouveau riche blacks.   It is a place where the chattering classes on the dinner party circuit sip expensive wine from crystal glasses and exchange stories with each other about errant house – maids.   Highflying executives and ladies that “do lunch” politely chit – chat about how lazy their domestic helper has become.

“Man, I tell you my garden boy had the cheek to take a week off to go to the Transkei for his brother’s funeral”

“That’s nothing my boy pitches up fifteen minutes late and still takes an hour for lunch”

While the glitterati gleefully swap horror stories about the latest murder or hi jacking they nod in unison as if to say “This wouldn’t have happened in the old days”. Those living in Alexandra Township are happy to survive from day to day.

Roger interrupted my thoughts.   He sighed contentedly, turned to me and said, “I love it when a plan comes together”.

I downed a beer, plugged in my headphones and slumped into my seat to watch “The Life of Brian” for the tenth time.   While I tried to concentrate on the stoning scene my thoughts drifted to the adventure ahead.   I struggled to tuck my legs behind my ears and fiddled with the pillow until I drifted into a fitful sleep, but seconds later I was wide – awake. In my dream I was sweating up a never–ending hill and my lungs were on the point of exploding.   I woke at the point when I was sent flying into a ditch by a truck!

The six weeks had seen me cycling feverishly around suburban Johannesburg in a vain effort to simulate a 2000 – kilometer bike expedition.   My somewhat unscientific efforts represented a pathetic attempt to prepare for a ride from Islamabad in northern Pakistan to Kashgar on China’s ancient Silk Route.   I hadn’t felt so ill prepared since I was thirteen and doing some last minute cramming for a Latin exam.

My panic training, to be honest, was haphazard and I detested slogging up the interminable hills. Every time that I reached home in one piece I mentally ticked off a victory of man over maniacal drivers. Most of my time was spent gasping for breath and I battled onwards and upwards deep in oxygen debt and hating it all. I lost gallons of sweat and discovered that the ache in my thigh muscles was a result of lactic acid build up.   I tried to imagine what it would be like cycling at 5000m in the Karakoram Mountains. Certainly not like the chaotic Johannesburg traffic snarl on a Tuesday morning!

Once or twice I let slip about my proposed ride. Most of my friends were hardened, masochistic endurance athletes and occasionally, (if they were brave enough) diplomatically broached the issue of my fitness. “You’ll struggle” was their most optimistic forecast. They also added in the nicest possible way (and I paraphrase here) “You are too old and overweight!” By about 20kilograms and 30 years – they could have added.

To be honest they were right on all counts. My urban training methods and the real thing couldn’t have been more different. Only the belching diesel fumes and mindless truck drivers offered a taste of what I could look forward to. In the eyes of Pakistani truck drivers cyclists are little more than target practice.

Within an hour of arriving in Pakistan I surmised that Johannesburg isn’t the only place where a driving license can be bought. If you can afford to pay you can get one in ten minutes.

In Pakistan white lines on the road don’t mean a thing. Drivers weave, honk, squeeze, yell, wave, swerve and do anything except brake. An oncoming cyclist is the lowest form of life – if you don’t count pedestrians! My training ground in downtown Johannesburg was well chosen.

I was bullish about tackling the mountains in a gung ho kind of way, but in truth Roger and I didn’t begin to apply ourselves to the detailed logistics of the trip until ten days before departure. The fact that we didn’t possess detailed maps didn’t faze us, after all Faa Sien got by without an A – Z of Asia.   With hindsight it seems easy to criticize us for not being better prepared and I would be the first to agree that we should have thought more carefully about how we’d transport our gear over those mountains.   The sad truth is that we adopted the ostrich approach and so we only had ourselves to blame. Not that it helped.

I almost suffered a hernia as I struggled to heave two huge cardboard boxes on the scales at the check – in desk in Johannesburg. Alarm bells started to ring but I was high on adrenaline and didn’t want to spoil the moment. We kissed our wives, assured them that we’d be safe and promised that we’d remember to change our underpants. I managed to convince myself that everything was under control, but deep down I knew that our packing had been a bit hit and miss!

When we hauled out the photos months later, our more honest mates fell about laughing when they saw our bikes piled high with plastic bags and sugar sacks. The kinder ones coughed politely and compared us with new age travellers. They appeared puzzled about why we had so much rubbish stacked on the rear carriers. I explained as patiently as I could about our dress rehearsal.

A week before we left home we had a trial run.   This involved spreading our equipment on the lawn and cramming it into our cycle bags, but our failure to gather most of the actual items we intended to take with us, led to the partial collapse of the plan.

I remember asking Roger if two pillows were roughly the size of a tent. We assumed that three Cosmopolitan magazines weighed more or less the same as a petrol – stove. If we’d had real cycle bags to pack it would have helped.

We congratulated ourselves on our creativity and improvisational skills although it was all a trifle hit and miss.   We calculated the weight of our load by clutching everything in our arms and standing on a bathroom scale and then deducting our normal body weight.   Normally it would have been fine, but we’d just eaten six blueberry muffins, four bananas and a cheese sandwich so our estimates were screwed up a shade, but we decided that it was close enough.

While I stood waiting for our cardboard boxes to rumble round on the Islamabad airport luggage carousel I couldn’t dispel a nagging feeling of self- doubt. I dragged our gear off to a quiet corner of the arrivals hall.   We attempted to stay calm and not act hastily until we’d taken stock of the situation. When I tried to lift the boxes I was in mild shock. Before leaving home we agreed to strip our gear to the bare essentials. Roger phoned me one evening and asked, “If I take the short sleeve shirt and not the long sleeve one will it save weight?”

Fifteen minutes after we landed in Pakistan the other passengers disappeared in the dead of night pulling their fancy suitcases behind them.   At that unearthly hour nobody else was around except for a handful of bored customs officials and a couple of curious airport sweepers.

During the dress rehearsal we agreed that a bulky sleeping bag would take up half our packing space but we hoped that it would mysteriously shrink. The truth is that we prayed for a miracle.

“We’ll just shove the stuff in and work it out later”, I said in blind hope rather with than any firm conviction. We painstakingly unpacked our tent, stove, clothes, medical supplies, packets of soup and the other assorted bits and pieces. We kidded ourselves that we’d packed everything necessary for a successful expedition.

I knew that real explorers like Scott didn’t take jars of Marmite to the Antarctic but I In spite of my cavalier attitude, it didn’t all “shove in” and we began building a small mountain on the back carrier.   When I questioned Roger during the dry run he confidently assured me that front – carriers were a complete waste of time. This pearl of wisdom was based on a cycling experience in Vietnam where the temperature rarely dips below 25 centigrade and you never need more than a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Our trip was subtly different – more specifically we would be tackling a 4900m pass in the snow. I argued that it was reasonable to assume that the winter jackets and jerseys would come in handy.   For a brief moment we were tempted to donate them to the cleaning staff at the airport!   In Vietnam, Roger didn’t need a tent, or most of the stuff, we were about to ferry through the silent streets of Pakistan’s capital.

It took nearly two hours to squash in, and strap down our mountain of gear. We knew that the way we’d distributed our stuff on the bikes was far from perfect but nevertheless we were hyped up and eager to get going.   We were in high spirits and ready to tackle anything Pakistan could throw at us.   But as we wobbled shakily away from Islamabad airport a deep sense of foreboding swept over me and my legs sent a message to my brain that I was hauling a cement mixer behind my bike!   We were carrying just over 20kg each but it felt like twice as much.

At last we were on our way!   We treated the airport workers to a rousing rendition of Frank Sinatra’s, “My Way” which left the cleaners bemused but it seemed a good call. Twenty minutes later “Strangers in the Night” would have been far more appropriate.

Whilst ferreting through our boxes I had made a couple of worrying discoveries and for a brief moment I fought back a wave of pessimism. I decided that the broken pump would only be a minor setback provided that we didn’t pick up any punctures for 1500km. – highly unlikely, but I tried not to appear too negative at the outset.

At Roger’s urging I’d invested in a new gadget to tell me how far and how fast we’d be going. I suggested that an oxygen mask would be a better place to direct our limited funds, but my sarcasm fell on deaf ears.   Unfortunately the piece of high tech equipment had been ripped from its moorings by some careless loader in transit between Dubai and Islamabad, but I was determined not to allow such a trifling setback to dampen my spirits.

I assumed that it would be obvious which direction to take as we cycled out of the airport gates. I suppose that I expected some sort of road – sign, not elaborate, just something simple like – “Islamabad City Centre” If I thought that things were going to be that easy I was living in a fool’s paradise! There wasn’t a single signpost to be seen!

The twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi are only separated by ten kilometers of tarred road, but in every imaginable way they are different worlds. Islamabad is a squeaky clean enclave where expatriates and multi – national businessmen live in luxury and play tennis at weekends.   Rawalpindi is chaotic and dirty and that’s where real people are engaged in life’s struggle.   We headed for Sadar Bazaar in the heart of old Rawalpindi. People looking for cheap hotel rooms always seem to end up there.

Within ten minutes we were hopelessly lost. “How the fuck will we ever find our way to China?” I asked Roger a trifle petulantly. On reflection maybe this was an over – reaction, but I excused myself.   It was three o’clock in the morning and we’d been travelling non -stop for nearly two days.

A bleary eyed guard was dozing in his hut outside an army barracks but he sat bolt upright as we approached.   Two unshaven infidels in bright trousers waving their arms animatedly and asking directions to Sadar Bazaar in the middle of the night was outside his usual terms of reference. I imagine that the duty guard at The Empire State Building felt the same way when he discovered King Kong crawling up to the nineteenth floor. “Salaam!” he said overcoming his initial amazement and showing how eager he was to help.   With a vague wave of his arm and an expansive, toothless smile he pointed us back in the direction we had just come from!

“You see how nice everyone is,” Roger said.   His generous nature always allows him to see the best side of people even under the most trying circumstances.

“Isn’t it a little early for such a sweeping judgment” I said churlishly, immediately pouring cold water on his enthusiasm.

After three hair raising circuits of the Rawalpindi railway station forecourt, we established that we were in a grubby enough part of the city to begin our search for a suitably cheap hotel.   Nobody else was awake, but as the sky became progressively lighter we could see that the hotels we’d picked out were even more run-down than we thought. Our first choice had raw sewage streaming down the exterior but it still appeared better than the seedy joints either side of it.

We settled on the New Kamran hotel and wondered just how bad the old one had been to necessitate a name change. We chose it because the guidebook had written glowingly about a “pretty garden”. When we saw the rubbish-strewn yard we sensed that the author had been indulging in a little Afghan weed and had stretched the outer edges of poetic license. The railings in the courtyard were quite handy to chain up our bikes and at least we didn’t have to lug them up flights of stairs. Other than that the hotel didn’t have a lot going for it. Except for the two – dollar price tag.

As we unpacked we found goodies and notes secreted away  by our wives. I found a post card showing Garfield the cat saying, “Fuck Off”. The instructions that accompanied the card read, “This is for the truck drivers!” We also uncovered enough chocolate bars to last us for two years but they had melted and taken on their own form and in the stifling heat they steadily oozed out of their wrappers.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Our tasks for the day were, on the face of it, fairly straightforward.   First we’d grab some sleep and then buy a bicycle pump. Neither proved to be a cakewalk.   We were hopelessly jet-lagged and bike shops in the bazaar were thin on the ground. When we eventually located a shop we peered inside at the old clunkers. Most looked like museum pieces.   The hotel manager shook his head and said that he doubted whether we would find the type of pump we were searching for in the whole of Pakistan.

“Let’s get something to eat”. Roger suggested, eager as ever to gloss over our problems. We began our Pakistan culinary romance with naan and channa. It also spelled the end of our gourmet experience. These staple foodstuffs of tandoori bread and a stew of mushy chickpeas formed the foundation of our daily diet for two months.

Mushtaq asked me where I lived.   He provided the perfect chance to launch into a bit of cricket talk. “South Africa – you know Hansie Cronje and Jonty Rhodes” “I hate cricket”, he told me. “Did you see the heavyweight title fight in South Africa between Lennox Lewis and that Muslim boxer Hasim Rahman”?

Out of millions of cricket mad Pakistanis I had stumbled on a boxing fan. Mistakenly I always had it in my head that boxing in Pakistan was about as popular as ice hockey in Angola, but quite clearly I was labouring under a grave misapprehension!

When we returned to the New Kamran we noticed a couple of solid steel cycles propped up against a wall and we were keen to meet the owners. The bikes belonged to Malcolm and Chris a New Zealand couple who’d left London six months before to cycle across Europe and the Middle East.

Suddenly our trip wasn’t the epic adventure we imagined!   Chris was graying and dumpy in sharp contrast to Malcolm who had the lean hard body of a trained athlete. When we talked to him both Roger and I nonchalantly pulled in our stomachs.

Chris was determined to tackle the Karakoram Highway head on and eventually would pedal her way home to Auckland.

“What about the long desert stretch you did from Iran into Pakistan? Did you put your bikes on a bus?” I asked. “We don’t do buses”. Chris said crisply shooting me down in flames. They were carrying a huge amount of equipment but Malcolm had constructed carriers capable of transporting the contents of the average terraced house.   He’d also devised several other nifty adaptations that were beyond my non-mechanical mind.

While I chatted to Chris, Roger squeezed Malcolm for as much technical advice as he could. A parting shot from Chris proved to be the most valuable tip we received on the whole trip.

She said, “A lot of these macho young guys pedal too fast and use very high gears. All that happens is that their knees pop!”

At the time I didn’t have any idea what ”pop,” meant, but it sounded nasty enough to avoid.

Work on the Karakoram Highway began in 1959 and the idea was to of build an all weather road along the Indus Valley to link Gilgit and other isolated villages in the north of the country with rest of Pakistan.

Eight years later the governments of China and Pakistan were busy cozying up and they devised their master plan. They would construct a road connecting Gilgit with Kashgar in China and would announce to the world that their grand vision for the Karakoram Highway would open up a major trading route.

Seven battalions of Pakistani Army Engineers and ten thousand men from the Frontier Works Organization were conscripted to work on the road. They constructed landing strips to airlift thousands of tons of earth – moving machinery into the valleys and at the peak of building there were twenty five thousand people working on the highway. The Chinese tackled a short section in the north of Pakistan and their engineers boasted that it was the most difficult road ever built.

Nearly a hundred bridges were constructed across the river Indus.   Eight million kilos of dynamite were used to blast 30 million cubic meters of earth and rock. Eighty million kilos of cement were needed and more than a thousand trucks were written off during the project.

The official Chinese story was that four hundred workers died during construction and 314 were seriously injured. It was a thinly veiled secret that these numbers represented only the very tip of a very large iceberg.

“What do you feel about us beginning our ride a bit further up the Karakoram Highway?” I asked in hope rather than in the expectation of a positive response.   It was a feeble effort intended to persuade Roger that we could avoid a boring slog through Rawalpindi’s poisonous fumes and grid – locked traffic, but he put his foot down. If nothing else he is a purist.

“We must start at Havlian, that’s where the route begins and I don’t care about how crappy it will be to get out of the city!” he said abruptly closing the subject. So that was it.

We began in Havlian, a small nondescript town about forty kilometers from Rawalpindi.

We wobbled through Sadar Bazaar at daybreak passing inert bodies still slumbering on their charpoys. Others lay swathed in blankets – huddled in shop doorways under tattered awnings – most of them appeared to be dead.

I joined a queue of twenty jostling passengers at the station. The accepted definition of the word queue does not have quite the same meaning in Pakistan; we would probably call it a rugby scrum. Everyone wanted third class tickets.   When I managed to battle my way to the ticket counter a surly booking clerk confronted me. I stood helplessly trying to say “Havlian” with every inflection I could muster until I had exhausted every pronunciation and permutation possible. Once I had been totally humiliated he grudgingly issued me with two tickets.

A baggage office clerk tagged our bikes and assured us that they would be quite safe in the guard’s van. We enlisted the services of a red-jacketed porter who hoisted our luggage onto his head. As I struggled down the platform behind him, Roger grabbed three bags from the porter who smiled craftily.

“What are you doing Roger, he’s a bloody porter”. I said testily.   “Ag I’m just helping him, the stuff is very heavy!” he replied.

There were only a few other passengers in our section of the train. We spread our bags out and enjoyed a makeshift breakfast of melted chocolate. The scenery was featureless and uninteresting and secretly I was glad that we were on the train. Half an hour into the journey a group of adolescent schoolboys boarded and insisted on squeezing up next to us even though the compartment was almost empty. They engaged Roger in an immature joshing conversation that relied heavily on stupid jokes and high pitched giggling. This puerile exchange ended in a free-for-all. I pretended to sleep but the ring – leader jogged my arm to wake me and seemed genuinely surprised that I was pissed off.

We spent an hour on the platform at Havlian deciding how to pack a household load of equipment into two small bags. Our arrival caused a stir and word spread through the town like wildfire. Any impresario worth his salt could have sold tickets to the hundred or so onlookers who crowded round to watch. The audience seemed genuinely disappointed when the show was over and we were ready to go. This was when our real trip began.

Ten o’clock was too late by about four hours to start cycling and it was far hotter than we anticipated. More specifically it was like riding into a pizza oven.   We ground relentlessly uphill for two hours in our lowest gear. We became progressively more exhausted whilst inhaling diesel fumes and cursing truck drivers who for some obscure reason took perverse pleasure in cutting us up. So much for avoiding the Rawalpindi traffic!

We finally reached Abbottabad where we’d decided to spend our first night.   I was weary and stiff and we’d only covered twenty kilometers.   I volunteered to nose around the bustling bazaars to look for a cheap hotel while Roger guarded the gear. Thirty minutes later and with some trepidation I conveyed the news to Roger that the Falcon Hotel at the bargain price of 200 rupees would fit the bill.   I was nervous how he’d react to such a cheap dive. It was easy for me, as a hardened veteran of low budget trips in India and South East Asia. Fleapits were my natural habitat!   Roger on the other hand had been softened up during his high – powered business trips and five star hotels were more his mark.

I spotted Roger standing by our bikes and he was deep in conversation with “The Murderer”.

Abdul proudly told us that he’d been released from prison a month earlier.

“Yes, I killed a man and if self – defence is a crime then I am guilty” he added sanctimoniously.

He seemed just like any normal young man in Pakistan – unshaven and wearing a shalwar – kameez.   He didn’t appear the least intimidating or violent, but there again that’s what they said about the Yorkshire Ripper.

“While I was in prison I taught myself English and I enjoyed reading Shakespeare and Blake. Actually I am rather fond of Keats”, he pompously announced looking around the gathering crowd for approval.

I was certainly impressed – I struggled to get through Macbeth.   We excused ourselves and we promised that we would drop by later to have dinner with him.   Abdul called for two bottles of mango juice and handed them to us. I couldn’t imagine that sort of hospitality coming from The Son of Sam; he was certainly the first murderer to treat me to a cool drink.

I thought that he was an interesting and intelligent guy, but later we saw him in the street and when we greeted him he was hopelessly drunk and he hardly recognized us.

In the dim light of a twenty – watt bulb Roger was engrossed in his office work and his bed was strewn with paper mache.   His documents had been reduced to a soggy pulp after several sweaty hours in his moon bag and he was drying them. It was the first of many times that Roger went through this ritual during the trip.

Later, glowing in the aftermath of a successful first day, we sat in a small dhaba eating vegetables and naan and reliving the day’s events.   A man at the table across from us leaned over and told us that he was on vacation from Saudi Arabia.   He worked in Jeddah as a spray painter in a car body shop and slept and ate in the shop.

“I’ve been there seven years, the money is good but the Saudis treat us like dogs”. Almost all the Pakistani workers who’d worked in the Gulf echoed identical sentiments. They went there on the promise of untold fortune but they lived as second-class citizens and took holidays at home to regain their dignity.

Next morning we dragged our gear downstairs and began strapping our bags on the bikes.   It was six thirty, and we made a solemn promise that we would get up earlier. It was already blazing hot and the shopkeepers were hosing down their shop fronts.   We knew that we needed more self – discipline.

We cycled back through the town to buy bread and bottled water. I wanted to something to eat but I didn’t fancy the idea of backtracking so early in the day.   Roger was meticulously keeping a log of our times and distances.

“Explain to me Roger, does this deviation counted as plus or minus kilometers?” I asked facetiously.

We didn’t really get to grips with Abbottabad but after the frenetic activity of Rawalpindi it appeared much more relaxed. It’s a predominantly army town and is the headquarters of the elite Frontier Force, Army Medical Corps and Army School of Music and it also has some of Pakistan’s most prestigious public schools. It is far more attractive than most sprawling Pakistani urban areas. It has parks, tree lined avenues, large colonial – style bungalows, luxuriant gardens, schools, hospitals and churches. On the way out of town we passed a sadly neglected Christian cemetery, a reminder of the British presence fifty years before.

The minibus taxis continuously cut in front of us to drop off passengers. They irritatingly raced past and then stopped dead causing us to brake and swerve round them. We cursed them all and hoped they understood what two fingers meant.

We pedaled slowly uphill for a couple of hours before plunging down at breakneck speed to the nondescript town of Mansehra.   We stopped for a plate of channa, naan and a pot of green tea although we could have murdered a coffee and a croissant.

Before leaving home we studied very rudimentary maps of the Karakoram Highway and we read anything we could about the route although to describe our planning as sketchy was putting it mildly. We flicked to our guidebook where it described alternative routes between Mansehra and Gilgit.   We chose the shorter option up the Kagan Valley to Balakot.   I reasoned that if we only averaged 40 km a day we would still get to Gilgit quicker. It was a great plan on paper, but we were cycling and should have heeded the warning.

“Some people that have cycled over the 4175m pass say that you should only attempt the trip if you have a very lightly loaded bike.   You should only attempt the journey if you are in very good shape”.   In a masterly stroke of understatement the guidebook continued, “The drivers in the Kagan Valley are reckless”.   We turned left out of Mansehra to tackle the tough – guy route.

The road was better than we expected with a couple of stiff climbs where we had to dismount to push for a bit.   We deluded ourselves that we would become fitter as we went along.   We pressed on, looking for a shady spot to shelter from the intense heat – it was noon and the sun had turned the valley into a furnace.   We had pressed on far too long and we were both very close to dehydration. In the haze we spotted an isolated building and as we got closer we could make out a ‘Sprite’ sign.

The drinks stop turned out to be a charpoy hotel. Charpoy literally means string bed, but adding ‘hotel’ is stretching the truth. These wayside hostelries are little more than open-air communal dormitories where you pay a few rupees a night. The “hotels” double up as cheap eating – places during the day and truck drivers order tea and bread and crash out on a charpoy for an hour’s sleep during the intense heat of the day.

I could see the concept catching on at Macdonald’s.   Tired executives could snatch forty winks at lunchtime to recover from a hard night on the tiles. “Double cheeseburger and chips please and if anyone calls you’ll find me on that mattress in the corner”

We downed three bottles of water in quick time while the owner rustled up a mountain of chips, a plate of channa and a pot of green tea. We retired to the verandah stretched out on the charpoys and sunk into a deep sleep.

Roger was fighting a wretched bout of cramps probably bought on because he hadn’t drunk enough. The owner introduced himself as Faisal and insisted on demonstrating his version of Tai Chi relaxation exercises but to the untrained eye he looked more like a kangaroo dancing Swan Lake. He volunteered to give Roger a rub down but we didn’t pin much faith on his physiotherapy skills!   We thanked him profusely for a great meal but made no promises to follow his exercise programme.

Feeling decidedly stiff and sore we plodded on towards Balakot. Roger cannot exist without a daily intake of ten bananas which seem to enable him to survive the rigors of the modern world. Today he was clearly suffering from withdrawal symptoms so we pulled up by a roadside stall where they sold dwarf sized bananas at giant-sized prices.   Roger wolfed down a couple and pronounced himself fit to continue.   We pedaled slowly up a gradient telling ourselves what fun we were having.   An hour later we finally reached the summit. Then we had a thrilling 5km descent at over 50km an hour into Balakot.   It was just after five o’clock and we had covered 75km during the day.

Grubby and run down are the words that spring to mind to describe Balakot.   At first sight the town has nothing going for it; hours later nothing we saw persuaded us to change our opinion. I  assumed the responsibility of securing cheap accommodation in each new town. Roger hated to squeeze hotel proprietors and pressurize them into knocking down the price of their rooms – he’s just too nice. I enjoy the challenge of bargaining for every last rupee and acting the tough uncompromising negotiator. Usually I get screwed.

Challenge is one of those words that Roger and I debated at length and we have very differing opinions about how the word should be used.   I am cynical when newly appointed chief executives tell the media,

“My new role will be the greatest challenge of my career”. Usually what they mean is, “Thank you for this million dollar salary package. Please park my new Mercedes round the back and if I have the odd couple of hours between lunch appointments, I’ll see what I can do about getting this company back on it’s’ feet.”

Finding a room in Balakot was a challenge in the purest sense of the word. I scoured the town looking for a hostelry with soft beds and fluffy towels. What I found was a faceless, nameless hotel that was barely worth 150 rupees. We never found out if it ever had a name.   Our room had everything that an exhausted cyclist would ever need. There was a cracked mirror, stained sheets, a squat toilet and a magnificent view of the mosque. Taking into consideration these outstanding benefits we were prepared to overlook the inconvenience of humping our gear up four flights of stairs!

We hunted around the squalid little bazaar hoping to find a pharmacy that sold dehydration tablets to rid Roger of his cramps.

When we first met Charlie we didn’t recognize him as a westerner. He was attired in a shalwar kameez, the costume worn by all the local people. He raced across the road and hugged us like long-lost friends. Charlie was an American who’d been living in Balakot for six months without meeting another westerner.   He was desperate to talk English, and he told us that he and his wife worked at the local hospital.   Charlie was anxious for us to meet her. We crossed the road to the car but his wife sat in the back seat and we noticed that in deference to strict Muslim fundamentalist tradition she was covered from head to toe.   She didn’t seem very friendly but maybe if we had been able to see her face it would have been easier to talk. I was surprised that they didn’t invite us home as they were probably starved for company, but as fast as he arrived Charlie was gone and we never saw him again.

We analyzed our medical kit and it was fair to say that if we bumped into a herd of elephants that were suffering from a severe bout of diarrhea we were equipped with enough medication to help.   We had absolutely nothing to ease cramping muscles. Roger was doubled up in agony and was rolling around the room moaning and trying to massage his legs. I slipped into Florence Nightingale mode but my bedside manner still needed fine- tuning!

We scoured Balakot for a hostelry able to rustle up a plate of vegetables and rice for dinner as we guessed that the chances of finding tiger prawns in a light butter sauce was a trifle ambitious.   At the time it didn’t seem an overly difficult assignment but it took some searching in the dingy back alleys before we stumbled on a dive with crumbling walls and tame rats.   We ordered a passable meal of naan and channa where “filling” was how Bacchus might have described it.

By eight o’clock we were so tired that we could hardly climb the stairs to the room. The twenty- watt light bulb made reading impossible although the red light did lend a certain nightclub atmosphere.   The bedbugs recognized a good feed when they saw one and the mosquitoes came out in black swarms, the dogs howled outside the room.   Were we really doing this for fun?

xx

“I’d rather be kicked in the balls than climb for three hours up steep hill at five in the morning”. I remarked somewhat ungraciously as we laboured through the steep, tight bends leading out of Balakot.

Our breathing came in rasping gasps and my lungs felt as if they would burst. We were only ten minutes into the ride and I had already downed a bottle of water. We felt absolutely knackered and by mutual consent we dismounted and started to push.   Schoolchildren walking downhill called out to us. “Alsalaam Aleikum!”

“Salaam” I panted in reply. “How do you say that again?” Roger asked incredulously. I instantly became an authority on the Urdu language” Alsalam aleikum “I said confidently.” You’ll have to tell me again,” said Roger, and so I did for the next five days.

The road went on and on and secretly I was beginning to question the wisdom of tackling the Kagan Valley even though it passed through one of Pakistan’s most scenic regions.   Admittedly we had been sucked into the romance of cycling through alpine forests, lush green meadows and snowy peaks. Now we faced the reality of screaming muscles and heavily loaded bikes.

Years before I had trained for a three – day canoe marathon on the Dusi River deep in rural Kwa Zulu. The event traverses tribal land and far from being a sedate paddle it involves dragging and carrying a boat for thirty kilometers through the African bush. My close friend “Fox” talked me into attempting this piece of macho madness and for practice we went to Linksfield Ridge a sedate middle class suburb in Johannesburg.

We didn’t test our paddling skills in raging rapids but instead we spent long hours running up and down a steep stony track with the canoe on our shoulders. Residents assumed that we were crazy as the nearest river was ten kilometers away.   They had no idea what we were doing. “Fox” drummed a lesson into my head that I never forgot.   Whenever our resolve began to flag he said. “Vasbyt, (hang in) wait, keep your head down and the hill will come to you!” This morning I kept my head down and without warning we reached the summit.

A man emerged from a wooden shack selling dudh-chai, a milky tea concocted from equal parts of water, leaves, sugar and long-life milk.   It is made by bringing the mix to a raging boil and is far and away the most popular beverage in Pakistan.

The owner greeted us effusively,

“Are you Muslims?”   We were asked this question many times in Pakistan and it was posed much as I would ask a total stranger if he supported Manchester United. The owner, Anwar, was excited to hear that we came from South Africa.

“Jonty Rhodes, Shaun Pollock, Jaques Kallis”. He chanted like a mantra. “Shahid Afridi, Inzamam ul Haq, Abdul Razzaq”, I responded mechanically. “You’ll have to teach me some of those names so that I can talk to these guys”, Roger said enthusiastically.

We ordered two ‘sabaz chais’- or green tea – it was our second stumbling excursion into Urdu. “I’m definitely going to learn four new Urdu words every day.”   Roger said, fired up. It was a noble ambition but by the time we left Pakistan we still only knew about twenty words and most of those were menu items!   We offered to pay for our tea but Anwar insisted that Pakistani hospitality forbade him to accept money from visitors. I wondered whether he would still be in business next year.

From that moment on our stops were dictated by the availability of chai.   After another two hours we pulled into a mud walled chai stop just outside Kawai.   We were ravenous, but the restaurant amazingly didn’t serve food.   Roger asked the owner if he could prepare a packet of vegetable soup that we’d bought from home. He studied the serving instructions but he had clearly never seen packet soup before. Clearly his grasp of English was sketchy but he tackled the task energetically. I didn’t want to seem overly critical but I would have preferred not to have the wood ash floating around in my bowl. There didn’t appear to be a simmer button on his log fire.

On the road to Paras we had to weave our way around the road works and heavy grading equipment for half an hour. We guessed that we were still about thirty kilometers from Mahendri where we hoped to find somewhere to spend the night. It was the very hottest part of the day so we pulled into a mud walled restaurant and ordered chapattis, channa and green tea and then retired to the roof, stretched out on a charpoy and promptly fell asleep for two hours.

By three o’clock when it was cooler we decided to press on. The asphalt factory on the way was the only ugly blot in the otherwise pristine valley. We slithered through a muddy, rutted section along a narrow ribbon of road that hugged the banks of the Kunhar River.

We rounded a bend and found ourselves surrounded by huge flock of goats and sheep being driven south along the road by Gujar shepherds.   These fearsome looking nomads are the descendents of the landless poor forced to eke out a wandering existence. They drive their animals down to the lowlands to see out the long winters and then in summer they take their flocks high into the mountains to fatten them up.

Just when we felt that the day would never end an old man strolling along the road called out to us and waved. “Welcome Americans” Instead of taking the piss out of us sweating away on our bikes it was great to get some local encouragement for a change.

Dead – beat but still very chipper we pedaled into Mahendri and within minutes we realized that our choice of hostelries was destined to be severely limited. Limited to one, is a more accurate statement. We checked into the Gulmarg hotel and it was acceptable in a Pakistan sort of way. On the positive side, it did have a couple of unusual features going for it and any hotel sales executive worth his salt would certainly highlight some of the special features in the rooms. Although conferences don’t form a meaningful chunk of the Gulmarg’s revenue, with a little imagination that side of the business could be developed.

An elaborate spider – web of electrical wires was strung across our room and I suggested much to Roger’s horror, that they would make handy washing lines. The management was conducting some sort of experimental fish – farming project in our shower cubicle and I was fascinated by dozens of prawn- like things swimming on the floor.

“You may think I am a big girl’s blouse but I’m not going in there without sandals”, said Roger with finality.   Our room had been fitted with tinted windows. We could stand stark naked whilst surveying the feverish activity in the bazaar. You can’t often do that without getting locked up!

We were raving hungry and when it was time to think about our nightly dose of naan and channa we limped stiffly to the downstairs restaurant. Not that there was any great selection of dining spots in Mahendri. A few clues indicated how many Michelin stars we could expect.   A half- eaten chicken carcass lay at the foot of the stairs and a trail of bones led across the mud floor to our table. In a far corner of the restaurant a fellow diner was washing his feet in the hand basin. This wasn’t the kind of place that lovers linger over a bottle of wine. We wolfed down our food and hobbled upstairs to bed wondering how we would survive the arduous ride to Naran.

xxxxx

“Bloody brilliant” “I couldn’t have slept better in a five star hotel!” Roger croaked as soon as he opened his eyes.

A room with smoked glass windows for a hundred rupees was a bargain. We had a blissful night for the kind of money that wouldn’t even buy you a slice of toast in Europe. I could turn a blind eye to the prawns on the shower floor!

Theoretically we’d saved two hundred dollars if, for the sake of the exercise, we’d stayed in the Brussels Hilton and not the Gulmarg. We were quite chuffed with ourselves. It’s not often you save that much before breakfast!

We pedalled through the rutted main bazaar but as soon as we left Mahendri the road started to deteriorate. We negotiated mudslides, rock falls and a couple small streams and it took nearly an hour to do six kilometres. The views were superb but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate the glowing description in the tourist blurb. The writer was quite clearly an enthusiastic hiker, but he was also a fiction writer with a vivid imagination.

“You can see the brooding peak of the majestic ‘Koh i Makra and the area is a great place to walk your soles off or snooze away a few days!”

We’d only been on the road for four days, but my bike appeared to have developed a few technical glitches. Roger is light – years ahead of me when it comes to fiddling with oily chains and cogs. I couldn’t just dismiss the grinding sound coming from my gears as a figment of imagination. I have a pathological aversion to getting my hands dirty and my friends consider me to be mechanically challenged.   A screwdriver is a lethal weapon in my hands and since I have only recently mastered the art of putting batteries into my radio in the correct sequence I am not mentally attuned for the hassle of fixing punctures.   I am not at home with my elbows in oil and grease and I don’t mess around with Shimano gears – or whatever they’re called.

Gangs of Army Engineers were doing routine road maintenance. It is not fair to generalize but most workers seemed to spend their days lying on a charpoy in the shade and drinking tea.   Life seemed pretty relaxed in the work camps. As we pulled up, a uniformed officer waving a cane stepped forward and offered us glasses of milky chai.

He was supervising the construction of a new road to Chilas. The ongoing conflict with India meant that the road was needed as a strategic military link so his gang was busy blasting a route through the mountains. We were only fifty kilometers from the disputed Indian Kashmir border and disparate groups of Pakistani freedom fighters had set up training camps within spitting distance of where we stood.

In a way I have to admire the way Pakistan doggedly defend their Muslim state, after all they have lost every war that they ever started!   If you count volunteers and reservists, Pakistan has half a million trained – soldiers and most seem to be itching for action. The government will never admit it but thousands more are deployed to stir up trouble inside what is known in politically correct circles as “Indian occupied Kashmir’,

As close neighbours neither India nor Pakistan needs high technology to launch sophisticated ballistic rockets. Either can land a missile into enemy territory and drop it on a rupee note! India possesses the capability of lobbing a nuclear warhead onto a cricket ground from two hundred kilometers away. The arms race is a frightening prospect but in spite of the potentially horrifying consequences Pakistan continue to flex their muscles, rattle their swords and make faces over the fence.

The smallest village has collection boxes emblazoned with evocative drawings of masked freedom fighters brandishing automatic weapons. In Mahendri a chai – shop owner asked me to contribute a few coins to the cause and at first I thought that he was joking. Far from it – he was deadly serious.

We negotiated a tricky stretch of road and slipped and slid through the thick cloying mud for almost an hour until we reached Kagan. This dreary bazaar town gets its name from the valley. We made a beeline for the Lalazar Hotel in the hope of grabbing a late breakfast. We were the only people in the cavernous restaurant. We scanned the Urdu menu, I would have paid blood money for eggs, bacon and sausage, but channa and naan seemed about the limit of the chef’s offerings.

We’d become far too casual about our personal security and we didn’t even bother lock our bikes when we parked them. Sometimes we removed our valuables when we stopped for chai we mostly we relied on the honesty of the people.   An hour later when we went outside, a band of urchin kids crowded round our bikes and one of them was fiddling with my gear levers, but I thought no more about it.

Twenty kilometers further along the valley the wind picked up and I became chilly. I scratched around in a plastic bag for my waterproof jacket. The bag was hanging open and although I hadn’t noticed anything amiss when we left Kagan I discovered that one of the little bastards had stolen my rain jacket and sweater!

The theft of my clothes put me in a bad mood, although my anger was directed at myself for being so careless.   Later when a truck hooted at me I waved him on irritably and gave him the sign I normally reserve for drivers that honk at me when I don’t take off like Michael Schumacher, as the traffic light turns green. He smiled and courteously handed me my water bottle – it had been shaken out of its holder a couple of kilometers back. Things were falling apart!

We rattled over a dry and rutted road and we choked in the horrendous clouds of dust thrown up by passing trucks.   People had warned us to watch out for stone throwing kids in the Kagan Valley, but it came as a surprise when a rock whizzed in front of my wheel. When it happened my fatigue and accumulated frustration surfaced. I screeched to a halt and shouted at the top of my voice in the direction of the stone throwers.

“You fucking little sods.   If you throw another stone and I’ll come up there and beat the living shit out of you. Why do you throw rocks at cyclists you stupid little pricks?”

The kids were shaken rigid, judging by their reaction. They ran like headless chickens and a couple burst into tears and sought the comforting embrace of their parents. We cycled on pumped up after a huge adrenaline rush. That was the way to deal with the little sods!   We hoped that was the last of our troubles were behind us and we looked forward to getting to Naran. We were both absolutely exhausted.

It takes time to compose award – winning shots and we agreed never to be rushed or be tempted to click and run. I was verging on exhaustion and I lazily sat astride the crossbar while focusing on a group of nomads herding their flocks. I should have dismounted and parked the bike because the weight of all my gear was concentrated on the back. In a split-second the bike slid away from me and I grabbed wildly at the handlebars in time to see my camera crash into a pile of rocks. “Shit, shit, shit!” I said snatching up the camera and hoping that by some divine miracle it had survived without serious damage.   As I was dusting it off, examining it and mentally computing how much it would cost to repair, a shepherd appeared out of nowhere and fixed me with a beady stare “What is your country?” he asked.

For bad timing he’d just won first prize!   I have a vivid recollection of South Africa’s last gasp defeat in the World Cup Cricket final. It ended in tears after a suicidal run out between Allan Donald and Lance Klusener.

“How do you feel?” a commentator asked a tearful Allan Donald, shoving a microphone up his nose as he walked dejectedly from the pitch.   He probably wanted to say that his whole world had just caved in.

My feelings mirrored Allan’s, but I lacked his diplomacy.

“For fuck sake, I’ve just destroyed my wife’s a massively expensive camera. I’m totally stuffed after a day in the saddle, half my clothing has been nicked by a thieving little bastard and you seriously want to know what country I am from?”   He looked at me uncomprehendingly, but he got the message loud and clear!

We only had two kilometers to negotiate before getting to Naran. I knew that I’d soon be able to put my feet up and forget the day’s chapter of niggling events and have a good laugh. But the guardian angel of geriatric cyclists had taken the afternoon off.

I‘d been watching Roger confidently ride through the shallow streams whilst I had been far more conservative and pushed my way through. Out of sheer fatigue I rode full bore into the water but this time the stream was knee deep and the front wheel of my bike whacked into a rock and capsized into the water. I was totally and utterly pissed off and wearily retrieved the bike.   I shook the trout out of my saturated bags and sunk into a depressive ” poor me” mode.

By the time we arrived in Naran I had sunk into a depressive state so Roger made me sit down on a wall like a petulant child while he went off to find a room. “You are at a bit of a psychological low”, he said, in a schoolmasterly voice. He came back twenty minutes later all smiles.

“I’ve found a great room but it costs a bit more than usual.” “What’s the catch?” I asked with my customary skepticism.

“It’s not on the ground floor, but there’s a great view” he answered a touch defensively.

My legs seemed to collapse as we made our third trip up the stairs to our fourth floor room with our gear. The room was perfectly designed for vertically challenged dwarfs. After two days I quite enjoyed showering on my knees!

We were anxious to discover what Naran had to offer the discerning tourist. We bumped into two Pakistani guys in the bazaar who greeted us in English, or at least a half- recognizable form of the language. One came from Derby and the other from Coventry and I could barely understand their accents so how their cousins in Lahore managed remains a mystery.

We spent the evening meticulously planning our assault on the notorious Babusar Pass, an arduous three- day trip that would involve fording rivers and dragging our bikes over rough tracks.   We mulled over the logistics and decided what food we would need.   We sought the advice of our waiter. He gave us an incredulous look.

“Sir, the Babusar Pass is closed and it won’t open for another month,” he said. It seemed that we were the only two idiots in the Kagan Valley not au fait with this rather key piece of information!

Ever the optimist Roger said. “We’ll check it out tomorrow” but to be honest things didn’t look promising.

xx

At five o’clock we were shaken out of our sleep by a bunch of spoilt, unruly kids playing Formula One games right outside our door. I didn’t have the strength to get up and strangle them so instead I said a silent prayer that one of them would hit the crash barriers and let me sleep. I conducted a snap test on the state of my muscles. “Jesus! I can’t move my legs I’m stiff as a board” I told Roger.

We sat in a chai-shop watching the mobs of young men preening and strutting through the bazaar.   There wasn’t a woman to be seen. A bunch of middle – aged men in western dress sat at the table next to us. One of them leaned over and told me that they’d travelled from Punjab to spend their holiday in Naran. “It is cool up here,” he said as if that explained everything, but I suspected that he was referring to the climate. He told us with obvious pride that he was staying at the Lalazar. My guidebook dismissed it as “The easy winner of Naran’s ugliest building award”.

Naran isn’t the kind of place that would spring to mind when planning my annual – vacation, as the town seemed conspicuous only by its total lack of charm. On the other hand most of these men wouldn’t give you two bob for a week on a tropical beach in Seychelles – unless it was to ogle the girls.

I was convinced that we’d never get through the Babusar Pass – I had a gut feeling.   Roger wasn’t easily thwarted and tried to persuade me that we could load our bikes on donkeys and walk round any rock -falls. The idea sounded very macho so I didn’t want to throw cold water on his plan. Secretly I couldn’t imagine where we’d buy or hire donkeys or whether they’d be up to the job. We walked to the jeep yard to check if anyone had been making it through the pass but the jeep drivers told us gloomily that several bridges had washed away during winter. “Would you like me to take you trout fishing?” the jeep driver asked more in hope than with any realistic expectation that we would take up his offer.

“No problem” said Roger customarily viewing the situation through rose – coloured spectacles. “We can pull our bikes through the rivers”. I was aghast because if nothing else as my canoeing exploits had taught me many painful lessons about the power of floodwater. I knew enough about tragic drownings to feel obligated to put my paddle in – so to speak.

“Are you crazy? Can you see that piss-willy little river down there. Try fording it and you’ll be swept away and they will find your body next year in a storm water drain in Lahore”. I said.

Naran’s main bazaar is no more than a straggle of small shops selling dried fruit, cheap clothing and biscuits.   I was in the market for a new jacket to replace the one that had been stolen. I settled on a shop where I could drive a good deal with the owner and after an hour of uncompromising bargaining I succeeded in shaving about one dollar off the asking price. I was quite pleased with my cheap Chinese imitation Adidas zip up jacket. It certainly wasn’t made of breathable fabric and deep down I knew that it was total crap. I would turn into a walking sauna – bath whenever I wore it, but I didn’t relish tackling the mountains wearing a cotton T-shirt.

We spent an hour hosing off the mud that had clogged up our bike chains.   We, or should I say Roger, tightened the loose nuts and bolts that had shaken loose.

Eight men from Lahore wearing shalwar kameezes and crash helmets puttered into town riding vintage Vespa scooters. It had taken them two days to scramble through cloying mud and they looked like participants in a bog snorkeling competition.

After lunch Roger produced the Scrabble board and we set up at a local tea – house. Three hours later we were still locked in mortal combat. The locals stood watching intently for ten minutes and walked away shaking their heads at the crass stupidity. Perhaps if we’d been playing the Urdu version we could have gained a few converts. A law student from Lahore said that it was his favourite game and he plonked himself next to Roger and whispered words of advice.

We asked him why all the young men we saw strutting around Naran were in their Sunday best. He smiled coyly and told us conspiratorially that he and his friends had spent the morning at the lake with the sole purpose of meeting girls. He was trying to impress a ravishing student doctor even though she was covered from head to toe. “How did you get on?” Roger asked him in a nudge nudge wink wink tone. He replied wistfully and with a touch of sadness, “I won’t achieve in two hours what I haven’t managed in five years”

He asked me how old I was. “In Pakistan you are finished when you are that old” he told me without any trace of irony.

When we returned to the room we surveyed the mess. Could so much junk really have fitted into a couple a cycle bags? Our wet clothes were draped everywhere, and as usual, Roger was drying his paperwork on the bed.

At dinner we ordered “sabaz chai mirch chini” a phrase we had practiced earlier.   The waiter looked at us in total bemusement but only after several similar reactions and several days later did we accept that our pronunciation might not be up to scratch.

xx 

We lugged our gear down three flights of stairs for the last time. I’d grown to appreciate the view and the dwarf’s shower.   The day had just begun and I was already exhausted.   We found a restaurant that looked a cut above the average and ordered Narans’ specialty breakfast of omelet burned to a cinder and naan.   All the restaurants seemed to serve the same thing.

Since we’d exhausted every possibility of traversing the Babusar Pass we decided to cut our losses and return to Mansehra to rejoin the Karakoram Highway. We’d cycle the alternative route to Gilgit through Chilas but we weren’t sure how long it would take us to reach Kashgar as we’d fallen behind our original plan.

After an hour’s tough negotiation we succeeded in securing a never to be repeated, rock bottom fare of 1600 rupees to charter a Jeep.

“How much are you paying?” our hotel manager asked while we were loading our gear

“A very cheap price” I replied smugly. “My price 1500” he said entirely without prompting!

Our driver was a huge bear of a man with a generous paunch and wild beard.   His name was Imran and it was the last thing that we understood. To get our bikes to fit on the jeep we had to strip them down until they resembled the pieces of a metal puzzle that you get in a Christmas cracker. Worryingly I would never work out how to get the bits back together.   We slotted the frames, wheels and bags into the back of the jeep. It looked a tangled mess. “Acha” Imran said reassuringly.

As Imran negotiated the potholes, mud, rivers and rocks we were impressed that we had actually ridden the road. “Its all bloody downhill”, Roger exclaimed. “This is not chicken shit!” I replied. No wonder we had been so exhausted when we reached Naran.

Imran pulled over and smilingly showed us the exact spot where two Japanese backpackers had been driven over a precipice. He pointed into the chasm and made a cutting motion across his throat!   I found it odd how misfortune and human tragedy could become such a point of morbid attraction. When we reached Kawai, Imran unilaterally declared lunchtime.   He ordered a huge plate of mutton stew and a small mountain of naan. When the dish arrived he immediately shouted for the waiter to bring him more.   When Imran was finally replete, he motioned for the waiter to present us with the bill for his meal!   We continued our journey in silence only shattered by a volley of appreciative burps emanating from a very contented driver.

Imran stopped briefly to observe afternoon prayers before depositing us at the entrance of the Erun hotel in Mansehra’s main bazaar.

The Erun is the filthiest hotel in Pakistan by a long chalk but it was the only hostelry we patronized that had a bath in the room. It is academic that the taps didn’t work and that the tub had not been used or cleaned for twenty years or that a shepherd wouldn’t have dipped his sheep in it.   The room did, however, have a black and white television. If Roger stood in the cupboard with the aerial in his left hand and closed the door I could just about make out that cricket was being screened.

Ryan Sidebottom was making his England debut and was being hit to all parts of the ground by the rampant Pakistani batsmen. Sidebottom had an extremely stupid haircut that gave him the appearance of a 60s rock band drummer.

Our plan was to charter a Suzuki van to take us a hundred kilometers up the Karakoram Highway to Dasu and make up for lost time. Suzuki van taxis looked fun. The vehicles are adorned with extensive murals, miniature disco systems, tassels and other bric-a-brac. Muslim prayers are stuck on the dashboard and chrome ornaments and mascots are glued on the roof like African fetishes. These advanced safety features are designed to ensure the longevity of the driver, but not necessarily the passengers. The decorations supposedly ward off danger but they are hopelessly ineffective in reducing the horrific carnage on Pakistan’s roads.   We naively assumed that the logical place to find a Suzuki van would be the taxi or bus station.   After being shunted from one supervisor to another and exchanging pleasantries and sharing pots of tea, they told us that no driver wanted to do the trip! We didn’t have a backup plan so it looked that we were up shit’s creek once more.

We spotted Imran drinking tea with his chums and after a bout of haggling he agreed to drive us to Dasu for 2700 rupees. The snag was that he needed a deposit from us to get his jeep fixed!   I pointed out to him that if we hadn’t come along at that precise time his jeep would have stayed in Mansehra forever, but as he didn’t understand a word my sarcasm was wasted.   It was fortunate that he had stopped for afternoon prayers because as far as Imran was concerned there was clearly divine intervention.

Feeling somewhat relieved to have the trip to Dasu under control we returned to our hotel to watch England’s determined progress against Pakistan. They finally put the Pakistan tail-enders to the sword – no thanks to Sidebottom. I went out to buy a bottle of water and when I got back to the lobby I was ambushed by a group of locals.   They wanted to know if I was sympathetic to Pakistan in their ongoing spat with India. In this neck of the woods Kashmir is a sensitive issue so I put on my political hat and I rambled on as evasively as possible. Thankfully they didn’t ask for a contribution although a collection box was prominently positioned on the front desk. It was right next to the sign” No spitting please”.

I was relieved when the conversation moved on to less sensitive matters. They turned to cricket and when they found out that I was a South African they fired the inevitable Hansie Cronje questions. It was no surprise that they rated him as a great captain and a top batsman. I’d often heard these sentiments echoed on the sub continent, where he is still revered.   They were philosophical about Hansie’s transgressions although they stopped short of condoning his actions. “Everybody does it”, they said “Especially the Pakistanis”. I replied hoping that I wouldn’t spark a riot. A man who owned the local cinema invited us to join him in the evening as his personal guests.

We pushed our way through a black curtain and sat down on one of the wooden chairs. There were about thirty customers engrossed in an action movie. They sat spaced out rather like the patrons in an Amsterdam porn show where nobody dares to make eye contact.   I tried to concentrate on the third rate Pakistani action thriller that was flickering on a sheet. The lurid posters outside the cinema depicted a curvaceous brunette with an automatic rifle slung across her ample bosom.   I attempted to pick up on the plot.

A voluptuous woman dressed in pink Lycra tights and a revealing sweater was dancing with a smarmy guy with a pock marked face and a hairstyle that went out of fashion in the 50’s.   It was a classic Bollywood boy meets girl scene.   The music played furiously until it reached a crescendo and the couple brushed lightly against each other nearly kissing.   They writhed and swayed beside a mountain stream until they broke apart leaving the audience with an empty, hollow feeling and a sense of anti-climax.

The location shifted to a seedy nightclub. A hairy – chested hero with his shirt unbuttoned to the navel and sporting a medallion the size of a small dinner plate sidled in with three shady looking sidekicks in tow. With an exaggerated swagger he sat at one of only two tables and ordered coca- colas all round – he was clearly expecting big trouble.

As a snake – hipped waiter approached they moved into thug mode. The heavies leapt up and without warning started beating the crap out him.   I appreciate that we came in halfway through the movie, but I was battling to get up to speed with the story – line.   However, my sympathies lay with the waiter.

Events became more confusing when the scene switched to a jail where the unfortunate waiter was being flogged by police interrogators. Let it be said, they seemed to be having an unhealthily enjoyable time.

The action switched back to the heroine who was running at full tilt in her high heel shoes.   Her pendulous breasts bounced up and down but she miraculously managed to stay ten steps ahead of an unknown man who was chasing her in his car.

I looked furtively around and noticed that several customers had their hands working furiously under their shalwar kameez. Most were sweating profusely and had a faraway glazed look on their faces! By this time I was so engrossed in the action that I hardly noticed the rippling screen and out of focus picture.

The waiter had thankfully managed to escape from the jail and was now also running flat – out across a field pursued by the gang of four.   They were on the verge of catching him, when, with a desperate leap he mounted a white horse that was conveniently standing by. In a death- defying leap the horse jumped a fence and onto a road.   By a remarkable stroke of good fortune a fancy dress parade was in progress and the waiter was able to slip unseen into the crowd! The screen went blank and the customers rushed outside to buy cool drinks and chilli bites to fortify them for the second half.   I was drained. Before we left the cinema we spotted Imran in the audience, at least he had enough cash left over after fixing his car to enjoy a good night out at the movies!

xx

We had breakfast at a small scruffy dhaba opposite the Erum Hotel.   The waiter shot us a weird look when we asked him to bring us “sabaz chai mich chini”. He appeared puzzled by our order.

“Don’t you think we should check that phrase out again?” Roger suggested. We flicked to the guidebook glossary.   We didn’t anticipate having much call for the goat and mutton dishes, but green tea was something we ordered all the time. We discovered that for the past week we had been confidently ordering green tea with chilies!   It was little wonder that the waiter thought we were quirky. Maybe he imagined that foreigners preferred their tea like that! So it was back to the drawing board with our “teach yourself Urdu” lessons.

Imran agreed to meet us at eight o’clock outside the Erum. By quarter past eight I became agitated when he hadn’t pitched up. “You see I knew we shouldn’t have given that bastard such a big deposit”. I said to Roger, my natural optimism shining through.

“I half expected him not to turn up but we’ll give him another half hour and then make another plan,” said Roger uncharacteristically.

Two minutes later Imran swept into the hotel forecourt, all smiles but no apologies. “You see I knew he would come, I was just thinking the worst but in my heart I knew he was honest!” I said with considerable relief.

We crossed the Indus River at Thakot Bridge and headed north.   The jeep coughed and spluttered up the steep mountain pass and wound between neatly terraced rice fields and experimental tea plantations.   Near the summit the jeep’s engine started to emit a burning smell.   Imran stopped by a spring and poured gallons of water into the radiator.   Meanwhile we joined a crowd of rubbernecking locals watching a truck being hauled up the mountain – side attached to steel ropes.   Apparently the driver had plunged over the edge earlier that morning and didn’t have a chance.   A bystander gave us an animated description of how the driver’s arms and legs had been severed.   He explained how the unfortunate driver had been rescued and how his limbs were torn off and scattered all over the place.   He would make an excellent guest in “Whose line is it anyway?” such was the gusto and unbridled enthusiasm of his demonstration.

We drove through meadows and pine forests to Chattar Plain but I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the vision of oceans of blood and arms and legs flying through the air.   Imran stopped outside Besham for lunch at a run -down roadside dhaba.   True to form the waiter presented us with the bill for his lunch and he once more proved to be a very hungry man. Maybe he only ate when he was carrying gullible passengers and he certainly wasn’t easily satisfied with just a single helping of mutton stew.

We rode along a narrow winding road that clung to the sheer vertical sides of the Indus Gorge. The section of the road through Kohistan is one of the most dramatic stretches and wildest areas in Pakistan. For years the government has struggled to control the feuding factions that live deep in the hidden valleys. The region was once tagged “Yagisthan, the land of the ungoverned”. Tribal warfare and blood feuds are commonplace and outlaws hide out without fear of being captured or retribution.

Elaborately painted trucks wheezed up the pass until they were forced to a halt. Drivers beat their heads on the dashboard in frustration at the oncoming flocks of sheep being driven along the road but the shepherds seemed totally oblivious to the hooting and revving.

Imran indicated that it was prayer -time and he pulled off the road and joined a long line of vehicles. Daily prayer is one of the five pillars of the Islam faith and adherents pray five times a day.   Believers pray in the early morning before the sun has rises above the horizon, in the early afternoon when the sun passes it’s zenith, later when the sun is halfway towards setting again immediately after sunset and in the evening before retiring to bed. That’s a lot of stops if you are a hungry truck driver. You can pray anywhere – in a mosque or in Imran’s case on a flat rock beside the road facing towards the Ka’ba in Mecca.

We were tempted to ask Imran to stop and allow us to freewheel on our bikes down the long stretch into Dasu. As we careered round the tight bends Roger became increasingly nervous. He peeped out of the window and whispered hoarsely that two wheels of the jeep were over the edge. When I contemplated the sheer drop off into the valley below I secretly wished that I had the insurance policy of a recent prayer session under my belt.   “Acha Acha OK, OK” Imran assured us while taking his eyes off the road and glancing over his shoulder.

The twin towns of Dasu and Komila were impoverished, dirty and nondescript so we asked Imran to take us to the Khyber Lodge another five minutes outside Dasu. He dropped us off outside but there were no tears, no huge bear hugs and no lasting promises to keep in touch.   Roger paid Imran and seconds later he was gone.   Maybe he was off to catch a good movie in Dasu!

The rooms at the Khyber Lodge were dark and dreary and certainly not fancy enough to qualify for the luxury of a window but on the plus side, if we went into the corridor, we had a five star view of the Indus River from the balcony.

The manager told us that there was another cyclist in the hotel and reliably informed us that he was German. As we entered the restaurant I saw our fellow cyclist and I greeted him in my best German. “Guten tag”.   He looked a little bewildered and introduced himself as Eric from Colorado in USA   and apologized that he couldn’t speak German. He’d been “resting up for a few days”.

“I think that my knees have popped. I’ve been riding too hard in a high gear!”

Chris’ last words to us in Rawalpindi in Eric’s case had proved prophetic.   We were determined not to fall into the same trap. Eric said that he was going to put his bike on a bus to Gilgit and see how it went from there. He planned to cycle across Tibet with a Danish guy he’d contacted on the Internet.

That night we tucked into the best meal of the trip and boned up on the route.   We were relaxed, my legs had lost most of their soreness and we were ready for the next leg of the trip. At least our knees hadn’t popped yet!

xx

We were up before first light. Our gear was strewn around the room and our clothes lay in wet bundles. As a kid my mother had an expression for it. She’d say in a resigned voice” This bedroom looks as if it’s been hit by a bomb”.

Each morning when Roger disappeared for half an hour for his appointment with the white scooter I enjoyed a few moments of solitude.   I valued the time alone and took the chance to gather my thoughts.

We were still packing when Nazir the waiter barged in without knocking. He smiled tenderly at Roger and gently began stroking his arm muscles. I could detect the hint of longing from a man who’d been starved of company!   He remarked how strong Roger was. He told us the night before how much he missed his friends and how lonely he was in this god – forsaken spot up in the mountains.   He must have hankered after his social life in Lahore where men are men.

I was becoming quite slick at loading my bike. I could gather my things together and be ready to ride in about half an hour but we were still disorganized and lacked any real system.   I bought an old sugar bag in the bazaar in Naran and it was just what I needed for stowing my clothes and sleeping bag. I strapped the pile of equipment onto the back carrier with a bungee cord. I also had two back panniers and a small front bag on the handlebars for my camera and sunglasses.

We left by sunrise and after ten minutes we crossed a creaky girder-bridge. There were few vicious hills and it was easy going on an undulating road. I pedaled furiously to build up speed on the down- hills and used the momentum to climb out of the dips, but inevitably I would hit a rocky patch or a wash-away. Two hours later we crossed an icy torrent of brilliant turquoise water gushing down from the snow peaks where the Kandia River merges with the turgid brown sludge of the Indus.

The Khyber Hotel prepared hard – boiled eggs for us, as we didn’t expect to find an eating – stop for at least thirty kilometers. At seven o’clock we pulled off the road and picked our way down a rocky incline to the banks of the Indus and sat in the early morning sun eating our eggs with stale naan and marmite.   Tandoori bread is wonderful when it’s fresh but the piece left over from last night’s meal was rock -hard! Roger and I made a solemn pact that our personal cache of Marmite was never under any circumstances to be shared! In this neck of the woods it was irreplaceable and had the street value greater than hashish.

A car screamed to a halt.   Eric had managed to squeeze his bike into the boot and he’d cadged a lift to Gilgit and although he looked relaxed we guessed that he would sooner be cycling with us.

Two hours later we stopped at a chai shop beside a mountain stream. We ordered endless pots of green tea, channa, bindi (okra) and wonderful fresh naan and lounged around on the charpoys for a couple of hours.   We planned to leave when it cooled down later in the afternoon. By noon a cavalcade of minivans stopped and disgorged their passengers. The chai shop owner became agitated and made it abundantly clear that we had out – stayed our welcome and that he needed our charpoys for his new customers.   We prolonged our stay by ordering our fifth pot of tea and sat tight.

Crowds of pilgrims were streaming back to Kohistan and Punjab after a week – long Sunni Muslim gathering in Gilgit. This annual meeting has attracted more than its fair share of sectarian violence over the years. Gilgit’s population is split more or less equally between the Sunni and Shia sects – a lethal cocktail.

At key religious festivals Tension heightens between the communities but this year had been calm. In 1988 violence erupted and hundreds of people were killed in running gun battles and in 1993 the town had to slap a 24 – hour curfew to curtail the violence.

An old man sporting a wild beard typical of many Sunni Muslims sat at our table and told us that he’d visited Durban on an Islamic lecture tour.   Over a cup of tea he demanded to know why I hadn’t studied the Koran.

“Why should I, I don’t even study the Bible?” I answered him in a confrontational tone.   I was taken aback that he should ask such a direct and personal question within minutes of meeting me.

As we were leaving I asked his permission to take his photo.   He and said that the beliefs of devout Muslims didn’t allow it. I asked, “What about all those pictures I see of the Pakistani cricketers – are they not Muslims?” But he didn’t answer.

The next twenty kilometers were hard riding through rocky, stark, barren country and it reminded me of parts of Namibia.   We arrived in Shatial in mid afternoon and we asked the officer on duty at the police post on the edge of town if we could camp in the compound.   He waved vaguely towards town and told us that there was a guest- house that we could try.

A more appropriate name for this grotty town would be Shitty Shatial. It is unbelievably depressing and run down, no more than a miserable collection of shacks. If you weren’t on a bike it was the sort of place you’d flash through in a blink.

We were at a loss to know what to do stuck in such a crappy place so we took refuge in the nearest chai shop!   We chose a terrible place tucked down an alley and even the local people seemed to be avoiding it.   However it didn’t take long for the word to get out that two foreigners were in town and we quickly drew a crowd of expectant onlookers.   Even they were surprised by the free show that they were about to witness.

“I think I’ll entertain the crowd with a few tricks”, Roger said.

For the next hour he dazzled an enthusiastic audience with the amazing disappearing cigarette routine and a variety of card – tricks most of which, to be honest, were not delivered with his usual slickness. A man in the front row insisted on shuffling the cards and when I watched the ease with which he handled the pack I guessed that he was probably a card shark. We never expected to encounter such a smooth operator.   He delighted in telling the audience exactly how the trick was performed and thus bought the performance to an abrupt end.

I located a room in a charpoy hotel that cost only a hundred rupees (or about a dollar in real money) and worryingly the owner gave the impression that I was on the worst end of the deal. When we saw the room we could see why he was so happy, and by the time we had shoehorned our bikes and the bags into position there was just room for us to squeeze our tired bodies on to the string beds. It was lucky that there was no other furniture to get in the way. On the plus side we had a great view of the Indus. The communal toilet was ankle deep in excrement and anyone that could stomach a visit would probably think that the Black Hole of Calcutta was a dream holiday destination!   Roger said he could hold out until tomorrow.

“I’m going for a wander,” Roger said cheerily. I would have understood if Shatial offered even a glimmer of promise but there was absolutely nothing to see. Roger announced his intentions in much the same tone of voice as I imagined the South Pole explorer, Titus Oates to have mumbled. His immortal words to his tent mate before plunging into the night were. “I’m just going out (or something along those lines) I may be some time”. He stepped into a blizzard and wasn’t seen again until he turned up as a frozen corpse.

Supper was memorable if only because it plumbed the depths of my culinary experience. We sat alone on a raised wooden dais in a smoke filled, dark eating – house and picked through a plate of channa that closely resembled thick glutinous oil with mysterious bits floating on the surface.

Later, as we lay awake panting in the hot airless room, there was an urgent knocking on the door followed by a shouted request to complete the visitors’ book and pay for our room.

“For fuck’s sake piss – off we are trying to sleep. Wait until the morning”. I shouted in the general direction of the knocking.

“Ian-kie calm down he’s only doing his job”. Roger said rather predictably, but I was too tired to argue.

xx

The best thing about Shatial was leaving. Even the gaping crowd showed a singular disinterest in our elaborate preparations.

We began the day with a stiff uphill haul through a narrow canyon. The road followed the Indus and made a wide sweeping bend around Shatial. In contrast to its turbulent passage through the lower reaches of Kohistan, the river is wide and gentle and flanked by wide enticing sandy beaches. From the saddle the beaches appeared more and more seductive as the day wore on and the blazing sun sapped our energy. We spent the morning pedaling through a high altitude desert and only the long musical horn blasts delivered by the truck drivers as they thundered past, shook us out of our hypnotic rhythm.

We found a suitable place to eat our cold greasy parantha and marmite. We parked the bikes and scrambled down to a beautiful beach on the river- banks. The smelly, overflowing, dank toilets in our hotel were too horrific to contemplate even, as I was, a battle hardened veteran visitor to Bangladesh’s no star hotels.   I squatted down by the Indus to complete my natural bodily functions in a pristine environment.

We battled through several deep sand patches and stretches of broken road but we made good progress, spurred on to Thore by thoughts of a pot of chai and naan.

As we approached Thore we saw through the dust what appeared to be an abandoned settlement and it looked for all the world like a dusty Mexican desert village. I fully expected to see tumbleweed blowing down the middle of the street and dark – jowled men sitting under wide brimmed hats.

We flopped out on the charpoys and drank a pot of tea.   Roger was still hyped up after the adrenaline rush of his relatively successful conjuring performance in Shatial. He couldn’t wait to show his disappearing handkerchief trick to the kids hanging around outside the building.

I reminded Roger that as his agent I expected a slice of the take. I promised that I would arrange for him to perform at the Palladium Theatre in Gilgit. The word that two foreigners were doing card tricks spread like wildfire and soon we had an audience of six or seven expectant onlookers. After the show in Shatial I couldn’t expect to bask in Roger’s reflected glory. To become a real team the pressure was on for me to sign some lucrative contracts and start earning my keep as his manager and publicist!

About an hour down the road I discovered the loss of my sunglasses and I was sure that I’d left them on the charpoy at Thore. I decided to go back to look for them so Roger found a shady spot under a tree and waited while I flagged down an oncoming truck. I explained to the driver that I wanted a ride back to Thore and he agreed to take me. He drove barefoot and I was quite impressed with his cerise colored painted toenails – a fashion I couldn’t believe would catch on with European truckers.

At Thore, after a frantic but fruitless search, I remembered that I had stopped to take a photo just after leaving the chai house.   I guessed that I’d left my new and rather expensive sunglasses on the carrier and ridden off, thus consigning them to history.   I was pissed off, and by the time I got back to Roger I had already mentally calculated how much my carelessness had cost me to date. The score stood at Pakistan five, me nil! Gone were sunglasses, a speedometer, jacket, jersey and headband. At that rate I wouldn’t have to worry about the weight I was carrying.   Soon there would be nothing left

We slogged on. Roger was battling and vowed never to ride in the heat of the day again. He draped himself with a huge cloth and appeared like an Olympic athlete that does a lap of the track swathed in the national flag. He was really suffering and he was sweating profusely. We’d drunk six liters of water each since leaving the Khyber. Mercifully we had a strong tail wind and we cruised into Chilas by three o’clock, we had completed sixty – four kilometers in the day.

The guy behind the desk at the Karakoram Inn gave me a resigned look.   I am uncompromising when it comes to negotiating hotel rates but I must confess that I felt like the school bully as I drove him down from 650 to 300 rupees.   I knew that he didn’t have any other guests and he was desperate for our business.

The room had an air cooler but it didn’t help. In the sub continent the frequent power cuts are known euphemistically as” load shedding” and we found ourselves right in the middle of an electricity free period.   It was far cooler outside than inside the room.

Chilas is a town known to be hostile towards infidels. Dr. Leitner came to Chilas in 1866 to make a study of the language and customs.   He observed in his diary entry that the customary greeting when roughly translated, meant, “We kill all infidels” and “Beat him now and kill him afterwards”. If he had arrived a century later he would doubtless have concluded that the most popular expression was “Chuck stones at any passing cyclist”.

The good doctor’s sentiments seem to have trickled down through the generations and even today people in Chilas have a reputation for antagonism towards strangers. My guidebook couldn’t have been more pointed. “Beware of stone throwing kids”.   From then on we were constantly on our guard against unexpected missiles, but as we waked the main street all we saw were friendly old men sitting around drinking tea and playing cards!

xx

I was the self – appointed bookkeeper for the trip and when I totted up our expenses I was surprised to find that our biggest daily outlay was for bottled drinking water.   We were getting through about six or seven liters each every day.   Sometimes we chanced it and used local tap water and “doctored” it.   It was my job to refill the empty bottles with tap water and sanitize them with three drops of iodine tincture.   The water turned a yellowish brown and after a while we didn’t worry about the weird taste. At the time we didn’t know that too much iodine could make you impotent – or brain – dead.

Assuming that bottled water was always available it would cost us about two dollars a day or sixty dollars a month.   It would be easy to dismiss our water doctoring as petty savings, but it only became an issue because our dinner cost less than a dollar. Two dollars for water seemed excessive but at the time we couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Our miserliness had echoes of stinking rich people who call in to radio talk shows and confess to reusing tea bags five times!

We crossed the Batogah Nala River before six o’clock and then continued at full – tilt to Gini for breakfast and another magic-show. Life on the road was tough for successful touring entertainers. Hoards of kids gathered to watch the disappearing cigarette trick and as usual there were squeals of delight and looks of incredulity. This time we improvised a bit and I hid a cigarette butt in a crack in the wall before we announced that there would be a show. After Roger made it disappear I theatrically retrieved it from its hiding place to the absolute bemusement of the audience. As we rode away to our next performance, I visualized “The Great Roger” making a once only appearance at the Empire Theatre in Kashgar.

After two weeks in Pakistan we were still laughing at each other’s jokes and we were still on speaking terms. Apparently that’s not always the case with explorers! My wife predicted that at the end of the trip we would either be ready to take marriage vows or we’d never talk to each other again! I made a mental note to start looking out for an engagement ring.

Despite the dramatic scenery only a few cyclists tackle Kohistan. We didn’t know why before we started, but it soon became obvious that it was because food stops are few and far between and the local people can be intimidating. The people in Kohistan have a reputation for being xenophobic and fiercely traditional. They don’t take kindly to outsiders poking their noses in.   A slogan painted on the rocks said it all. “Proud to be a Muslim fundamentalist” and further on “Holy Jihad is the only answer for Kashmir”

Throughout Kohisthan we didn’t glimpse a woman because the men are careful to keep them covered and cloister them behind the high walls of their houses. In many hidden valleys, the female literacy levels are practically zero.   A Sunni man asked me how many sons I had. “I don’t have sons but I have a daughter,” I told him. He replied,

“That is of no consequence”.

We pulled up at a patch of scrubby grass with a bit of shade. It was lunchtime and we were raving hungry! Roger suggested that we brew up some soup to fortify us for the afternoon so he primed and pumped away at the stove but couldn’t get it to work. After getting through a box of matches we realized that we hadn’t put any fuel in the tank! That little glitch solved, we made some oxtail soup to have with our stale naan.

We spotted three cyclists coming towards us. They appeared like the wobbly apparition in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ when Omar Sharif rides his camel across the desert to the well and starts shitting out Peter O’Toole for drinking his water.

The first to arrive was James, an American from Washington closely followed by his German mate, Tim. They met the previous year whilst they were cycling in Chile.   Stefan a Swiss guy was last to arrive. He’d left Lausanne a year before and had cycled alone through Europe, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Iran. “I’m on a ten year world trip,” he told us. Stefan then produced a raw potato, an onion, a carrot and a cucumber and started munching away.

James told us that they’d been doing a hundred kilometers a day for the last couple of days. They were completely drained but after a swig of water and an exchange of pleasantries they were off again. We set off half an hour later struggling into a vicious headwind until eventually I was in my lowest gear travelling downhill.

“I don’t mind struggling uphill, but I get pissed off when I have to pedal hard on the flat and downhill stretches”, I moaned to Roger.

We reached Raikot Bridge and completed police check formalities. By then it was forty degrees in the shade although that statistic was somewhat misleading, as there was absolutely no shade for miles around!

We found a small shelter and stretched out on a pile of cement bags. A boy arrived from nowhere carrying a tray of dirty cups and asked if we would like to order tea! We never discovered where he came from or where he disappeared to but for the next two hours he ferried greasy cups filled with green tea until my bladder was fit to burst.

Although as the afternoon wore on it became marginally cooler although there was still little respite from the sun or the headwind and we pushed our bikes uphill for ten minutes singing, “Climb every mountain”. We estimated that Talichi was about twelve kilometers from Raikot Bridge. We could see a couple of trees in the distance it just never seemed to come.

We could see a narrow strip of rutted road running along the barren mountain- side across the other side of the valley and trucks were throwing up a cloud of dust as they picked their way along. There are dozens of independent fiefdoms dotted around these remote valleys and communication is virtually non – existent. Even today the government can’t exert control over the people living there.

A throng of kids greeted us as we approached Talichi and they formed a guard of honour. It was reminiscent of the crowds that gather at the top of a mountain pass in the Tour de France to cheer on the riders. The kids and escorted us to the government rest house where we found Stefan, James and Tim relaxing on the verandah steps. We slumped down beside them too exhausted to check the room. We drank endless cups of tea and exchanged ideas about how to deal with stone throwing kids and what we’d do to them if we caught them.

Stefan peered out owlishly from behind a pair of old-fashioned spectacles and his beard looked as if it had been stuck on. Just about everything about Stefan was old-fashioned, even his overloaded cycle carriers looked like something his father may have discarded thirty years ago. He had forty kilograms of gear and he reluctantly conceded that the huge oil lamp he was carrying was slightly over the top. Stefan became bored with his postman’s round back in Berne and had taken the ultimate gap, a ten-year bike trip round the globe.

James was a stocky nuggetty character. He hailed from Washington and earned his living as a cycle courier. “I became engaged to a Pakistani girl and then we came back here to get married in the Islam tradition,” he told us. “We were living together in Washington until she was offered a job with an NGO in Skardu, a town 250km from Gilgit”.

Under pressure James had agreed to adopt the Muslim faith when family values kicked in. “It was a joke really, I just said that I accepted Allah and recited a few words parrot-fashion from the Koran and that was it”. I asked him if he was really serious, but from the look he gave me, I could see that he had done little more than gone through the motions. “I could murder a beer right now!” he said as if to underline my suspicions.

The chowdikar bought us a dinner of potato, spinach, dal and rice and Roger and I ranked it as our best meal since leaving Dubai.   Stefan opted out but was grateful enough to wolf down our leftovers. Even after two weeks on the road I could pull my belt in by a couple of notched.

Our room was spartan and there were no lights.   I slept on a couple of cushions as there was only one bed in the room but after ten minutes I was so hot that I crept out to the verandah and lay looking up into a starred filled sky. After countless visits to planetariums and listening to explanations about where to find the Plough or the Southern Cross (or any of things that have names but don’t look a bit like they are supposed to) it was shameful that I couldn’t identify even one of them!

xx

We left at daybreak but James and Tim were already on the road. Stefan had chosen to ride to Gilgit with the slow coaches rather than participate in a flat out race with the other two.

As we wheeled our bikes out of the gates of the rest – house we were treated to a view that I thought only existed on Swiss chocolate boxes. Rising majestically through the clouds, snow- topped Nanga Parbat looked magnificent. It was a peak we’d heard a lot about since leaving Rawalpindi, but not being mountaineers it was hard to visualize the stark majesty that fascinates climbers so much. They know it as ‘The Killer Mountain’.

We met two German climbers that were preparing for an assault on the mountain and they were unfazed by the more than fifty climbers that have died trying to scale the 8125m peak. The altitude doesn’t trouble climbers – their concern is with the massive rock face on the north wall. It is so technically dangerous that a misplaced foothold will send them plummeting 7000m down to the Indus. We were glad to be on bikes.

Two Gurkha members of a British climbing – team got to 7000m in 1895 but, they never returned and their bodies were never recovered. Nanga Parbat fired public imagination again in the1930’s when five successive German climbing – parties were thwarted in their attempts to reach the summit. Finally in 1953 an Austrian climber named Hermann Buhl stood on top of the highest peak of Nanga Parbat. Tensing and Hillary conquered Everest only five weeks earlier and their efforts overshadowed Buhl’s magnificent achievement.

We enjoyed the early morning luxury of a long thrilling descent and we touched speeds of over sixty kilometers an hour.   Stefan powered ahead helped by his heavily loaded bike, but when we reached the flat sections we could hear his heavy breathing and his squeaking, creaking bike.   We paid for the easy start with a stiff and arduous slog to Jaglot. An irritating pack of kids ran beside us, pulling at the carriers and shouting “One pen one pen” until we told them to bugger off.

We hauled ourselves onto the chai house veranda at Pari and ordered a plate of spinach and naan. Stefan beamed from ear to ear and was already starting to enjoy life at an easier pace. Two motorcyclists pulled in, a German and a New Zealander who had ridden from Australia through Malaysia, Thailand and Nepal. They planned to be in Karimabad that night. It was sobering to think that we wouldn’t arrive there for another week.

Because the sun was so fierce, ten minutes after filling our bottles, our drinking water was as refreshing as warm bath water. Roger came up with a solution. When we stopped to replenish our water supply at streams or mosques we soaked a couple of old socks and wrapped them round our bottles. The water stayed icy cold for at least half an hour.

Around noon we reached police control post where we were flagged down and asked to complete a register. I couldn’t fathom why the police needed a record of my father’s name or details of my occupation.   I wrote ‘snake charmer’ and reminded the policeman to search for me if I got lost.   We slogged out the last eleven kilometers into Gilgit through sprawling untidy suburbs. The temperature was over forty degrees and I felt sorry for the gangs of road workers in shalwar kameezes swinging pick axes in holes and trenches.

We poked our noses into a couple of rather seedy guesthouses before we settled on the Hunza Tourist House. After a bit of horse – trading we agreed on a price of four hundred rupees. I listed my occupation as ‘steeplejack’ in the register.   Roger followed suit by writing ‘rabbit breeder’. The receptionist glanced at the register and appeared nonplussed so I assumed that steeplejacks often stayed there.

When the Department of Statistics in distant Islamabad compiles monthly guest arrivals by occupation they would make several interesting discoveries. Perhaps over a glass of chai the conversation will go something along these lines. “Look Yousef can you believe that we’ve had two trapeze artists and one lion tamer this month?”

Our room had a dirty maroon carpet – a bare stone floor would have been better than our flea-ridden rug. On the plus side it had sufficient food embedded in the pile to feed an average Pakistani family for a week!

We took the least line of resistance after a long day in the saddle and decided to try the guesthouse restaurant.   Against my better judgment I ordered a hamburger. We were the only customers in the place and immediately I knew that we were in the wrong place and that we’d made a huge mistake.

Years of bitter experience has taught me that half – star; ‘hole in the wall’ cafes in remote or primitive places have the kind of menus that would make a gourmet salivate. Sadly they can’t walk the talk.   These eating – houses with their charcoal stoves and rickety furniture feature items on the menu like “braised oxtail in a light mustard sauce accompanied by a medley of seasonal vegetables”.   They usually offer two hundred other exotic dishes. They don’t have the ingredients, and they never have had them, but these mouth- watering suggestions look good on the menu. What Pakistani restaurants do well is bread and spinach!   So, two hours later and three excursions into the kitchen to check on the progress of our meal, we were still waiting. Eventually the waiter arrived and with an exaggerated flourish he placed a sad looking imitation of a Big Mac. I still cannot hazard a guess where they found the meat but we saw a couple of very nervous cows outside the gates.

Gilgit’s main bazaar is buzzing, eclectic and lively. Shop owners come from all over Pakistan and some even are from as far away as Xinjiang in China.   As we cycled past a shopkeeper called out to us and invited us to join him for tea. He motioned us to sit on low stools in the dark recesses of the shop and said that it was his ‘Muslim duty’ to invite visitors to join him for a pot of sweet tea. We stopped twice more to avail ourselves of other shop – owners’ hospitality and by the time we reached the Madina Hotel my kidneys were ready to burst.

The Madina hotel has become a legendary travellers’ haunt on the road to China.   Although it is something of a backpacker ghetto it is also a tranquil haven and its restaurant is famous for the kind of comfort food that you can’t find along the way. They make things like banana pancakes or toast and honey. Over a pot of strong coffee and a plate of vegetables we sat and swapped stories with James and Tim.

A sign in the garden read, “At the Madina there are no bed bugs. If you do find them, please tell the management as, sometimes, in the summer they come down from the shepherd’s huts”. Another sign proclaimed, “Our staff is all well trained, honest and clean”.

BBC World was flickering on the TV in the corner and we realized that it was the first news we had seen since leaving home. The Israelis had shot down a Lebanese Cessna.

  xx

We cycled to the bazaar for breakfast and wallowed in the decadent atmosphere of the Madina. There was something almost illicit about sitting cloistered in the garden sipping strong coffee and eating honey pancakes while the frenetic pace of life in the dusty hot streets continued unabated. It was great to sit around talking crap with no schedule for the day. It made a change to eat familiar food instead of the tedious diet of green tea and spinach.

Roger was pushed for time as he had a real job back home. We checked the alternative ways for him to travel back to Islamabad from Kashgar when we finished the ride. I had no time limits and planned to spend a few weeks wandering around the tribal areas.

There are three daily flights from Gilgit to Islamabad but whether they actually get off the ground is little more than a lucky dip. Flights get cancelled whenever there is heavy cloudy or stormy weather and passengers are often left stranded for days waiting for the weather to clear. Pakistan Airlines expect foreigners to subsidize their domestic flights and foreigners are asked to stump up more than twice what locals pay for the journey. This is like a red rag to a bull to me and I fight the principle tooth and nail even though it is a pointless crusade. From China to Poland greedy authorities seem to think that visitors to their country have bulging wallets and it is their duty to milk them.

About a year previously I met Dan Norris on a rickety bus on the way from Manali to Ladakh in the far north of India.   During our trek Dan tipped me off about what to expect in the north of Pakistan. He cycled from Gilgit to the Kunjerab Pass but turned round and didn’t cross into China. When he discovered that I was on my way to Gilgit he asked me to buy him a local cloth cap and to post it to him in London.   He thought that he would look rather trendy strutting down Islington High St. looking like a Kohisthan peasant.

Being Friday lunchtime the shops were closed and the faithful were streaming to the mosque for prayers.   The plaintive calls of the muezzins from the minarets of a dozen mosques strung across town broke the graveyard quiet in the streets. At first I found the calls atmospheric and charming but the over – lapping, unsynchronized, distorted amplified chants soon lost their appeal When I was trying to sleep 4.30 in the morning I found it difficult to appreciate their incessant wailing. I tried to imagine vicars doing the same thing from the bell towers of London’s churches on Sunday mornings. We took refuge in the cool of our room and slept for a couple of hours.

The Madina’s cook urged us not to miss the big match at the polo ground. Since polo eclipses even cricket or hockey in popularity and Gilgit are the Arsenal of the Pakistani game we were excited to see some action. We set off on what was to prove a wild goose chase through the alleys and dusty back streets. We searched frantically for the ground and when we asked locals for directions they looked at us as if we were quite mad. They shunted us from pillar to post clearly bemused by why we wanted to know. Eventually we tracked down the ground but there was no game in progress and the stadium was devoid of spectators.   We felt like total idiots. The cook seemed to be the only person in Gilgit who didn’t know that it was the close season!

A pontificating American who’d just returned from China plonked himself next to me and proceeded to relate his experiences chapter and verse. He was typical of a breed of naïve travelers who believe that they are the first since Marco Polo to travel east. Thankfully when he grasped the fact that I was not impressed he drifted away to look for a new pair of ears to bore shitless.

The ‘Comments and Complaints’ book at Madina made good reading. Hardcore, low budget backpackers had made scathing remarks about the high prices of food.   While it was true that you could eat a bit cheaper in the main bazaar, the Madina’s restaurant was comfortable and it was worth paying a few rupees more to enjoy the calm hassle free atmosphere.   Many travellers had spent too long in India, where street food is ridiculously cheap.

Yacoob, the proprietor had obviously been stung by the criticism and was quick to reply.   He wrote, “My rent is 14,500 rupees and my workers cost 30,000 rupees a month. You are free to check my accounts and if you think I am making too much profit I will hand over this business to you!”   When they talk in corporate boardrooms about transparency perhaps they should use Yacoob’s open – book policy as a case study!

The sum total of Yacoob’s schooling was six months. When he left Gilgit for Karachi to work in a jute mill he couldn’t speak a word of English. A couple of years of menial, back – breaking work was enough time for Yacoob to cobble enough money together to return to Gilgit.   He opened a basic guesthouse with his meager savings and as the years passed The Madina became the focal point for travellers to chill out after trekking, climbing or cycling expeditions in the mountains. An entry in his comment book summed the place up, “Mohammed Yacoob is a role model for the rest of Pakistan’s guest houses”.

Dan enthused about a rugged jeep trip from Gilgit to Chitral over the Shandur Pass. I was seriously contemplating cycling the route when I returned from China. Three cyclists from Prague had just come from Chitral so I asked them if they thought that I could average thirty kilometres a day. I needed this information as I didn’t plan to carry a heavy tent or a stove and I would have to rely on the hospitality of people along the way. They cast serious doubt about anyone making it alone and warned that the road was unbelievably rough. Two of them had destroyed their bikes and had to abandon the trip.

xx

I’d been away several times with Roger and we knew each other’s quirks and lived with them but after two weeks our personal idiosyncrasies and oddities had begun to bubble to the surface!

Flatulence, be honest, is embarrassing.   At school I used to make the kids laugh by farting on demand but now a constant diet of bread, channa and spinach made that trick too easy!   When I passed wind, Roger responded with a prudish “Excuse me!” and it pissed me off.   Farting is one of those laddish things that most men find hilarious and Roger’s prissy reaction was something I found immensely irritating.   Any discussion about indelicate things relating to bodily functions was brought to an abrupt end by Roger gruffly saying “That’s enough of that we don’t want to hear about it!”

His early morning visit to the toilet never failed to surprise me. I spend roughly two minutes on the toilet – shorter if there’s paper. Roger needs at least half an hour.   Bearing this in mind we agreed to build in a time margin in the morning. This way Roger could relax, get up, and conduct his business unhurriedly while could sleep longer.

Roger is a perfect travelling companion. He puts up with all my nonsense. At times (most of the time many would say) I can be sarcastic, pessimistic and argumentative whereas Roger is considerate, caring, thoughtful, eternally optimistic and great fun to be with. I was lucky to be doing the trip with such a close friend, after all, who else would have volunteered to carry my bike up three flights of steps as Roger did in Naran? Honestly, with my hand on my heart, I really didn’t mind if he took an hour to take a shit!

We rode along the river- bank to the bus station dodging cars and trucks. In Pakistan cyclists are so low on the pecking order that every urban ride is a potential death trap.   We passed a mangy old dog lying in the street that had been knocked down by a truck. It was being reduced to a messy pulp by a constant stream of buses. Blood was seeping from its mouth and it was in its final death throes. “It was horrible and I just couldn’t bring myself look at it” Roger confessed.

Cycling in shorts was an absolute no – no in this conservative part of the world and it was a source of some irritation that we had to wear long trousers to ride. Roger bought an absurd pair of floral patterned trousers on the trip. They were the kind that you see worn by aging hippies on a beach in Goa so I was secretly pleased when they developed a huge rip in the bum.

We went to the bazaar with the intention of buying proper trousers to hide his bandy legs from sensitive Pakistani eyes. Except for the snake – hipped polyester variety, available in any size waist up to 32, the only pants they had were the bottom half of a shalwar kameez!   The regulation “fit all sizes” were tight at the ankles and had a 73inch waist that you gather up with a drawstring.   We found a second hand clothing seller and after a bout of intensive haggling we agreed a price of two hundred rupees for a full winter outfit. It was totally impractical but Roger liked the colour and thought he’d be a sensation at fancy dress parties.

After we’d done the deal the doleful stall – owner adopted one of those hang – dog looks that so eloquently say “I am desperately poor, and you filthy rich tourists come along and screw me into the ground. How can I hope to feed my family if you snatch the bread out of my mouth?”

But as soon as he’d pocketed the cash his face was wreathed in smiles and he sent out for cups of tea as if to say. “I can’t believe my luck, these dick – heads have just paid twice what I’d get from a local”. I was happy that he had enough money to buy naan and channa for his wife and kids and that Roger could wear even more stupid looking baggy trousers!   It was what the city high rollers call a win – win.   I was feeling pretty self – satisfied with my bargaining skills, but as we were sipping tea Roger said to me “You were a bit ruthless towards him”. Thank you Mr. Nice Guy.

Our bikes were in dire need of an overhaul so we removed the wheels and the chains (or should I more correctly say that Roger removed the wheels and the chains) and cleaned, oiled and tightened every loose nut and bolt. The bikes were ready to tackle the mountains. Their owners were slightly apprehensive and a trifle less resilient.

I was thankful to Roger for his mechanical know-how and his willingness to get his hands greasy and dirty while I looked on helplessly.   He never actually said that I was a fairy or that I wasn’t doing my bit. I tried to win back a few brownie points by offering to do our laundry.

Later Roger strutted up and down the verandah of the guest – house wearing his shalwaar kameez and Chitrali cap and he cut a dashing figure. I did Basil Fawlty moose sketch impressions underneath a mangy old stuffed mountain ibex head that was probably originally mounted on the wall during colonial times. Over the years the poor thing had been ravaged by mange.

We conducted a swift personal health check, pronounced ourselves fit, rested and ready to go. Roger made a snap decision to shave off his moustache and beard and instantly regretted it “I have absolutely no top lip whatsoever”; he said staring balefully into the mirror.   I said he looked great, but I was lying through my teeth.

xx

We sat on the hotel veranda sipping early morning tea and Roger remarked how much it reminded him of the type of colonial home that you find in Karen Blixen’s Kenya. Our room overlooked a pretty little garden that was all sweet peas and hollyhocks. Hovering waiters, polished floors and heavy colonial furniture added to the Out of Africa image. The scraggly lawn received a generous watering every morning from Wasim, the hotel’s ancient dog’s body and he gave the hollyhocks a quick burst with the hose each evening. He’d probably been following the same daily routine since the British baled out of Pakistan!

We cycled through the bazaar to the Madina for our daily fix of honey pancakes and coffee. We were very conscious that our decadent lifestyle would end the moment we left Gilgit.

I sat with Chris who I noted also arrived on a bike. He told me that the most strenuous ride he’d done was a casual weekend trip to Fremantle from Perth, but now he was on his way to Kashgar. He decided to cycle on a whim, after reading about the Karakoram Highway in a doctor’s waiting room.

Chris spent three years as a Selous Scout during the bush war in Rhodesia. He was a helicopter pilot and flew dozens of mercy missions. He confessed that the stomach churning atrocities he witnessed sickened him. After leaving Rhodesia his checkered career included a spell of cane cutting in Australia’s Northern Territory, a year bumming around Greece and teaching English in Taiwan.

We were joined by a Mick Hucknell (from Simply Red) look – alike who’d just come from India where he’d spent six weeks watching the games between Australia and India. India won the test matches in Mumbai and Chennai and the home side snatched a famous series victory and knocked the cocky Aussies off their perch!

It was lunchtime and an entire morning had drifted by. At first Roger felt guilty and twitchy and wanted to be doing something educational or enriching from the time we first opened our eyes. Now he was enjoying idling the days away and he was beginning to relax and fall into the rhythm of a long trip.

We last saw Eric riding in luxury to Gilgit.   Now he rocked up at the Madina. He’d just returned from a trek to Rakaposhi with his new walking mates Vanessa and Marie.

I told Eric about Stefan’s plans to cycle through Tibet and I introduced them. Weeks later I learned that they were getting along like a house on fire but for some obscure reason they’d been staying in separate rooms. I was a little puzzled because budget travellers notoriously do anything to save money. It appeared that Stefan, in spite of having so much gear only possessed one pair of socks and his feet smelled so much that Eric made him sleep alone!

We went to the Madina for their famous buffet of soup, rice, salad, goat stew, veggies and apricot custard.   At one dollar fifty in real money it was the bargain of the century.

When Vanessa asked my age she was surprised that I was older than her father. He was a mere stripling of fifty-two!   I didn’t qualify for a free bus pass but I did admit to ordering a pensioner’s breakfast at Denny’s. I told her that sponsorship for our trip had been provided, courtesy of a company that distributed surgical appliances and walking frames!

We were used to riding back to Hunza in the pitch dark.   We couldn’t see a thing but we navigated by the moon, swerved round the potholes, negotiated the wandering buffaloes and hoped that oncoming drivers would see our flashing red armbands!   At least in Pakistan pedestrians are rarely pissed.

xx

We were glad to be on the road again.

The route should have been obvious because it ran next to the Gilgit River but it wasn’t. After crossing the swing bridge we reached a fork in the road and we had to stop to ask directions from the driver of a passing jeep. He looked at us as if we were complete morons and waved us on.

There are two routes out of Gilgit, one for heavy trucks and buses, and the other for jeeps, cars and, we presumed, bikes. The road led across a spectacular suspension bridge over the Hunza River and then disappeared into a single lane tunnel running into the cliff face. Once we entered the tunnel half-witted jeep drivers impatiently tried to force their way past us. They drove at breakneck speed and brushed against our cycle bags forcing us to squeeze against the wall.   Were they trying to clip five seconds off the115km trip to Karimabad? Was there something really useful to do with the time that they saved? Was there a prize for the record?

We emerged into the light at the busy village of Danyore.   I was feeling queasy and put my upset stomach down to the buffet dinner at the Madina, probably the last four helpings of apricot custard. The road was undulating and there was a slight, but irritating, headwind that made the going tiresome. Jeeps raced past on their way to Karimabad each one packed to the gills with passengers standing on the back bumper and hanging on for dear life.   We were surprised by how much traffic there was on a road that was going nowhere of any great importance.

We stopped at a small community school in the middle of nowhere and the kids ran out and greeted us with waves and smiles. The boys were dressed in orange coloured uniforms. The girls wore long blue dresses with white head coverings, but they didn’t cover their faces. Basic education for girls is more common the further north you go and at this school there were as many girls as there were boys.

The road started to rise fairly steeply and the landscape was barren. We could see the old Hunza road running like a long scar along the base of the mountain. Mud houses lined the road and far below in the valley wheat fields, apricot orchards and mulberry trees were dotted along the banks of the river. At Jutal an old woman was herding a couple of cows through a shady apricot orchard. In these valleys older people feel useful and they are encouraged to help out with the family chores instead of vegetating in a rocking chair or playing bingo!

We were progressing at about ten kilometres an hour; slow enough to provide entertainment for the kids who enjoyed running right beside us. They were a nuisance when they grabbed at the bike and hung on. Although it was just a bit of fun for them, the only way we could shake them off was to deliver a sharp enough rebuke to send them running for cover. After two hours we stopped at the Green Valley truck stop for tea and I lay down under a tree and tried to overcome my nausea.

A pick- up truck flashed past piled high with live chickens, there must have been seven hundred hens stacked high in crates all shitting on each other. They poked their heads out searching for air and they must have known that their time was up.

After Rahimabad the canyon wall closed in on the right hand side and signs warned that we had reached the start of a landslide section.   There were piles of fallen rocks but nothing too difficult to negotiate although we were a little wary as we ducked under the overhangs.

Soon the patchwork of fields surrounding the village of Chalt came into view across the river. We picked our way down a narrow rocky track to the edge of the village. Brightly dressed women hid their faces and ducked silently behind the mud walls of their homes. Sullen youths looked on barely glancing at us but the smaller kids offered us bowls of cherries and mulberries.   Eventually the track became too rough to ride and virtually impassible, maybe it was OK for donkeys but we had to get off and push.

It was no wonder that the people were cool towards us. The village only sees a handful of visitors and until five years ago less than a handful of foreign travellers a year passed through.

When the track petered out we stumbled across the Tourist Inn, a small guest- house set in a walled garden. At 150 rupees the price was right. Our room was cavernous and there was space to spread our bags around. The owner rustled up a late lunch of naan and potato curry and it proved to be one of our tastiest meals. By four o’clock we were dog-tired after a hard day in the saddle so we crashed out in a sleep of death!

Hunza is touted as the original Shangri La.   A book titled “Hunza’s fifteen secrets of the worlds Healthiest and Longest Living People” waffles on about its isolation and point out how residents live in a society free from illness. In attempting to perpetuate this romantic notion the text goes on, “Hunza folk are robust and famed for their longevity and good looks and their secret stems from a life of isolation and Spartan diet” but this blurb is no more than a figment of the writer’s imagination. Reality is far different.

The WHO issued a report on Hunza’s people and estimated that sixty percent suffer from an iodine deficiency. The lack of iodine has resulted in fairly advanced symptoms of cretinism in seven per cent of the population! We expected to see a bunch of locals wandering about Chalt at least a naan short of a picnic!

Later, as the light faded, I strolled through the village hoping to capture pictures of rural village life but as soon as I raised my camera I was angrily warned off by a group of young men.

I paged through the visitor’s register and was surprised to see that only ten guests had stayed there all year.   Like the proverbial number nineteen bus you wait forever and then three come along together. Tonight there were five guests including a Frenchman who had been up in the mountains with ropes and crampons and two other cyclists. Nick was a New Zealander with silly short dreadlocks and his mate was Harald, a Norwegian.

Our bill for the room, food and endless pots of tea came to seven dollars. We had spent two hundred dollars since leaving home including our spree in Dubai, jeep hire, accommodation, food and drinks.   Our budget of fifteen dollars a day was on track.

We aimed to reach Karimabad tomorrow but there were few places to stop and even those had the minimum of facilities. We planned to carry five liters of water each and we estimated that if we started early enough we could make the sixty kilometres before the sun became too fierce. Today we rode almost the same distance and I felt strong.

xx

We packed our gear and rode gingerly down the narrow stony track, braking hard until we reached the bridge.   My legs still felt weary and I hoped that my muscles would loosen when I warmed up. I told myself that I had an excuse for pushing my bike up the last stretch to the main road!

We got our first clear views of Rakaposhi as the road curved just when it seemed that we would hit a dead – end wall of rock. The road twisted and turned and suddenly opened out to a panoramic vista.   We pushed on to Nagar and reached a mud- walled chai place with a mountain-view.

I felt nauseous but Roger was raving hungry. I had the runs and was content to sip a coke and lie in the shade.   Roger ordered a Mexican omelet and even if the connection was a bit obscure, the cook had an excuse to chuck in a handful of chilies and give a very ordinary egg dish an exotic name.

We posed for photos on the bridge and kept the locals amused with our efforts to drape advertising banners in front of our bikes. How could they have known that our sponsors expected us to provide some Fuji – Moments? They gazed at us with bemused expressions as we said a silent thank you for our free rolls of expired film!

We discussed re – jigging our overnight plans because we weren’t making great progress. Minapin was only about twenty kilometres away and neither of us relished a long ride in the debilitating heat. Roger was vehement. “I’m stopping before twelve whatever happens”. The sun was murderously hot and Roger was really suffering. He draped a cloth around himself and was sweating profusely. Our idea of stopping in Minapin turned to dust when we reached the turnoff, as we couldn’t face the four – kilometre uphill slog on a rough track.

We cruised downhill to bridge where notices threatened a prison sentence and a daily flogging to anyone who dared to take a photo. I couldn’t let such threats slip by without a challenge to the guards. “Why no photos?   What do you think we will do with them, sell them to India? If anyone wants to blow up the bridge, surely they will jump in a plane and fly down the valley and bomb it?   Don’t tell us that our crappy little pictures are going to be used for espionage!”   The guards just looked mildly irritated and waved us on mumbling “no picture!”

We pushed our bikes for twenty minutes, telling ourselves that we needed these walking interludes to rest our overworked thighs. Sweating profusely we trudged forward and without prompting we burst into an impromptu version of “I have been a rover”. The Hunza branch of the Frank Sinatra appreciation society would have been proud of us!

The road flattened and we cruised into Nazirabad and we found a secluded spot in a cherry orchard. We the bikes parked and rolled out our groundsheets and sleeping bags with every intention of grabbing a few hours sleep but within a few minutes a group of curious onlookers gathered and stood staring intently at us.

A pretty, fair – skinned, blue eyed, young girl pushed herself forward and began to talk to us very confidently in English. She told us that she was twelve and attended co -educational school where all lessons were conducted in English.

The people in Hunza are Ismailis and their attitude towards women is poles apart from the Sunni Muslims in Kohisthan. The Aga Khan is their spiritual leader and their faith is an offshoot of Shia Islam.  Roger encouraged Fatima her to read aloud from his book. I was amazed to hear her trot out words like “suspension bridge”. The text would have floored English kids of a similar age. She clearly basked in the attention she was getting.   Roger gave her an exercise book and a couple of South African wildlife postcards and she showed the pictures of lions and elephants to her mother and father who had come to watch.   Her father has eight children and although he was only sixty he looked far older. As young man he once cycled to Karimabad so he wasn’t fazed to hear that we intended to cycle to China.

Whenever people asked where we were going, we always answered “To China”.   Although it was only a couple of hundred kilometres to the border few people ever seemed to have ventured that far.   One of the kids bought us a bowl of cherries while we sat and talked with the family.

The old man seemed determined to give his children a good education. His eldest son worked for a legal firm in Lahore and another was at university in Karachi.   We asked what Fatima would do when she was older. He shrugged and said that she would stay at home, get married and spend her time cooking.

He was on safer ground talking about the Ismaili faith. He told us that their customs allow women greater freedom and daily prayers are less rigid than Sunnis. Instead of attending a mosque Ismailis worship in the ‘jamat khana’ a place that doubles up as a community hall.

It was still blisteringly hot at two o’clock but we still aimed to reach Karimabad so reluctantly took off.   A strong wind picked up causing swirling sandstorms and it rapidly became cloudy and overcast.   Suddenly trucks began pulling off the road and we couldn’t make out why. We didn’t give it much thought until stones and rocks started cascading off the mountainside. By then we realized that we should have stopped too, but by then it was too late.   We became really alarmed, as there was absolutely nowhere to take cover. Stones peppered my hands and back and a sizeable chunk of rock bounced off my helmet and other debris showered around us. The sandstorm worsened and we could barely see ahead and we could only cycle at walking pace against the headwind.   I wrapped my scarf around my face and battled on until finally we emerged at a section of the road lined by pine trees. We had survived a suicidal half-hour. We were foolhardy to run the gauntlet of falling rocks and were lucky to escape so lightly.

We slogged up another long steep incline to Ganesh. Just past the village at the turnoff we dismounted and pushed up a very steep hill into Karimabad.

A hotel tout hassled us, although to be fair he was the first one that we’d encountered in Pakistan. Ignoring his sales pitch we pressed on to the Hilltop Hotel. A group of French trekkers were in the lobby and Michel invited us to join them for dinner at The Durbar hotel. While we waited in the lobby I fiddled with the TV remote control. As I was about to press a button that would send us all into oblivion the concierge rushed forward and if his look could kill I’d be dead.   We were saved from a tongue lashing when our new friends came to the lobby and ushered us to the main restaurant.

Naturally, we hoped that Michel would order a bottle of the finest Burgundy but he told us that the group had pledged to abstain from alcohol while they were in Pakistan! The buffet was a poor imitation of the Madina’s and I was rather disappointed.   The company was good and I enjoyed the iced cherry drink but I would have definitely have preferred a glass of red wine! The Emir’s wife was dining at an adjacent table and she looked just like any old auntie, not at all regal!

The crowd seated at the next table was on an overland tour travelling to Kashgar in a modified truck.   I could never have assembled a more disparate collection of oddballs and misfits in my wildest dreams. And they were spending three weeks together!

We were then frog-marched (if that is an appropriate expression) to the terrace to watch an excruciating display of local folk dancing. Men were waving handkerchiefs in their hands and gyrating to the rhythm of a drummer and the wail of a squeezebox player.   A man in a shiny suit invited me to dance with him and it seemed churlish to refuse so I pranced about with a big grin and prayed for the music to stop.

A couple of Japanese in sunglasses stumbled into the action and unwittingly provided light relief. They looked like two Yakuza heavies that you’d expect to walk into a restaurant, shoot down ten innocent diners in cold blood and casually stroll away.

xx 

If I thought that I’d sleep late Roger had other ideas. By seven he’d flung the windows and doors open and sunlight streamed into the room. He was shuffling a mound of crumpled papier-mâché documents that were much the worst for wear after two weeks in his sweaty body belt.

Our room at the Hilltop was a steal for 250 rupees and according to the manager far less than the Aussie trekking group was paying. He swore us to secrecy and asked us not tell any other guest how much we had paid! I liked the framed picture of a cute little dog wearing a yellow ribbon that hung above my bed!

If we craned our necks we could see hundreds of tiny houses dotting the lower slopes of Karimabad. The town has five thousand residents and there are about 650 houses. The average household is made up of a grandparent, husband and wife, four children, a cow, two goats, five chickens and an anthropologist!

The towering Ultar Nala Mountain behind the hotel was only climbed for the first time last year. Previously climbers believed that the ascent was technically impossible. A Japanese climbing party scaled the 7388m summit after spending several months on the mountain.

Waiters were scurrying about in their ridiculously impractical starched white shirts, black pants and bow ties. After a cursory look at the menu Roger chose the Mexican omelet whilst I was quite content with a giant sized pot of coffee and a stack of lightly burned bread.   The waiter assured me that it was called toast in Karimabad.

Roger was dead set on visiting Baltit Fort so I offered to accompany him for the walk. I baulked at the outrageous five – dollar entrance fee and there was no way that I’d pay to go in. I don’t believe in paying to visit an attraction unless it is world famous, unique or in some way whimsical.

We met Nick on the way to the fort and he told us that his mate Harald was sick as a dog and vomiting. He only drank one litre of water during yesterday’s ride and was now dehydrated.

When we reached Baltit Fort on impulse I decided to join the tour. I made one of decisions that you instantly know you have messed up. I do it in restaurants all the time. I decide that I’ll have a medium rare rump steak and then when the waiter takes my order I make a last minute switch to the eel in red wine and then regret it all evening!

We trailed aimlessly behind the guide and I learned slightly less about the fort than if I’d boned up on the history from the guidebook for two minutes. Our guide pointed to the original wooden support beams and gave a running commentary about marginally interesting royal artifacts and dusty items of clothing. He insisted on us inspecting a pile of ancient utensils that looked like something from my mother’s kitchen.   We sat on a pile of rugs while he showed a scratchy slide – show consisting of a pastiche of sepia photos of long departed rulers. Without warning we got the bum rush and a few words from our guide. “Hope you enjoyed the tour folks, tipping is entirely at your own discretion”. Pull the other leg Abdul!

The Emir clearly knew that the place was on the verge of falling apart.   He cut his losses and moved his family down the hill to a palace that had running water and electric lights. Over time the fort decayed so badly that the government was forced to call in a team of foreign architects to supervise its restoration. Now they are trying to recoup the cost of renovation work by charging exorbitant admission prices.

As a consolation for being ripped off we ducked into a tiny cafe playing classical Pakistani music and ordered walnut cake and apricot juice. It was a way of saying “So much for a totally crap morning, we’ve just chucked away five bucks but we don’t care”.

Roger scoured Karimabad for a mechanic that had a spanner to tighten the handlebars on his bike. He returned an hour later and seemed quite pleased with himself. He said that things had gone well under difficult circumstances.   I agreed that if a hammer was the mechanic’s tool of choice, he’d done a great job. The handlebars were looking good – under the circumstances.

I installed myself on a chair under the trees.   Cherries were in season and I gorged myself till I was sick. A Canadian guy lent me a book written by ‘an adventure cyclist’ from their home – town in Manitoba.   When I read that the author had descended the Kunjerab Pass and ridden to Sost in one and a half hours at an average speed of 90km an hour I wrote him off as a bullshitter. Call me an old cynic if you will.

An Australian couple arrived from China and guzzled bottles of beer on the lawn much the same way boarding school kids might have a midnight feast.   Faced with two weeks in Pakistan without easy access to the amber nectar they were downing the few bottles of cheap Chinese beer that they’d slipped past customs.

Karimabad’s main bazaar is a ramshackle row of tourist booking offices, art dealers, and fruit and nut vendors. We wandered into a shop selling carpets where a man in his mid fifties sat on a stool dressed in boots, shorts and a pink shirt. He wore his long gray hair swept back in a ponytail and had a tangle of chains, medallions and feathers round his neck and huge turquoise rings on three of his fingers. He was clearly no retiring violet. He introduced himself as Cycle Baba but he ignored us when we asked his real name.

He recounted his life story within ten minutes of meeting us.

He sold his rambling house in County Cork in Ireland and he now lives from the income on his investments. He dismissed Ireland as, “a shit hole full of complaining, dull witted people who are always pissed”.   Every year he packs his tent, a few personal possessions and his custom built bike and heads for the Indian Himalayas. Last year he lived in a tent in Spiti in Himachel Pradesh for six months. “It was great but it was fucking cold in winter” he said.

“The rest of India is dirty and full of cow shit. I hate the green Nepalese scenery. I love the stark barren rock and harsh mountains”

Cycle Baba sprinkled his stories with the word ‘fuck’. When he recounted the tale of his disastrously short marriage and his subsequent acrimonious divorce it cropped up with increasing frequency. There were quite a few bitches in his story too so we deduced that marriage was not a happy phase of his life.

CB lived in New York for a couple of years and earned a crust as an electrician. “In anyhow” he said, using his trademark phrase and looking at Roger intently “You’re too old to work”.

Roger confessed to having to go home to his job. CB replied, “You must be fucking mad”

Cycle Baba tipped us off that the Old Hunza Inn was the cheapest place in town to eat so we made our way there. We sat at a long table with four Japanese, the New Zealand motorcyclist whom we’d met a few days before, and a guy from Liverpool. The meal was of trencherman proportions and we tucked into bowls of soup and huge servings of stew. I couldn’t imagine how they put on a spread like that for less than a dollar.

Peter, the Liverpudlian, bought me up to date with all the British soccer scores. I didn’t even know who’d won the FA Cup. Peter was a frustrated stand up comedian. He trotted out Bill Shankley jokes that passed harmlessly over the heads of everyone else. They are stories that have passed into soccer folklore and most soccer fans know them by heart. Shankley was a hard man as a manager and an assassin as a player during his years with the Merseyside club. Peter trotted out the oldest story of them all. When Shankley was asked whether football was life and death, he is alleged to have retorted “No it is more important than that”.

Peter lived in a suburb of Shanghai for four months with his Chinese girlfriend.   I was amazed that the Chinese had not hounded him out.   “No problem” he said. “They broke down the door one night but we sorted that out”. I tried to fathom what chain of events bought this jolly middle-aged man from a Liverpool working class background to the dreary suburbs of a mega Chinese city. I suspect that he enjoyed a million-dollar sex life and his girlfriend probably taught him things he’d never learn from a self-respecting factory girl back home.

xx

We belted downhill to the main road at Ganesh like a couple of boy-racers. I was pedaling furiously trying to keep up the momentum when I heard a fearsome crash behind me. I was afraid that if I looked back I would see Roger unconscious in the road.   I imagined him bleeding profusely from horrific head wounds, his body a tangled mess.   I had visions of him being airlifted to Islamabad for life saving surgery. As I screeched to a halt Roger called out cheerfully “Don’t worry all the bags have fallen off the back”.

I had the runs again and I guessed that it was because I‘d been drinking the local water. I saw tiny flakes of mica floating around in the tap water, but the locals assured me that it kept them in good health so I assumed that it wouldn’t do me any harm. My first bout of the shits was probably triggered off by the handful of unwashed apricots and mulberries the village kids had given me.

Climbing the seven kilometres of slow poison was hard graft, but I kept my head down and pedaled steadily, my breath coming in laboured gasps. Someone, or probably a whole army of graffiti writers, had written on the mountain -side in King Kong sized letters using stones and rocks. “Welcome His Highness Shah Karim a Husayni Aga Khan IV.”   I wondered why The Aga Khan would want to quit his Paris home to venture into these desolate valleys unless he was curious to know how his adherents were spending the family fortune.

The Aga Khan Rural Support Program was launched in 1982 to address the plight of the rural poor. The aim was to help small villages become self- sustaining. The members of village committees were taught how to manage their own development project. Villages get a starter loan, technical help and access to management skills. It has meant that life has changed dramatically for more than two thousand participating villages. Today more than 80% of rural households are benefiting from the assistance programme.

Critics argue that Aga Khan Programmes help the Ismailis at the expense of other religious communities. Whilst the argument is partly true, many other religious groups also benefit from primary health care, women’s self-help and training and other development projects. Hundreds of English medium schools have been established and they provide a standard of education unsurpassed in Pakistan.

We pressed on to Gulmit and we expected to find more than a cluster of houses and a tiny cultural museum. The star exhibit in the museum is the gun “that caused Col. Durand to walk in a funny way”. You can hardly get much more Pythoneque than that, and at a tenth of the admission price charged at the Baltit Fort it is a bargain.

We hunted for a place to have breakfast. The Gulmit Tourist Inn had tables laid out in readiness for fifty people and waiters busied themselves polishing glasses. As we were the only customers in the place I asked a waiter if they were expecting a flood of business.

He looked puzzled at my question and replied, “Maybe next month when we get Japanese groups”.

I ordered the “sembled eggs” and sat back and waited … and waited.

About an hour later a waiter plonked his masterpiece in front of me – a miserable yellow heap of gunge on a huge platter. This pathetic effort was presumably the joint effort of the hotel’s entire team of chefs. Before our chance visit they were on standby, ready to prepare Japanese food for a clutch of agitated Tokyo industrialists who might or might not pass by. I understand the rushed nature of Japanese tourists and I know that they would not set aside more than a couple of days to do the entire KKH.   For their sake I hoped that they didn’t order the sushi!

A Swiss couple cycled towards us as we approached Passu. They’d hired bikes to cycle to Gulmit to call to China in the hope of tracing their travel journal. They’d left it in a café in Kashgar. They could have saved themselves a hard slog. There are no international telephone lines in Passu but a bit of elementary research would have revealed that Gulmit suffered a similar shortage.

There are several active but highly unstable glaciers in the Passu area.   In summer when the snow begins to melt so the local spin – doctors encourage visitors to hire local guides because they claim that trekkers are guilty of “wandering off and sliding down into the valley”.

The final downhill stretch to Passu was a breeze and instead of grinding uphill in low gear, head down into the wind we could absorb the views.   Passu Glacier is strikingly white compared with the dirty gray glaciers that we passed on the way from Gulmet. The village sits astride a wide alluvial plain and the houses are attractively scattered between irrigated fields and orchards. We were so engrossed with the views that we missed the turnoff to the village and had to cycle back.

I picked my way down a stony track to look for a place to stay while Roger guarded the bikes.

The women working in the fields openly returned my stares and I was quite taken aback because in Kohistan I’d been conditioned to seeing the women duck for cover whenever they saw a foreigner.

I found the Karim Village guest – house stuck away down a lane.   The proprietor had stuck up a set of house rules on the door that would make the sourest landlady proud. Notice to Guests was prominently displayed. I wondered what havoc previous visitors had wreaked to prompt the unambiguous house rules.

“No noise or smoking after 8 o’clock. No intoxicated drinking (sic). No hanky panky. Avoid jarring sounds. There must be no half dressing. Please do not run in the village”.

It must have been a great place to stay before the rules were implemented! It was just perfect for us.

When I returned, Roger was sitting on the verandah of a dilapidated guest -house sipping a coke.   He was chatting with an American who explained that he’d bought a Chinese mountain-bike in Kashgar with the idea of riding to Gilgit. “It only cost me fifty dollars, but I’ve never cycled in my life and it was far tougher than I thought – the trip turned into a nightmare so I chucked it in”. He had been waiting two days for a bus to Karimabad.

We had barely been in our room for ten minutes when there was an urgent knock on the door and somebody shouted.   “Open up, Police!”

“What the fuck is going on? “ I said throwing open the door. I was confronted by Cycle Baba’s grinning face. He was camping in a field just down the road. “In anyhow, come over for coffee” he said expansively.

CB motioned to us to squat on a rock next to his tent while he brewed up Kerala coffee and drained it through an old sock.   He demonstrated his petrol stove with a flourish and showed us his blow -up mattress as if he were a bed salesman demonstrating the merits of inner springs. He ushered us into his tent like a hotel bellboy.

He’d made some nifty adaptations to his steel – frame bike. He’d welded a protective cage round the jockey wheel and fitted a heavy-duty back carrier to the front forks.

Considering the paucity of his personal possessions it was a surprise to see that he carried a bottle of extra virgin olive oil and a fluffy towel that he’d bought in Peshawar!

CB confided that he was going back to Europe later in the year to look for a permanent home on a Greek island. “I’ve 100,000 pounds that should be enough don’t you think?”

xx

We hauled ourselves out of bed at first light and rode through Passu back to the main road. We launched into a hair-raising descent on a rough road but as we hit the dip we had to put our heads down, get into our lowest gear and concentrate on a five kilometre lung-busting climb.

For the first time, in spite of wearing gloves, my hands were numb from the cold.   We cycled for almost two hours in the shadow cast by the lofty snow covered peaks.   Roger was so cold that he rode with a woollen shawl wrapped round his shoulders and I wore all my warm clothes.   Although we’d given our water bottles the wet sock treatment it wasn’t necessary because the rush of cold air kept our drinks freezing cold all morning.

We traversed the Batura Glacier, crossed the Hunza River and climbed to Khyber where we hoped to find something to eat.   We rode eighteen kilometres in the first two hours and we were famished.   At first glance there didn’t seem to be anywhere open for a pot of chai let alone food. I spotted a dilapidated building that I thought looked like a guesthouse, but it appeared closed and it looked sad and neglected.

We were reluctant to leave with empty stomachs, as Sost was several hours away. We were on the point of pressing on but we didn’t want to leave Khyber before exhausting every possibility. As we mounted our bikes a man called from a mud house and asked if we wanted something to eat. Is the Pope a Catholic?   Why did he imagine two total strangers on bicycles in a remote mountain village were checking out a restaurant?

The proprietor gave the impression that he was able to offer us a full a la carte menu. I was ready to order the croissants and honey, followed by eggs, bacon, sausage and mushrooms when he jolted us back to reality. “You want fried eggs and chapati?”   It was if we had been offered a champagne breakfast!

We huddled in a cold, damp and dreary room that was bare save for a few plastic tables and chairs. Two waiters cheerfully rustled up “half fried eggs” and freshly made chapattis. Out came our jars of Marmite and for a few brief minutes we were in some kind of private culinary heaven.

During our logistics meeting Roger asked me what luxury item I was taking with me.   Without hesitation I plumped for a giant sized jar of Marmite.   I couldn’t think of anything tastier than naan straight from the tandoori oven smeared liberally with the stuff. A little bit of butter wouldn’t have gone amiss but that would have been ripping the ring! We sat clutching our own jars like misers. The rules were clear Marmite would never be shared.

Two villagers joined us at our table.   They told us that the Khyber village committee built the school and put in an elaborate water irrigation system with help from the AKRF.   English is the medium of instruction and many Khyber children speak the language confidently.   The literacy rate in the village is almost 95% compared to the national average of only 24%.

I asked their opinion of the strict fundamentalist beliefs we’d encountered in Kohisthan. He was scornful of Sunni Muslims and condemned the men’s attitude wards women. “Men in Kohisthan is homosex,” he told us earnestly. “Nowhere in the Koran says women must be completely covered; only Sunni men force it on women. We Ismailis believe that men and womens is equal. We only ask Ismaili women to cover their heads as a mark of respect, that is all”.

We rode the final two hours to Sost through the small settlements of Ghalapin and Morkhon in Upper Gojal. Most people in this region are Tajik settlers that have migrated from the north and we found them the friendliest people along the entire route.

Dan called Sost “the armpit of the Karakoram”. To me it looked to be no more than a frenetic strip of hotels, teashops, vehicles and men who seem to be waiting for Godot. My first impression of the town was the permanent smell of urine everywhere.

Many shops claimed to specialise in Chinese crockery, but apart from a couple of sour looking truck drivers I didn’t see anything else looking remotely Chinese. I instinctively knew that Sost wasn’t a town I wanted to hang about in.

We checked into the Mountain Refuge, a basic hostelry that is the best of a very bad bunch. We paid 150 rupees and we were assured that there was hot water in the room.   When we tried to shower we were told that Friday was a “load shedding day” and there would be no electricity!

Cycle Baba hammered at our door and said that he’d been searching for a place to camp.   The hotel owner said that he could pitch his tent in a field across the road. We agreed to meet later in the afternoon.

The main town was a depressing strip of scruffy shops and dirty teashops. We found Cycle Baba in a shack eating a plate of greasy chips that had been cooked in thick sludgy oil over a Primus stove. At that moment they looked absolutely irresistible!

After we’d eaten we tried to find someone to change our Pakistan rupees into Chinese yuan.   The banks were closed for two days for a public holiday so the shopkeepers knew that they had us over a barrel. The rate should have been eight rupees to a yuan but nobody wanted to give us more than seven.

It would take us a few days to cross the Kunjerab Pass and there were no villages on the way so if we wanted to eat we would have to cook.   We needed fuel to keep our stove going for a week but we hadn’t bargained for a petrol shortage!

It suddenly became clear why there were so many trucks lined up at the border and why so many Chinese truck drivers were aimlessly wandering around.   A taxi driver got wind that we were looking for fuel and he said that a friend would siphon off a litre from his tank. Roger latched onto him and returned ten minutes later clutching two plastic water bottles filled with petrol. He’d been charged five times the regular price and had quickly learned that the concept of supply and demand was understood only too well by these border bandits!

There wasn’t much in the stores other than soup and biscuits but we managed to find a packet of instant porridge and a couple of tubes of honey. I told Roger that I would rather cut my wrists than eat porridge for breakfast!

The vividly painted Pakistani trucks are works of art although they’re probably uncomfortable to ride in. The drivers decorate them with as many bright and shiny objects as possible and they look more like rolling metal buckets. Dozens of them were lining up for fuel and passing them was like cycling through an art gallery.

We ate a plate of rice and a bowl of greasy spinach for dinner. The portions were enough to feed ten normal adults, but unfortunately big didn’t equal better. The food was awful and I left most of it.   When I was a kid my mother used to say that if I left something on my plate “Starving Children in Africa” would like to have it. She also said things like “Don’t make faces – if the wind changes you’ll get stuck with it” but I could never work out how we would get the food to Africa.

The house speciality, for some obscure reason, was strawberry jelly. Roger divided our plateful with the precision of a brain surgeon and the jelly just about saved the meal from being a total disaster. After dinner we read the hotel”Rumour book”. It contained a few scrawled tips written by travellers who’d crossed the Kunjerab Pass. Most were travelling by bus and tips for cyclists were sketchy.   We wanted to know where we could get water.

I was alarmed to read about a cyclist who had encountered a pack of snarling dogs near the Chinese border. They chased him and he sustained ugly, ragged bites. Roger went for rabies injections before he left Johannesburg. I was scared off by the price tag of 350 rands and I had decided to risk it, but now I was sorry.

The book said, “Any dog bite should automatically be treated as rabid! In an emergency anyone unlucky enough to get bitten must wash the wound thoroughly with soap and water and leave it uncovered”.   It was cold comfort to know that even if you’ve had an inoculation you’d still need to rush to hospital for a rabies shot. It didn’t sound very encouraging.   In this God – forsaken corner of the world you couldn’t even get serum in Kashgar and Gilgit.   If I got bitten and didn’t get back to Islamabad, I’d be history! I went to sleep dreaming about big dogs with yellow fangs dripping with rabid slobber. It was time to pray not dream!

I was psyched up for the ride and my only doubt was whether I had enough warm clothing.

xx

We had a nourishing breakfast. “Full of goodness”. Roger said!

The waiter arrived with Sost’s specialty, “half fried eggs and chapattis” and he served them with the flourish of a silver -service waiter.   It was just a pity that the eggs were congealed and stone cold!

We rode into the Pakistani Customs yard when it opened at seven o’clock. Two Spanish cyclists were there already. They had inadvertently bypassed immigration and customs procedures in Sost.   It was easy enough to do, as the actual border between Pakistan and China is over a hundred kilometres away. This bureaucratic oversight cost them dearly, and after riding for two days through the mountains to the Kunjerab Pass, they were turned back at Koksil by border officials because they didn’t have an exit stamp in their passports.

A group of Pakistani traders arrived from China by bus. They poured out and began unloading their possessions from the roof. They stood surrounded by piles of cheap goods packed in suitcases and enormous cardboard boxes and waited to be processed by customs officials.

An unshaven, surly and grossly overweight customs supervisor arrived and began barking instructions to his assistants as he moved down the line of prospective smugglers. His henchmen rushed around like headless chickens trying to placate him and they began randomly opening boxes. The Pakistani traders tried earnestly to explain to the official why they needed twelve boxed bicycles and five thousand pairs of sunglasses for their own personal use.   I had little doubt that their most convincing argument would be a thousand rupee sweetener in a brown envelope. It wasn’t far away.

Roger and I queued patiently until it was our turn to be interrogated.

“Open your bag please” the official said, pointing to my sugar sack with his foot.

“What’s this?” he said eyeing my toilet bag suspiciously, as if it were an unexploded bomb.

“That is what I call a toilet bag”. I replied rather facetiously.

“Open” he responded, totally unmoved by my veiled sarcasm.

His eyes lit up and he poked around in the bag as if he had just uncovered a hidden cache of heroin, he grabbed hold of my shaving stick and began to turn it over suspiciously, examining it with the excitement of a trained spaniel sniffing for drugs.   I demonstrated how I used the shaving stick to lather my face.

If one stretched the limits of imagination it could have appeared that I was preparing to inject myself with heroin but he appeared convinced. “Go” he said with the charm of a pit bull terrier.

Some people were less fortunate. The customs official seemed bent on harassing the Pakistani traders, but he misjudged them. They would only be humiliated if they were forced to pay duty on their purchases! I couldn’t see what this interrogator was trying to achieve. Was he really searching for drugs and alcohol or was his role just to give people a hard time and make a bit of pocket money on the side?

After this comic charade we were shown into a dingy office occupied by an elderly clerk. Six onlookers sat drinking tea. Clearly we were intruding on more important things. The old man glanced up at us and grabbed our passports, sighed and began laboriously entering our details into a huge ledger.

“How many pieces?” he rasped. At first I didn’t understand what he was asking me.

“Do you count the water bottles and my body belt as separate pieces and are bananas counted as extra pieces?”   I said, fast losing my patience with these pointless questions.

He gave me a look that clearly said “Look here son, I’ve been doing this job for thirty years and I still don’t have a clue why I have to ask these stupid questions but don’t try to make my life difficult or I will keep you here for the next three hours”!

“Five pieces” I said hurriedly, “now let me get out of here”.

I was beginning to get ratty. “That guy is just a stupid prick,” I mumbled to Roger.   “Is he really going to the border with all our details?   Shit! They don’t even have phone lines up there in the Kunjerab Pass”.

“He’s only doing his job”. Roger said calmly, words I would hear over and over again.

“Now do I just walk out of this place and buy three days supply of food and pick up my bag of cocaine and start cycling towards the border? The whole thing is totally and utterly fucking ridiculous its typical third world crap”!

“Calm down” said Roger a little alarmed at my outburst.

An interview at the immigration post was the next hurdle in this chain of bureaucratic bullshit. There were three queues, one each for “Foreigners” “Chinese” and “Pakistanis”. Total confusion reigned when a Japanese backpacker was waved away to the Chinese line. He forced his way through the crowd back to the “Foreigners” queue. He was highly agitated and began waving his arms and gesticulating.   In a final act of frustration he stepped beyond the white line separating immigration official and arriving visitors. He thrust his passport belligerently at the official.

Roger was unable to contain himself and issued a sharp rebuke to the Japanese guy in a schoolmasterly voice. “Slowly, slowly, he’s only doing his job”.

I couldn’t bite my tongue any longer and I delivered a stinging response to Roger, “Mind your own fucking business and everybody else will take care of themselves, you don’t have to tell the rest of us how to deal with officials”.

When it was my turn to be questioned the official took my passport and disappeared to a small room at the back of the shed. “Perhaps they are searching for a murderer who looks like me!”   I said to anybody prepared to listen.

The immigration man returned and gazed intently at my Chinese visa. At Sost they don’t often see the type of holograph visa issued in Johannesburg. He flicked through the pages studying each stamp in minute detail, contemplating how he could thwart my departure. Reluctantly he stamped an exit permit in my passport and I was free to go.

A hundred metres down the road there was yet another police check and more forms to be completed.   This time I entered my occupation as ‘Opera singer”.   A policeman thumbed through our passports, closely scrutinized my face, nodded curtly and handed my passport back to Roger.   We do all look the same to them don’t we?

After all this I hoped that if I went missing in the mountains they would search for me. They wouldn’t have a clue what I looked like, but it was heartening to know that they would mount a search!

We rode along one of the loneliest sections of the route through a rocky treeless canyon and spent three hours battling against a headwind. “The wind direction will change when we get round the corner”.   Roger said confidently.   Needless to say the wind howled even harder when we rounded the bend and I peevishly pointed out to Roger that he was wrong. I instantly told myself that I was being a complete dick-head.

A wheezing truck with Chinese registration plates rumbled slowly up behind us. It was carrying a huge trailer loaded with heavy earth moving machinery. It spluttered and coughed and ground to a halt two hundred metres down the track.   The driver and his mate jumped out and went down to the river to collect buckets of water to pour into the radiator.

During our ride to Kashgar we often averaged less than five kilometres an hour but we managed to keep ahead of the truck for the next week. Twice a day we saw the two drivers squatting by the river filling buckets of water that they used to top up the radiator.

We battled away in low gear and I was enjoying a comfortable days’ cycling. Forty kilometres further on we got to a barrier and a sign that indicated that we were entering the Kunjerab National Park. A notice stuck on the office door detailed the admission fees.   I took this opportunity to play an old tune that Roger was hearing for the first time!

Many third world countries have adopted the two tier pricing system and it drives me crazy.   What these governments seem to forget is that tourists pay exorbitant visa fees to get into their country, but they still feel it necessary to milk so-called rich foreigners and squeeze as much as possible out of them.

The entry fee at the Taj Mahal is twenty rupees for locals but foreigners get hit a whopping five hundred. In China visitors stump up several times what locals pay whenever they travel by bus or train or visit tourist attractions. It is bullshit!

Entry to the Kunjerab National Park costs twelve times more than for Pakistan citizens but as the English say, “We shouldn’t grumble”.

The problem is I want to grumble.   I can’t help myself! I have listened to every argument used to justify the two- tier pricing and the main defense seems to be “All foreigners can afford it”. I’m afraid that doesn’t wash. If, for example, a Bangladeshi jute mill worker earning 500 rupees a month decides to visit a museum in Calcutta, should he pay ten times more than an Indian industrialist? Is it a means test?   Roger didn’t listen and frankly he didn’t give a shit, I was boring him.

I avoided an acrimonious dispute for the sake of peace.   Instead I questioned the ranger about the apparent scarcity of snow leopards and what evasive action I should take in the unlikely event that I encountered a large brown bear blocking the road. Sensibly the ranger chose to ignore such trivial remarks. He told us that there were “about fifty” snow leopards in the park.

“Are they away on holiday?” I said as a parting shot. Anyway who is counting?   Ten, twenty, fifty, I doubt whether anyone has seen them all together at one time, so the rangers are probably ticking off the same ones over and over.

I grudgingly paid the two hundred rupees admission fee. It is not the kind of National Park where one encounters smartly dressed rangers and you don’t find glossy brochures or souvenir shops selling fluffy snow leopards!

We asked the park officials for permission to camp in a fenced off compound because it was very handy for the toilet. It was strategically positioned outside the door of the existing squat toilet and the brand new sanitary set was just waiting to be officially unveiled. The piles of crap around the toilet bowl were ample evidence that it had never been used. It was still in its original wrapping and it had been there for several years.   I looked forward to christening this super-loo.

Roger and I dined on farmhouse vegetable soup and a wad of Hunza bread. The bread has the specific gravity of Leadwood and was made for us by the guesthouse cook in Sost. We could have built a medium sized house with twenty thousand of these loaves. Jesus would probably have done the job with five.

We pitched the tent in the last rays of the sun. Roger took over whilst I ran around trying to appear useful. Later basking in the afterglow of our gourmet dinner we sat on the steps of our private toilet and played a game of scrabble. The best word we could come up with was “frustrate” which all in all I thought summed up our day.

Xx 

We both spent an uncomfortable night. We pitched our tent on rocks and stones and the thin foam sleeping mats offered scant protection for our hips. We were up by six o’clock but the sun was already beating down and the bit of shade that we had yesterday was gone. I went to the well to draw water for washing and cooking. Roger got the stove going but the jets seemed to be blocked and it was only working at half the normal power – probably because the fuel we got from the taxi driver was dirty.

Roger made a pot of porridge and served it with a tube of honey.   It was revolting.   When I was young my father forced me to eat porridge oats with salt and I have hated the stuff ever since.   Now, I don’t like it however it’s dressed up.   A spoonful was enough to confirm that even if I were hungry, I would prefer to gnaw on a chunk of stale bread.

We took our time to pack up and prepare our bikes because we only aimed to ride about forty kilometres and there was no advantage in arriving at Koksil too early. We expected it to be quite a bit colder on the Kunjerab Pass and almost certainly we would be camping above the snowline.

We cycled for an hour against a strong headwind along a narrow road hemmed in between the river and the mountain. The road is susceptible to massive rock-falls and severe flooding and last year an immense landslide dammed the river and travellers had to walk round the blockage.   We cycled like maniacs doing our best to dodge a few loose falling stones.   We passed an abandoned hunting check – post but there was little point in anyone manning it as hunters have given up on the elusive snow leopards!   As we crossed a very narrow, rocky stretch, a huge truck with Chinese registration plates nudged past covering us with dust. Why the fuck couldn’t the driver wait for two minutes?   It was beyond my understanding and I wondered whether this selfish “I’m alright Wong” attitude was typical of the Chinese.

An hour later the weather took a turn for the worse. It became cloudy, overcast and cold and I dug into my bag for the jacket I’d bought in Naran.   It was the first time I’d worn it and although I had grave doubts whether it would be waterproof I hoped that it would give some protection against the wind.   Within ten minutes I knew that the jacket was useless!   It looked very smart with it’s’ rip-off Adidas logo but within minutes the inside felt like a sauna! It was no super breathable jacket, it was cheap crap, but it had to suffice.

The mountains were bleak and barren and we struggled against the wind. Even on the downhill we barely reached ten kilometres an hour and most of the time we pedalled in our lowest gear. High up in a crevasse we saw a couple of ibex that sensibly stayed far away from the hunters and snow leopards. A jeep hurtled past carrying twenty shaggy coated goats squashed in the back and we wondered where on earth they were being taken.   It was certainly not to China and there was no other civilisation between here and the border.

In this desolate, windswept place we were amazed to come across a group of road workers shivering in the bitterly cold weather. Perhaps the goats were for their supper. They flagged us down to ask for cigarettes.

I was going through a bad patch and I was depressed that we were making such slow progress against the wind. I told Roger that I didn’t really think that I was cut out to be a cyclist and that I preferred walking and trekking.   He interpreted my remarks to mean that I wasn’t enjoying the trip. Far from it, I was having a great time but I absorb more when I am on foot and not battling, head down against the elements.

We stopped to shelter from the wind in a disused gravel pit.   We brewed some coffee and ate a chunk of bread with processed cheese.   We left feeling on top of the world.   It is quite amazing how a hot drink can lift your morale.

An hour later we reached the police post at Koksil. The compound was hidden behind high walls. We asked a guard whether we could camp inside the grounds and he said that he thought that it would be OK, but he’d have to ask the commander.   There was no running water or toilet, but we were glad to find somewhere that afforded some protection from the elements.   We put up the tent but we were hampered by gusting wind and snow flurries.   I wore two shirts, a jersey, gloves, a fleece jacket and my Adidas special. We threw the sleeping bags and all our other personal gear into the tent and crawled in to try and keep warm.

The station commander came to see us and stayed for a chat. He’d been posted to Koksil a year ago and hated it and he was counting the days until he could move on to Gilgit or Skardu.   Every day during the summer months he drove over the Kunjerab Pass to visit his counterpart at the Chinese border post.   The police at Koksil are waging war on drug smugglers and trying to stem the flow of illegal alcohol.

I quizzed the police commander about the meaning of ‘khun jerab’ but he didn’t seem sure. He thought it meant ’Valley of Blood’ which sounded a bit ominous.

I walked about two kilometres to get fresh water from a mountain stream.   By six o’clock we retired to the tent and played a non- scoring Scrabble game we’d devised to make it quicker and less competitive.

We planned to be up by five o’clock to tackle the pass. The commander came to say goodnight and we thought what a nice bloke he was, until he confessed that he was the one responsible for turning the Spaniards back to Sost!

xx

Today we hoped for warm weather and no wind. We should have prayed harder, or to another God.   By four thirty the wind was howling, it was bitterly cold and we could see snow covered peaks in the distance. Snow had fallen during the night and there was a sprinkling round our tent.   The police cook was scratching around gathering wood. I sat with him for a few minutes trying to warm my hands over a charcoal fire.   We packed the tent and strapped our equipment on the bikes. We girded our loins for the final climb to 4700m.

As we cycled from the police check post we glanced up at the switchbacks winding to the top of the Kunjerab Pass and it looked daunting.

Within minutes we were gasping for breath. Although it was only a gradual gradient we battled away in our lowest gear. We stopped to top up our water bottles at an icy stream; there were snowdrifts on the road and ice bridges over the river in spite of being well into summer. The winter snows still hadn’t thawed. I wore my heaviest clothing and although my body was warm I just couldn’t work the numbness out of my fingers. My gloves were hopelessly inadequate and I tried to warm my hands by sticking them inside my underpants!

The road rapidly gained height as we climbed through twelve tight switchback bends.   We watched a group of golden marmots scurry in the snow looking for food but as soon as we got near them they chased back to their burrows. Distance markings were painted on the road and we tried to cycle at least 400m at a time before slumping over the handlebars gasping for breath.

For centuries Tajik and Kyrgyz shepherds have gone up into the pastures of the Kunjerab Pass to graze their animals. They were the only people to inhabit the fertile lands until the 1950’s when a few Chinese traders ventured across on horseback. After the squabbles between Pakistan and China the border was closed. When the Karakoram Highway was officially reopened trade was encouraged again between the two countries. The road over the Kunjerab Pass is the highest paved international border crossing in the world.

We reckoned that we were roughly halfway up the pass and it was the bleakest and most inhospitable stretch of our trip. I remarked to Roger that humans couldn’t possibly exist up there. Almost immediately we saw a man standing by the side of the road wrapped in a blanket and wearing sheepskin clothing. He flagged us down hoping that we’d give him a cigarette and he was disappointed when we told him that we didn’t smoke. The Kunjerab National Park employs him as a conservation officer and he lives alone in a tent for six months at a time. He pointed out his tent and we were amazed to see that it was little more than a sheet of tarpaulin draped over a frame.

I saw a WWF sign reading ‘Save the Marco Polo Sheep’. Then I saw a herd of yak. The only wildlife we’d seen since paying our 200 rupees entrance fee to the Kunjerab National park were two ibex, several marmots and a couple of domesticated yaks.

The summit was frustratingly slow in coming but four hours after leaving Koksil we made it. We were very emotional and we hugged each other with relief because we knew that there was nothing to stop us reaching Kashgar.   A sign read “Beijing 6200 km”. All there was to indicate the Pakistan border was a high fence and an unoccupied lookout tower.

The Chinese border post was another four kilometres downhill. We were exhilarated and we pedalled at full tilt. My hands went into spasm as the freezing cold air hit me.   By the time we reached the barrier my face was frozen and I could hardly speak. We were so excited at arriving in China that we had forgotten to change to the right hand side of the road. It didn’t matter; in the four hours since leaving Koksil we hadn’t seen a single vehicle!

The border guards were terse and unsmiling.   A young official waved us down and demanded to see our passports. He was dressed in the khaki uniform and peaked cap worn by police all over China. I could have treated him more seriously if he hadn’t been wearing cheap white canvas shoes. An army big wig arrived with his personal entourage. As the cavalcade of six 4×4 vehicles pulled up a dozen sycophantic guards began to mill around the barrier bowing and saluting. He stayed for about ten minutes and then he was whisked off to Tashgurgan.

A guard with an impressive display of braid and ribbons on his uniform ushered us into the hut.

“You will proceed to Tashgurgan by bus. This is not my regulation it is the regulation of the government of the People’s Republic of China”.

He delivered this piece of news in a stilted monotone. If he lived in England he would have probably said. “Just doing my job governor”. We were astonished, ‘gutted’ as they say. Then as the enormity of what he said began to sink in we became very angry. “Why? What’s your problem? Hundreds of cyclists have done this stretch to Tashgurgan over the last ten years”. “We came all the way from South Africa just to ride the Karakoram Highway? What are you worried about?   Do you think that we will be savaged by rabid marmots?”

He couldn’t have cared less and he turned to walk away. “At least you can tell us how long we’ll be here in the freezing cold or when the bus is due” He looked at us scornfully, shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

We sheltered from the bitterly cold wind behind the hut and brewed a cup of coffee whilst huge snarling feral dogs prowled around. A young Chinese guard stared at us but neither Roger nor I were in the mood to foster Sino-African relationships. I looked straight at the guard, knowing that he couldn’t understand a single word of English, and said.   “I am about to take off all these sweaty trousers and my extremely smelly underpants so if you don’t want the shock of your life I suggest that you look away now”. I began to undress while the wind whipped my freezing cold body. When I got down to my underpants he began to stare even more intently.   I turned around, dropped my pants, bent over and gave him a moon.   Roger was aghast and all he could say in a strangled voice was “Ian – kie!” The guard shuffled away feeling rather embarrassed to let his mates know that he had just witnessed the greatest free show to hit the border!

We asked a guard whether we could shelter from the cold in the hut, but he refused. He said that we had to stay outside until the bus came.   That could have been three weeks for all we knew, so throwing good sense and caution to the wind, I said in a fit of blind fury. “Fuck you! I’m coming in and you can go and screw yourself!”   We forced our way past him into the hut. His face registered the kind of silent impassive scowl that Chinese people employ.   Westerners call these expressionless looks ‘inscrutable’ but they are burning up inside.   He turned on his heel and strode away to call a superior officer to back him up. I’m sure that he hoped we would be thrust into leg irons and he would be allowed to pull out our fingernails and stick needles in our eyes.

Five minutes later he returned, but we had already claimed a spot in the corner of the hut and we were busy making honey sandwiches.   His superior was now faced with a diplomatic impasse and to save face he needed the skills of a professional negotiator. The stand off was drawn to a conclusion when the superior officer delivered a stinging reprimand to us for eating in the hut. We offered a token apology and we were allowed to stay.

When it warmed up we went outside to sit in the sun. We produced the Scrabble board and a group of guards stood gaping at us. They doubtless thought we were playing a kind of slow-witted ‘Mah Jong’ but they lost interest when we didn’t scream, shout or slap the tiles down.

For years we’ve unloaded our letter ‘Z’ by using an obscure word that Roger assures me is legal.   The dictionary describes the word “Zo” as ‘a yak like animal found on the high plains in Central Asia’. Now we sat playing Scrabble while watching a herd of zos or dzus (as they were described in our guidebook) grazing contentedly on the mountain.   For a change, instead of moaning about the crap letters I had picked up, I was itching to get a ‘Z’ but it wasn’t to be. I did get a ‘Q’ and was mildly miffed when Roger wouldn’t allow me to use ‘Qing’ -as in the dynasty. Sometimes there really is no justice in this world!

A group of Germans pulled up in a minibus. They stared fixedly ahead as if they were ashamed to acknowledge our presence.   After a five-minute exchange of paperwork they were on their air-conditioned way. They didn’t even get out for a piss.

At two o’clock we saw a bus coming down the pass and a guard told us that it was going to Tashgurgan. We gathered up our bags in readiness, but we needn’t have rushed as it took an hour to complete border formalities.   We asked the Pakistani bus driver if he could take us to Tashgurgan and he agreed until he saw that he would have to load our bikes on the roof.   The driver changed his mind and said that he wasn’t allowed to pick passengers up in China. Of course he didn’t have any choice, as the Chinese wouldn’t allow him to continue to Tashgurgan without us, but he saw an opportunity to make a quick killing. He asked for a thousand rupees and we flipped!   It was a government owned NATCO bus we were sure that it wasn’t the regular fare and that the driver was being rather cavalier.   We bargained the rate down to 700 rupees. He grabbed the cash and shoved it into his back pocket. Even so we felt that our balls had been squeezed.

A guard was assigned to ride with us to ensure that we didn’t hop off down the road. We took the piss out of him by asking the driver to stop to allow us off. As well as the Pakistani traders on their way to Kashgar to buy cheap goods to sell back home there were two Americans on the bus. They were returning from Islamabad after a round – trip journey of eight days to get Kazakhstan visas.   It was nearer and quicker than going to Beijing. They met James and Tim in Gilgit and when we told them about the new regulation forbidding cyclists riding from the border to Tashgurgan they agreed “Those guys will go ape shit!”

We passed hundreds of marmots, plenty of shepherds with dogs, a few yurts and an unending stretch of desert but there was nothing that appeared either dangerous or remotely secret.   We assumed that this petty new regulation was yet another control – measure imposed by the Chinese to frustrate foreign cyclists.

Two hours and a hundred kilometres later we reached Tashgurgan and we were hustled out of the bus to face the sour faced immigration officials.   We waited patiently for our bicycles to be unloaded but as mine was handed down there was a loud hiss. My brand new tyre had a long slit in the side that rendered it useless.   NATCO one, Karakoram Highway Cyclist nil!

We presented our passports and we were herded into the customs hall. Our bikes and bags were only cursorily examined by customs officials more interested in the leather footballs the Pakistanis were bringing in.   I was pissed off about the tyre, but as usual Roger was unfazed and chirpy.   I envied his optimism and unfailingly positive attitude.   We changed the tyre in the customs hall and we fitted one of those “Fold up only to be used in dire emergency to get you home” jobs. Before we left home we debated whether to bother bringing a spare tyre. “If we get a cut in our tyre it will be a bloody miracle!” I distinctly remember saying.

The Traffic Hotel was reputed to be the best in town but when a man volunteered to escort us to the hotel, we assumed that he was a tout working on commission. We told him to shove off. After circling the town for forty minutes we pitched up at the front desk. We were somewhat surprised to learn that the tout was in fact the manager!

Our room was plush in a squalid, sleazy kind of way, the sort of place that would normally be rented by the hour. The manager was determined to demonstrate what a bargain we’d got.   He escorted us to the room and made it his business to personally show us the shower.   I’d seen many showers in my time but this was a first!   When I pressed a button a recorded staccato Chinese voice said, “Hot water now ready!”   What a win!   Could any self- respecting home – owner afford to be without one?

We went to the tatty little upstairs restaurant. It had a filthy floor, cracked windows, torn curtains, greasy tables, and broken chairs, but they did have beers!   I ordered sweet and sour chicken to stave off my hunger pangs and then we got down to some serious drinking.   We sat with Steve, an Englishman, who bubbled with enthusiasm about his trek to Rakaposhi Base Camp, and Joe, an American, who was touring the world in six weeks. We tossed around a few stories, talked a bit of bullshit and all in all I felt quite mellow after the first three beers.   It was a novel experience to be drinking beer that cost less than half the price of bottled water and seen through the bottom of a glass China didn’t seem such a bad place after all!

xx

I enjoyed playing with my talking shower, flicking between on and off to confuse the recorded message but there was obviously a “pissed off” microchip built in and I ended up with a scalded bum.

Our breakfast was banana pancake made by a lady with crooked teeth. She also wore fishnet tights and doubled up as a black -market exchange agent.

After abstinence in Pakistan there was a certain novelty in being able to buy a beer and speak to women …at the same time if you wanted. Tashgurgan is a town with a hotchpotch population of Tajiks, Uiygurs, Kyrghizs, and Uzbeks and imported Han Chinese. It has little to recommend it.

Thousands of Han Chinese have been forcibly relocated to Tashgurgan and it felt Chinese, but not.   The presence of Han people in Tashgurgan is a poignant reminder of Beijing’s ruthless policy of diluting the minority indigenous populations in China’s remote provinces. Tibet’s’ recent history is evidence of how Han Chinese have systematically infiltrated the population and destroyed its culture. If you continue to top up a glass of orange juice with water, eventually all you end up with is water!

At first we thought we had stumbled on a film location. If the people were dressing for a bet, the bookie was going to lose out big time. Most women wore pillbox hats, red skirts, high heel shoes and bobby socks and the men dressed in suits and baggy caps and it wasn’t even Sunday!

The mix of goods in the shops was unusual, to put it mildly. We wanted some tinned food to tide us over until we reached Kashgar. Pilchards, sardines, dolphin or shark-fin, just about anything that swam would have done.   I poked my nose into a store displaying bottles of beer tied up with raffia string, two television sets, twelve plastic buckets, six shirts, with pussy- cat patterns, and three wooden hoes. The shop next door was even odder; its entire stock comprised packets of cuttlefish snacks, boxes of dried fruit and nuts, bicycle tyres, watering cans and beer. After an abortive search, I gave up and bought some bread from a street vendor. It looked and tasted like a discus.

There was nothing to keep us in Tashgurgan so we headed out of town to the accompaniment of propaganda and marching music that blared from factory speakers. Employees had assembled in the forecourt outside the “Lucky Moon Tashgurgan Peoples Rubber Boot Factory” and “Golden Sun Cuttlefish Canning and Export Enterprise Factory” for tai chi exercises

The downhill start was very welcome, a twenty kilometre stretch that we knocked off in forty minutes.   Everybody said that the climb to Subash Plateau would take us two days and would be the toughest part of our entire ride to Kashgar but the gentle climb was boring as we meandered through a stark wide rocky canyon. There weren’t even sheep, goats or rabid dogs to inject a little light relief or even fear into the ride!

After a couple of hours we spotted a few dreary buildings in the distance and we hoped to get tea there. Roger rode over a broken bottle and developed a slow puncture, but we pressed on stopping every five minutes to pump up the tyre. We hoped that we could reach the village and fix it while we slurped a bowl of noodles there but as we neared the settlement we knew we’d be disappointed.

Civilisation is hardly the right choice of words as it was just a dilapidated apartment block and a mosque. We pulled off the road and followed a track leading to a mud walled village. On the outskirts we stopped in an onion field to fix the puncture and eat our sandwiches.   Roger was slick at removing the wheel without removing the panniers and I timed him at fifteen minutes for the complete job.

Workers passed us in their horse-drawn carts but they didn’t even give us a nod of acknowledgement. It was most odd, as they must very rarely see foreigners let alone two weirdo cyclists in shorts sitting in a field eating marmite sandwiches yet they just stared steadfastly down the track. If we had been in Pakistan we would have drawn a crowd of inquisitive onlookers and Roger would have already been well into his magic routine. The Pakistanis were unfailingly annoying but at least they had soul.

In mid afternoon we reached a small isolated army barracks in the middle of nowhere where a group of soldiers were playing basketball. When we asked if we could top up our water bottles the soldiers just waved us away. Both of us were angry, surely not even a Chinese soldier refuses water to a stranger in the desert? Well, they did!   We were determined not to be fobbed off and after we kicked up a fuss a uniformed soldier grudgingly gave us some hot weak tea from his flask and turned his back with not so much as a nod or smile.

Rain was threatening but there was nowhere for us to take shelter – not even a tree or a bush so we pressed on in the cold. We looked for a place to erect the tent before the rain started, but we left it too late!   We found shelter in a huge concrete storm water culvert that ran under the road.   We scrambled down a sandy incline, pushed our bikes into the culvert and took cover while we waited for the rain to stop.   It started to pour down even harder and the wind whipped through the drain.   We both watched nervously because flash floods represent a real danger. We hoped that we wouldn’t be swept away by a raging torrent. We shivered in our wet clothes for more than an hour while contemplating a night in our own personal sewer. We cleared a patch of rocks and stones and planned how we could pitch our tent.

Occasionally a truck rumbled overhead in a deafening roar. A night in the culvert would be like sleeping rough under Waterloo Bridge – we could even sell the Big Issue.   We unrolled the tent and pegged it out although we still had grave doubts whether this was our best overnight option. Suddenly the rain abated and the sun broke through the clouds!   We packed in a frantic rush and hit the road again, battling into the jaws of an icy cold headwind. After an hour’s slow progress low grey clouds overhead threatened rain again.

We reached a cluster of mud houses and we rode down a track to a sheltered spot under a grove of trees.   Within two minutes we were surrounded by a group of inquisitive Tajik children with rosy, wind – chapped cheeks. Their broad smiles revealed stained brown teeth. The girls all wore bright red dresses. Soon a couple of men in shabby grey suits arrived and we tried to make them understand that we would like to pitch a tent. They agreed readily and we set about unloading the bikes and laying out our gear. The kids watched from a safe distance and talked animatedly while watching every move we made. The men fiddled with our gear levers and wanted to know about the speedometer on Roger’s bike. We showed them how to read the distances and speeds and then we told them that we had ridden all the way from Rawalpindi. I am sure they didn’t understand, but they seemed happy with what we told them.   A woman sauntered over from the houses and stood with the children. When we began tying the guy ropes she demonstrated to the children how they worked. Obviously she had seen people camping here before but it was the first time that the children had seen anyone pitching a tent. We guessed that our visit was not an every day occurrence. A couple of older herd boys stopped to ask if we had lip salve for them.

We retreated into the tent out of the wind and snuggled into our sleeping bags for an hour.   Later we ventured out into the bitingly cold wind.   We were raving hungry and as it stayed light until around eight o’clock we didn’t have to cook by torchlight. The stove was still playing up and it took forever to cook up our beef and vegetable soup. The soup made us very thirsty and we debated if whether we had enough water for coffee. We only had four litres left although we expected to find water next day. When I thought back to our encounter with those soldiers I was even more pissed off.

The villagers got their water from a stagnant river about a hundred metres away but there was so much human shit and animal activity along the banks that we didn’t fancy drinking the water even if we dosed it with iodine. We checked the map to work out where we could get water but the map didn’t show any villages before Karakul Lake.   At best we would only reach there late in the afternoon. We decided to skip coffee.

It was nine o’clock when the kids finally left us in peace. They’d watched us do Naked Chef impressions and were off to make ‘oxtail a la discus bread’.   We crept into the tent and tried to warm up. There was nothing else for us to do except get out the Scrabble board. I managed to pick up scratchy BBC reception on my short wave radio but the static and the high mountains all round made it almost impossible to hear.

We sung a few lines of “Are you Lonesome tonight” and soon we were ready for sleep. Lying there in the dark, we started something that plagued us for the rest of the trip. It was the dreaded limerick disease!

xx

There is no more compelling wake up call than the mournful, persistent braying of two lovelorn donkeys. Add the combined bleat of a thousand sheep to the urgent snorting of a group of buffalo and your slumbers are over. I crawled stiffly out of the tent, I was freezing cold, every bone and muscle in my body was aching and my back felt broken! Roger was feeling just as bad which had the immediate effect of making me better.

We crouched on the rocks under the trees warming our bodies in the weak early morning sun.   We ate rock hard bread and cheese for breakfast.

Within minutes the kids arrived hoping for an early morning performance. They were not disappointed and they stood spellbound while we lit the stove to brew coffee. Roger staged a magic show and began with a few card tricks. He invited a boy to pick a card and made it jump to the top of the pack, but the kids were totally mystified. They’d probably never seen a pack of cards before. But once he made the handkerchief disappear there were squeals of delight and persistent shouts for encores.

Moisturiser would have been the best present you could give to anyone up here on these bleak, windswept, inhospitable, plains. The kids all had cracked hands, faces and lips that cried out for soothing cream.

I strolled over to the settlement where the women were suckling their babies and asked permission to take their photo but they refused and ducked inside their houses. We strapped down our gear and wobbled away from the village with the kids chased excitedly behind us. They waved furiously until we were out of sight.

It was mid morning and we didn’t have much enthusiasm for the unrelenting thirty kilometre slog up the steady incline.   We were barely able to maintain an average speed of five kilometres an hour against the wind and we soon became demoralised by our slow progress. The clouds threatened all morning and eventually it started to snow. We wore all our warm clothing and cycled on praying for the wind to abate and for the snow to stop.

The 4000m summit is only ten kilometres from the Tajikstan border. We passed an abandoned police check post but little else until we met a group of shepherds herding an enormous flock of goats. I was bugged by the thought that goats were able to graze on the sandy gravel, as there was precious little grass about.

I was extremely wary of the huge dogs but mercifully the shepherds kept them tied to long chains and the dogs responded obediently to their whistles to come to heel. I imagined myself frothing at the mouth after a bite from a rabid dog and it haunted me. I summoned up all my energy and put as much distance between the nomad group and me as fast as possible.

Further on we saw our first Chinese road gang and they shook their heads and called out to us because we were wearing shorts. In Pakistan we were forced to wear long pants as a mark of respect to Muslims. The Chinese couldn’t care less about that – they were just amazed that our legs were exposed because it was so bitterly cold.

“When will this fucking hill end?   We’ve been riding uphill for two bloody days”. I asked Roger.   “Let’s just go on for five kilometres and then we can stop for a bit” Roger said.   We were both leg weary and we had been ticking off the kilometre markers, but we had badly miscalculated. Eventually we spotted a rusting old road sign that had fallen over. When we examined it we couldn’t make out the Chinese characters but we crossed our fingers that the summit was over the next rise. It was!

The view at the top was majestic.   An endless barren plain stretched away in the distance and snow-capped mountains surrounded us. We cycled up and down a stretch of road taking pictures and playing the fool. We were so excited because we knew that the road to Karakul Lake was mainly downhill. We were knackered after two days of non-stop climbing.   We careered down the steep descent and we zigzagged round potholes in the tarmac. It was a thrillingly dangerous ride but from sheer elation we threw caution to the wind and at times we touched sixty kilometres an hour. I was desperately cold but I didn’t, care, I just shouted into the wind at the top of my voice and smiled a frozen grin.

When we reached the bottom the road flattened out along the valley where Kyrgyz shepherds had set up their summer settlements. Kyrgyz nomad families migrate to Karakul Lake during the warm months to graze their yaks on the rich summer pastures along the lakeshore.

We veered off the road and rode over a crusty, stony plain to an adobe mausoleum where twenty long – forgotten tombs nestled below a sand dune. We sheltered from the wind in a tomb and ate lunch of stale bread and marmalade. Our water supply was dangerously low and we had less than a litre between us. It was late but we had to push on to Karakul to get water.   We cruised for the first twenty kilometres and then we rode straight into the teeth of a vicious headwind that almost stopped us dead!   It was ridiculous; we were almost going backwards. When we got our first glimpse of the lake we were ecstatic. We checked in at a police post. The policemen were a friendly bunch of guys; for a change and they directed us further round the lake and said that we’d find a place to stay.

We turned into the grounds of a functional but spectacularly unwelcoming hotel. Several workers looked at us curiously, but nobody offered to help. A bunch of them were glued to a TV in a corner of the restaurant and they barely glanced up at us. I asked one of them what a room would cost.   A man wearing a hotel badge just shrugged his shoulders, turned round and walked away.   I was incensed and I chased after him and shouted. “Is this a fucking hotel or is it a private health resort run for the benefit of employees?” This tirade galvanised him into action and he called one of the cadres who reluctantly dragged himself away from the TV soap opera. He motioned for us to follow and he slouched off to a building at the side of the restaurant where he showed me a room. He told me that it cost two hundred yuan.

This grubby, claustrophobic, airless box was, at best worth thirty and I said so in no uncertain terms. He appeared very pleased by my reaction, as he had ensured that we wouldn’t take the room. That way he wouldn’t have to deal with ‘stroppy’ guests. I asked him where we could fill our water bottles.

“There is no water” he replied. “What about the room that you have just shown me, how do guests wash and shower?” He dragged me back into the room where he made an elaborate show of turning on the shower taps. Sure enough no water came out. “When will the water come back on again?” I asked. “No, there is never water in the rooms” he said impatiently. “But there is a fucking great lake down there, why don’t you pump some water up” I was exasperated by his negativity. He gave me a sullen look and stalked back to his TV programme.

“Now we’re in the crap,” I said to Roger. ”I’ve antagonised that guy so much we can’t even get water from the restaurant”, I asked about the yurts I’d seen in the grounds. Another sullen employee jangled a set of keys and led me to a yurt that was absolutely perfect for us. It was big, we could store the bikes and bags inside and it had Kelim rugs on the floor and huge pillows to lounge on. It was supposed to be a dormitory for eight people but I doubted whether any other guests would pitch up. “How much?” I asked him. “Forty yuan” he replied.   “I’ll take it I said” and I felt as if I had just won the lottery.

Perhaps some desperate traveller may occasionally stop at the place for lunch but overnight guests only happen in their dreams. Meanwhile twenty government workers eat, sleep and watch television at state expense.

A knot of workers sat at a large table in the corner of the restaurant slurping huge bowls of steaming noodles. Their table was straining under the weight of dumplings, vegetables, chicken and pork.   We salivated at the thought of a real meal!   “What can we order tonight?” we asked an unsmiling waitress. ”Noodles and vegetables” she said whilst picking at her teeth. “Ah! Yes, but we would like what they are eating at that table”. She clicked her tongue and repeated” Only noodles and vegetables.”

So we had cheap beers and a million-dollar view across the lake. Four or five beers later I asked where the toilet was, I was directed two hundred metres away to a disgusting open, fly ridden open latrine.   When I got back I asked where I could wash my hands. “Nowhere” the waitress answered. “That’s great!” I said crossing my fingers and hoping that she was joking. Unless the chef had a secret supply of water the food we had eaten could cause us a bit of grief.

xx

I got up for a pee during the night, it was snowing and the full moon cast an eerie light. The reflection of the mountains shimmered across the lake. If it weren’t freezing cold I would have been tempted to linger. When I crept back into the yurt I stuffed a plastic bag in a hole in roof to stop the howling wind. Then I crept under my Mickey Mouse duvet and slept soundly until six o’clock.

We had five star views of Muztagh Ata from the yurt. “The Father of Ice Mountains” is mightily impressive at over 7500metres and Karakul Lake must be one of the most beautiful spots in Western China. The uninterrupted view across the deep blue waters to the towering peaks of the Pamir Mountains is picture postcard stuff. It’s just a shame about the crappy hotel!

I quite enjoyed the combination of biscuits, jam, peanuts, dumplings and coffee for breakfast but when the waitress presented the bill I thought that she was taking the piss!   I begrudged shelling out five times as much as I would have paid in Pakistan for a substantial meal of channa and naan.

I was glad to leave this miserable hostelry run by the employees for the employees. As we swung out of the gates and back onto the road to Ghez we sung a raucous chorus of “Don’t get around much anymore”.

The road tracked the lake for an hour and we passed a group of shepherds driving donkey carts loaded with a few meagre possessions. Huge dogs on long chains snarled and snapped at their sheep. Whenever we saw a dog without a leash we picked up a rock ready to throw if the dogs became aggressive.   A shepherd waved us down and we stopped to exchange pleasantries. His wide Kyrgyz features and dark complexion gave him a central European appearance and he didn’t look Chinese at all.

We crossed the windswept plains under leaden skies and a bitingly cold wind. I wore all my warm clothing, long trousers, gloves, jacket, two sweaters and a scarf wrapped round my ears and face.   We skirted a wide marshy area of tussock grass and reeds before we began an arduous climb up the snow – covered mountain pass.   We picked our way round fallen rocks and boulders on a steadily worsening road. We feared that another snowstorm was imminent and at high altitude there wasn’t anywhere to shelter, but there was no point in stopping, so we pushed on. We joked about dying of exposure in the mountains but we knew that there was a real danger.

As we rounded the next bend we reached a miserable collection of mud houses at the small Kyrgyz settlement of Bulunkul.   A man motioned for us to stop.  He noticed the slashed tyre on the bike carrier and he motioned that he wanted to buy it!   In my wildest imagination I couldn’t guess what use he would have for it.

We continued through the rocky canyon flanking the Ghez River. The road was extremely rough and we had to ford several mountain streams and at times we were forced to dismount and carry our bikes over huge fallen boulders. The rich burgundy coloured sand stone cliffs in Tiger’s Mouth Gorge closed in around us.

I stood on the pedals to gain height because the road surface was rough and I couldn’t see more than a couple of metres ahead. We descended rapidly and I knew that we were going far too fast. If we braked in an emergency it would have been dangerous. As we descended the weather improved and the sun broke through in the proverbial land of four seasons a day.

We stopped in an old road works quarry to make instant soup and eat the last of our Tashgurgan bread. We’d saved a few dumplings from our breakfast and supplemented them with a tin of sardines that we’d been carrying from Gilgit.

Feeling buoyed by our morning ride and well fed, we set off at a cracking pace down a rapidly deteriorating road. We were fifty kilometres from Karakul Lake and blasting on towards Ghez when without warning my back wheel slid on a boulder. I skidded sideways and went careered across the road. As I lay on the ground I didn’t feel any immediate pain but my mind was reeling as I tried to assess whether I had sustained broken bones.

Roger screeched to a halt, raced back and hauled my bike to the side of the road to inspect the damage. Then he remembered to check on the damage to me!   I had left plenty of skin on the road and I had deep grazes on my hip and elbow but luckily there didn’t seem to be any broken bones.   We rolled out the medical kit – at least we could now justify carrying enough supplies to kit out an entire army field – hospital.   Roger poured a whole bottle of Mercurochrome into my wounds and bandaged my elbow. I was quite shaken and my grazes were stinging like hell but otherwise I was OK.   We plunged downhill on the last ten-kilometre stretch to Ghez and found a simple chai place for green tea.

I was already stiffening up and was feeling sore, bruised and sorry for myself. I feared that my grazed arms and legs would stick to the sheets! Call me a wimp but I didn’t relish a night in the tent sleeping on the rocky ground.

Roger found a room. “It’s a basic place and the family are happy to move out”. He said.   At that moment I could have kissed him and when I saw the basic room I was elated. The walls were covered with ethnic cloths and there was a pile of rugs and pillows on the raised mud platform. The family moved two large brass trunks out of the room and we moved in. All this for two dollars!

There were three generations living in the two rooms. The mother was the driving force in the family and she collected the room rent from us. Her husband stayed out of the way and appeared to earn his living playing cards with members of the local constabulary. Three cute little kids lived in the house and they ran the errands, performed chores and stoked the fire. Their grandmother was stooped and nearly blind and her husband had rheumy watery eyes and could barely hobble.

We spent the evening playing scrabble by candlelight in the local chai house. We ate noodles and vegetables and shared many bottles of lukewarm beer in the company of a couple of truck drivers.   The local policemen sat noisily slurping a bowl of noodle soup. I limped back to the room happy that I was not creeping into a tent.

xx

“Here! I’ve got one for you”. I said to Roger. Even though it was the middle of the night he was unfazed. We often had nocturnal conversations, sometimes on quite deep and philosophical subjects. Without waiting for him to reply I said “It’s a limerick about Tashgugan, want to hear!” “Yeah OK” Roger said offering me the very minimum of encouragement.

Their once was a man from Tashgurgan

Who had a young lover named Jurgen

You could see on his face,

That he hated the place,

And he’d rather be with Jurgen in Bergen

“It’s only a first draft and I’m working on the final version” I said defensively   “Goodnight Ian-kie “Roger mumbled and within seconds he was fast asleep.

The curse of the limerick had begun and from then on, the more difficult the town or village to rhyme, the greater the challenge.   Roger caught a massive dose and was only cured when he got back home. It was a plague of epidemic proportions.

I moaned and groaned about my cuts and bruises but I felt more human than I expected.   We had slept warmly, we were dry and we were remarkably comfortable. A small child barged into the room and started rummaging amongst a bundle of blankets at the back of the room. It was our cue to get up and get out.

I walked to the communal village toilet. It was a revolting experience that I couldn’t recommend to anyone the slightest bit squeamish. As I crouched over a stinking hole in the ground, a man greeted me, squatted over a fly infested hole, dropped his pants, farted loudly, opened a magazine and began reading!

I sat on a wall outside the house trying to warm up in the early morning sun. We bought freshly – made paranthas stuffed with onions and chillies for breakfast. I sent the kids to fetch a kettle of boiling water for coffee.

We were ready to leave Ghez, but we had to complete formalities at the police check post. Although it was abundantly clear that the official couldn’t read a word of English he made a big show of checking our visas and our photos before raising the barrier and sending us on our way. We made great progress and we covered forty kilometres in the first two hours. We calculated that we’d be in Upal by mid afternoon. Then Roger got a flat tyre.

Every time we had a puncture we used a new inner tube instead of fixing any of the old ones. We’d mixed them up we were no longer sure which ones we had holes or which ones were new. The first two inner tubes we tried already had slow punctures. The only way we could sort the tubes out was to patch all four spares right there by the roadside. We tried the “spit” method but we couldn’t see any bubbles to show us where the holes were. We immersed the tubes in a cut off plastic bottle full of water to look for the leaks.

We were winning the battle until a bunch of shepherds on donkeys drove a herd of goats and sheep along the road towards us. The animals stampeded blindly and knocked over my bike scattering the contents of the carrier. Hundreds of goats massed round Roger trampling over the patched inner tubes he’d left to dry.   Eventually we drove off the goats but we couldn’t get rid of the shepherds that easily. They fiddled with the gear levers and the speedometer and I was so distracted by the mayhem that when I looked up I saw a young boy mounting my bike for a joy ride.

As we finally hustled the shepherds away two giant trucks crossed in the road exactly where we were parked. They blasted their horns so loudly and came within a whisker of writing us off.

While we waited for the inner – tube patches to dry we clambered down to the river and enjoyed our first wash since leaving Tashgurgan. When we scrambled back to the road a man wearing a felt – winged hat and heavy overcoat appeared out of the blue and stared at us as if we had just landed in a spaceship.   We wanted him to remember us for the rest of his life so on cue; at the top of our voices we gave him a wholehearted rendition of “I Did It My Way”. He smiled as if we had done something perfectly normal, shook our hands and walked away.

An hour later we were pushing our bikes through an uphill, rocky section when James caught up with us.   Since we met him two weeks previously no other cyclist had passed us.   It was a blow to our pride especially as he caught us walking!   Other cyclists we met rode sturdy mountain bikes but James had a racing bike with thin tyres and drop handlebars and carried a large pack on his back.   He looked as if he was delivering passports from the Zambian Embassy to the White House.   James told us that Tim was “Aways back taking pictures”.   They set out in the morning from Karakul Lake and planned to cover 184km in one day!   And there was a very good reason for it.

James rested under a tree to allow Tim to catch up while Roger and I continued to ride through the canyon. We followed the course of the river between the spectacular rose coloured walls of the canyon until the road abruptly flattened out into sandy desert scrubland. It was blisteringly hot and time to look for a lunch stop.   What better place than one of our favourite storm water culverts?

We’d barely settled in our subterranean hideaway or had time to brew coffee when we heard shouts from James and Tim. They parked their bikes and joined us.   James explained why they were attempting this crazy 184km leg in one day. They wanted to reach Kashgar by nightfall. There was a fierce rivalry between them. Tim was an accomplished mountaineer and persuaded James to tackle the climb to Rakaposhi Base Camp. James fit as he was, suffered terribly because Tim set a punishing pace and James was determined to exact revenge.   James fancied himself as an endurance cyclist and had challenged Tim to this murderous day of riding.

We’d all read the cycling notes in Lonely Planet. The advice irked James. He poured scorn on the suggestion that riders experience a huge drop in daily average distances on the Karakoram. He said if you could cover a hundred kilometres day in Europe you could manage more than fifty with the same effort in Pakistan.

This technical stuff about carrying spares seemed reasonable advice to me, but James wrote the author off as an arsehole. “The advice about the third brake and the wheels is crap – he is full of bullshit” James said dismissively.

After lunch we were making good speed along a thirty kilometre boring, flat stretch of road that seemed to go on forever.   Shortly after we stopped to fill our water bottles, a gusting sandstorm blasted us across the road.   It was terrible, we were eating dust and our visibility was down to five metres and there was no place to shelter.

We struggled on for half an hour until we reached the outskirts of Upal, a rural ribbon stretching for more than four kilometres along the main highway. We looked for a place to camp and eventually arrived at a cluster of shops where a group of men sat chatting in the shade of the trees. We bought a couple of warm beers and sat on a wall to drink them.

Within minutes more than forty onlookers stood silently gaping at us. The men were dressed in suits and cloth caps. One man asked us “Country?” Roger proudly answered that we were from Nam Phi, which is ‘South Africa’ in the Vietnamese language.   He looked back blankly.   It was rather like answering a Frenchman in Romanian!

Eventually one man falteringly mouthed the word “Apri..ca” then followed up with “Nelso Mandela” barely able to contain his pride. So that was it – Jonty Rhodes in Pakistan and good old “Nelso” in China!

We ordered another beer and the show opened.   Roger swapped his cycle helmet for a winged felt hat belonging to an old man in the audience. He asked an onlooker to give him a cigarette and then with a liberal dose of mumbo jumbo and a great flourish he made it disappear. The audience was amazed and they returned flashing grins that showed off their gold teeth.

They pleaded for Roger to repeat the trick but the false thumb already had the cigarette squashed into it!   We ordered another beer and steadily proceeded to get pissed.   By the time Roger progressed to the card tricks things had sunk into a total shambles and no trick went according to plan.   Roger dropped the cards and of course it became obvious to everyone how the illusion worked!   We were definitely under the weather but being true stage artists we ended our act on a high note.   With a growing and captive audience we sang in full voice a tribute to the late, great Elvis.

“Are you lonesome tonight?   Do you miss me tonight?   Are you sorry we drifted apart?   Do the memories fade, on a bright summer’s day?”

We beat a hasty exit chased by a gaggle of small boys who wanted to see more tricks…. even the fucked up versions.   Tommy Cooper made his name by screwing up magic tricks so perhaps we were on the right track!

“Honey you lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you”

We followed a sandy track leading to the river and eventually shook off our fans.   We found the perfect campsite in a field shaded by trees and bushes. It took us exactly ten minutes to unload and begin rolling out the tent but in no time we had six small boys watching us!

“Now the stage is bare and I’m standing there with emptiness all around, and if you won’t come back to me, they can ring the curtain down”

I lay under a tree to sleep. Roger had more patience with the kids and sat talking to them. A boy bought us a handful of apricot stones and cracked them open and mimed to us that the kernels were good to eat. The children called their parents to watch the evening performance featuring Roger on the camping stove and me on the oxtail soup and instant noodles. The crowd was impressed but we were disappointed not to get a round of applause.

My hair was dirty and matted and I was filthy so I went to wash in a ditch. Obviously washing was not a popular thing to watch, as I only drew an audience of six or seven.

“Do the chairs in your parlour seem empty and bare; do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there?”

The sun dipped below the horizon, the mosquitoes came out to feed, our new friends went home and we were left to our Scrabble.

xx

By daybreak a crowd gathered outside our tent to catch a glimpse of us eating porridge and marmalade for breakfast.   I was experiencing a distinct end of term mood – we’d be in Kashgar today!

We packed slowly and show – boated for the crowd.   We could have said “Look how organised we are, we could do this blindfolded” There was a buzz of anticipation in the air when the onlookers noticed that we hadn’t packed our drinking bottles. There was a hushed expectancy.   Who would get a prized souvenir?

My guidebook said that the ride to Kashgar would be easy. The author had not reckoned on seventy kilometres of slow, gruelling, and unrelenting uphill riding into the teeth of the wind, he probably went by bus. We rode steadily through swirling sandstorms. Grit got into everything, our camera bags, bike chains, ears and eyes and up our noses.   We were wearing shorts and our legs got sandblasted.

It was monotonous riding along a wide, flat, tree – lined highway. The truck drivers who brushed past us with inches to spare provided the only excitement. They constantly harassed us and their hands seemed to be permanently taped to their horns. I asked Roger if he could think of ten things that he would rather be doing.

I tried to kick -start his thought process with a couple of my own suggestions.   For example – having his finger- nails pulled out by a Chinese border guard or worse – eating another bowl of channa in Shatial!

But his thoughts were a million miles away and when he spoke he completely floored me. He said. “Let’s ride to Kashgar by donkey!”   I mentally filed the idea, it was good enough for Jesus, but the Messiah didn’t ride down a busy Chinese highway or need to worry what he’d do with his bike!

We stopped at a Uiygur (pronounced weejer) serai for a bargain bottle of beer. At two yuan a bottle it worked out at fifty cents a litre!   The shopkeeper proudly showed off his radio and he tuned in to ten different Chinese stations.   He had an odd assortment of goods on his shelves, ranging from silk flowers (years past their sell by date) to candles and calendars. Chinese shops always stock hundreds of locks. This tiny shop displayed a dazzling selection from puny little things that a cockroach with big muscles could have opened, to huge padlocks that would test the skills of a safecracker. He’d never sell them all in a thousand years, so why is there such a demand in China? Is everybody a potential thief or are people just paranoid?

The shop – keeper sent us on our way and confidently told us that it was seventeen kilometres to Kashgar but as we turned on to the highway a sign indicated that it was twenty -one. In the end it was thirty!

The road was heavily congested with plodding donkeys pulling carts and dragging long wooden poles to Kashgar’s Sunday market. An old woman eyed me determinedly and blocked my progress; she clucked her tongue and cracked her whip. Her donkey burst into life and I was forced into the middle of the road almost under the wheels of a truck. She turned round and looked at me with an evil glint in her eye.

We bought bread from a stall outside a worker’s commune, dug out our marmite and ate lunch. As a symbolic gesture of victory we threw away the last two water bottles.

The guidebook gave sketchy, badly researched information on the stretch of the Karakoram between Sost and Tashgurgan.   Roger thought that it was quite understandable and said that the writers had probably never been to see for themselves. I was dumbfounded. “Roger, this is a fucking guide book we’re talking about. How can they write about somewhere they’ve never been?”

We rode through a nameless town with a main – street wider than three football pitches.   It was the first place since we crossed the Chinese border that had signs in Mandarin and not in Urdu.   “You can feel we are in a big town, this must be Kashgar” said Roger.

We never found out the name of this strange satellite town, but ten minutes later we had ridden right through it.   ”The Chinese must have built the main street so that they can land big aircraft if Kashgar airport is attacked”. Roger said.   I wondered why the aggressor wouldn’t just bomb the road while they were at it.

I rode over a bottle and got my first puncture only eight kilometres before we reached Kashgar! In Pakistan the roads were reasonably free of glass but in China they were littered with broken beer bottles.   We inflated the tyre at a filling station in hope that we could limp to Kashgar without having to change a wheel.  Within two minutes the tyre was flat again. Roger whipped the back wheel off and within ten minutes he’d fixed it. He had broken his personal best time!

It was a shock to be back in a big city. We navigated to the Chini Bagh Hotel through a sea of bicycles.   We were taken aback when the receptionist advised us that a room would cost two hundred yuan. I went to look but it was a shocker.   It was a founder member of The Dirty Carpet Hotel chain. We cycled to Seman Hotel No3. It was far worse, cost even more and from the state of the sheets should have been called semen. We went back to Chini Bagh and checked in.

After a while the room didn’t seem so bad. We had a piping hot shower (non – talking), a TV with thirty Chinese channels, and filthy curtains held together by ten years of dirt. I lay on my bed and studied the room service menu.

“Dear guests:

The Dinner Department will supply you assorted original – style cooked food, pure Muslims’ Cooked food and buffet or all kins of dinning car cooked food every day, please order, as you like.

Cahina hall is decorated in a natura and poised, simple and unsophisticated style, having the usage of multifunction.

“Hong liu Feast Hall is a product combined the minorities’ flavours with the modern high techndogecal measure, belonging to the sta-background dinig hall, all the arrangements of space and ouxurious, profund and full of poem-menaings, It is suitable to the big scaled dinner wedding baquets and chinese and foreign cool cocktail pareies.

Flavour hall is decoveion is unique and somewhat mysterous, this builing was decorated in england seyle taking the strong sentiment of the xinjiang. It makes the vesetors mind and ponder over together with the uniqur Islamic dinners.”

I pondered the possibility of ordering a snack and I wavered between ”steamed rice intestine with pasee bung” and the “stwed motton liver and kindey with cold vermicelli”. The “Roasting a whole sheep” seemed remarkable value at only 1200 yuan but, hungry as we were, I didn’t think I could finish it.

I flicked through the TV channels, it was four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and I had the choice of Chinese opera, a military marching band, a political rally or table tennis.

There was a loud bang on the door and an urgent staccato Chinese voice screamed something unintelligible. “For Christ’s sake piss – off”, I said, throwing the door open. It was the second time I’d fallen for the trick… this time James and Tim stood there grinning!

We arranged to meet them at John’s café, a supposed legend among travellers. The guidebook said “Foreign tourists often fall in love with the waitresses here”. I couldn’t imagine that any amorous tourist, however inebriated and sex – starved, would leer at these pouting, dumpy, spotty girls slouching about sullenly dispensing beers to thirsty customers.

We ate sweet and sour chicken and downed a few beers.   I was sorry that we didn’t dine at the The Chini Bagh restaurant I rather fancied the “shredded prok with peanues and fungas”.

I was elated to be in Kashgar.   I was stiff and tired but deliriously happy. Anything else that happened would be a huge bonus.

xx

We chained the bikes to the railings in the Chini Bagh courtyard. Tim and James met us there, they had news that Stefan had contracted typhoid and was recovering in Karimabad.   It didn’t surprise me as Stefan always drunk the local water and never worried what he ate. He would need to develop a strong immunity if he hoped to travel unscathed for ten years through the third world.

We cycled to the old city past the Id Kah Mosque and the main bazaar. The wide Renmin Dong Lu Avenue led past the Mao statue to the Sunday market.

Once a week people from the nearby villages stream to the Sunday market and Kashgar’s population rises to fifty thousand.   By sunrise the roads are an ocean of jostling pedestrians, horses, rickety donkey- carts, bikes, overloaded trucks, smart cars, buses and belching rickshaws.   Old men push hand- carts and shout “Boish Boish”as they try desperately to force their way through the tide of humanity.   Vendors sit cross legged in the road in front of piles of rugs, blankets, clothing, boots, hardware, junk, boom – boxes, wooden hoes, rakes and felt hats oblivious to the crowd.

We locked our bikes and entered a crowded restaurant. I couldn’t ignore the desperately low levels of hygiene; in this germ – ridden eatery – hepatitis and cholera were waiting to happen.   Even in this simple restaurant there was a washbasin and soap for customers to wash their hands and feet, but there was no guarantee that the chef would use it. Piles of pork fat lay on a fly infested slab, but diners didn’t seem to worry about the health risk as they tucked into steamed pork dumplings, mutton kebabs and copious pots of tea.

We ordered a pot of tea and some fresh naan.   I closed my eyes, took a gulp of tea and thought of the health risk that comes from drinking water or tea from communal cups and glasses. I couldn’t remember if my hepatitis jabs were up to date.

The livestock market was the most fascinating section. Thousands of sheep, goats, donkeys, horses, cows and a few haughty looking camels were corralled inside a vast enclosure. Prospective buyers could test-drive their purchases on a narrow strip of ground. Bearded old men sat arguing about the merits of the animals they hoped to sell and there was a hard business edge to the negotiations. Many people treated it as a huge social occasion, but when a deal was struck there were beaming smiles, handshakes all round and a shouts for trays of tea.

The market contained an astonishing array of goods. There were whole avenues dedicated to nothing else but brightly coloured cloth. Other streets specialised in second-hand radios and VCRs and others sold cheap electrical goods, crockery, pots, pans, and ornamental – daggers and carved knives.   There was a covered section where dozens of stallholders sold bicycles and components.   We noticed with some irony that the identical puncture patches we’d bought at home were on sale for a tenth of the cost.

We spotted Cycle Baba deep in conversation with an ageing hippie so we joined them and ordered a beer.   The last time we’d seen CB was when he was camped at Sost.   His friend sourcing computer components but CB assured him that prices were cheaper in Pakistan.   I was surprised to hear CB sounding off about computers as he’d previously told us that technology was a total mystery to him. Then I remembered that he was an authority on everything!   We sunk a couple of beers before eleven o’clock and we felt quite mellow. We promised to meet up with CB but we never saw him again.

I’d barely ridden out of the courtyard when I had another puncture. We’d taken a bet on how many punctures we would get on the trip. Roger reckoned on fifteen but I had faith in the tyre liners we’d fitted and I bet on seven.   This was the seventh so Roger owed me a beer.

We walked past the Muslim restaurants and the outdoor snooker parlours to the Seman hotel where Tim and James were waiting.   We were ushered into a small private room and presented with Chinese and Uiygur menus.   Beer is a universal word so that seemed like an appropriate starting point.   Two pints later we were no nearer to deciphering the menu.   A moon- faced girl wearing a mini skirt and bobby socks stood hovering over us expectantly.   She must have been hoping for an inspired burst from one of us in Uiygur.

“Only vegetables, meat no! Pig no, cow no!” Roger said snorting and mooing. “I want chicken but no beef,” James said clucking and doing flapping wing impressions

“I will have”, I started, but I knocked a beer bottle over and it went crashing on the floor and burst into a million glass shards. The waitress looked on in puzzled amusement. “I’m going to the kitchen”. Roger said in a final act of frustration. He left the room and we trailed after him but his stampeding progress was halted by a ‘heavy’ in a black suit.

We all trooped back and this time we tried to convey our order to “Mr Nasty” in the black suit – he wouldn’t have been out of place in a Chinese remake of Reservoir Dogs. More beers arrived and Tim said that he would eat “Anything, but I would like soup” “Anything” mimicked Mr Nasty scanning through the menu for inspiration. “Well we’ve tried our best, let’s pay for the beers and piss off”, said James in frustration.

Suddenly a smarmy waiter in a tight – fitting cream coloured suit entered the room. He could speak sixteen words of halting English but we couldn’t recognise any of them except chicken, rice and vegetables.   “OK. OK”, he assured us smilingly, “No probrem”. Mr Cream Suit reeled an order off to our waitress and she beamed at us, “No probrem, you beer? Understand I everything!”

The dishes kept coming until there wasn’t a free inch on the huge revolving table.   We had everything that we didn’t want. There was goat in oyster sauce, beef with bamboo shoots, sea slugs, mountains of rice and green leaf vegetables for Roger. Who cared? There was enough beer to go round.

We asked for the bill with some trepidation, but it came to less than six dollars each!   We were in an expansive mood and we gave the waitress a three- dollar tip. There was silence, she looked aghast.   What had we done?   It was more than a week’s wages. She looked furtively around to see if anyone else had seen her take the money and then slipped the notes into her bra and beamed an acne smile.

Sporting the biggest grins in Kashgar, we wove our way back to the Chini Bagh our red safety armbands flashing.

“Did you know? “said Roger, ever eager to improve his grasp of local languages “I’ve just looked it up and you can say ’wo chi su’ in Mandarin and ‘gushsiz’ in Uyghur”

“What does it mean Rog?” I asked.

“I am vegetarian”, he said triumphantly.

xx

China runs on Beijing time. Thousands of km away in Kashgar, people set their clocks and watches on unofficial Xinjiang time, two hours earlier. Buses and trains run according to Beijing time.

I found it very confusing, as I constantly needed to confirm whether people were talking local or Beijing time.   We got up at 6.30 when daylight broke, but officially it was only 4.30!

A Tim Robbins look alike runs the Caravan Café – in real life he is a teacher. The place is decorated in glitzy chrome, beech wood and had granite table- tops but more importantly it is squeaky clean.

The Caravan Café is unlike anything else in Kashgar or anywhere for two thousand kilometres.   NGO workers and expatriates meet and sip coffee in an oasis of calm and order. Foreign residents like it because they can forget that they are in a far – flung corner of China and kid themselves that the squalor and drabness outside doesn’t exist. For a few brief moments every day they can imagine that they are back home.

The croissants are pathetic imitations of the real thing and vastly overpriced, but we overlooked this shortcoming because, we too, enjoyed the civilised ambience after weeks of eating in grotty cafes.   James joined us, he was always stimulating company.  I finished reading a novel “Playing with Cobras” by Craig Thomas. It was a tale of intrigue, drugs and government plots set in Kashmir.   I enjoyed it and offered it to James who had just finished “The Great Game” by Peter Hopkirk but   James said that he wasn’t into novels.

Near the Mao statue China Telecom has a fast Internet facility. We chained our bikes to the railings and received a bollocking from an old lady who ran the official bike park next door.

I left Roger pecking at the keyboard and I went to the mobile phone shop next door.   I couldn’t believe that so many people owned mobile phones. I couldn’t work out how or where the chuppies generated their wealth, as the average wage was under $100 a month and the phones weren’t cheap.

We needed something to sustain us during the bus journey back to Gilgit. I enjoy mooching around supermarkets, but this was an eye – opener. A complete wall of shelves was taken up by booze. There were dozens of different beers and a selection of twenty or thirty white spirits. There was no dairy counter although there were tubs of sweetened insipid milky liquid. The snack department was fascinating but they had nothing as simple as cheese and onion chips.   I looked for something to nibble at with my beer, but the packets of dried octopus, chewy cuttlefish things and hundreds of other fishy bits you would normally chuck away were no substitute for peanuts. They had a display of the most extraordinary canned fish and after deliberating at length we settled on the fried sardines in chilli oil. It was a choice we were to regret!

Later we went to the Chini Bagh with Tim, James. We picked the restaurant purely on the basis that it didn’t screen non-stop kung fu movies. The waitresses wore half stockings and said, “It’s a pressure” and it was obviously her command of the language that the “English spoken here” sign was based. Ordering proved uneventful compared with the previous evening’s experience and I had a really tasty chicken dish with bamboo shoots and peanuts.

James was on great form, and with his beanie pulled down over his ears he not only looked like Mike Tyson but also did an impression that sounded more like Mike Tyson than Mike Tyson!   I tried to explain the rules of cricket to James because if he was going to spend a year in Pakistan he’d need a working knowledge of the game.   I tried to provide him with enough ammunition for him to join the conversations in Skardu but as usual when you start explaining the basics to Americans they make baseball comparisons. Bowlers become pitchers and batsmen are hitters and the whole exercise ends up nowhere!

“Name five famous Finns” James asked out of the blue. “Lasse Viren, Mikka Haakinen, and Parvo Nurmi” I started confidently but failed to finish.   I could have mentioned a couple of Premiership players but I knew I’d be shouted down. The only Austrians we could agree on were Hitler, Kurt Wadheim, Nickii Lauder and a bunch of classical composers.   But we all agreed that “Nelso” Mandela is the most famous South African.   They wouldn’t know Hansie.

We had an early night and trawled the TV channels. I hoped to catch a bit of Premiership table tennis.   I flicked through the heavy political discussions and the screaming, high pitched wailing of the Chinese opera until I settled on an interesting advertising insert for breast enlargement.

xx

We went to the bus station at the crack of dawn to see James and Tim on their way to Gilgit. James was in the courtyard fixing a broken spoke. We bought spare spokes in our kit but when I watched how James struggled I knew that there was no way I could do such a complicated job. I carried a spare chain, nuts and bolts and an array of tools but I hadn’t a clue what to do with them.   James could remove a back wheel and change a tyre in less than two minutes. “You can’t waste time fucking around if you want to be a bike courier. In Washington time is money” he told us. But still he still battled with the spoke!

The scene at the bus depot was chaotic. A dozen Pakistani traders piled boxes containing bicycles, crockery and electrical appliances onto the roof of a twenty- seater bus.   There seemed to be no system.   James bought tickets to Sost and their names were entered on the international manifest.   We said goodbye and left them to it!

We went to John’s for coffee and then rode to Telcom. A message from Franki served to remind me that in real life I lived in a country where bread came ready sliced in a plastic bag and where cuttlefish was given to budgies! She wrote.

“I paid the stupid fifty rand parking fine that I got in Rosebank months ago. Someone in the traffic department is stealing cheques and alters payee and the amounts. Some bastard removed all the writing except my signature and made the cheque out for fourteen hundred and seventy rands cash!   A teller phoned to tell me that a man using a false identity book called into Nedbank at Fourways to cash my cheque. They caught him in the bank and of course my cheque wasn’t cashed. The traffic department can go to hell if they think that I am going to pay them now”.

I hope that your radio picked up the results of the British elections. Labour romped home and there was a very low turn out. Less than sixty percent bothered to vote.   There was positive news from Pretoria last week.   There were only 13,500 rapes in South Africa this year between January and March – a drop of over 500 compared with the same period last year.

Roger, please don’t ask my husband to marry you and don’t take advantage as I am sure that he is very vulnerable!”

We went to the Mao statue, as I like having my picture taken next to world figures. So far I’ve got Ho Chi Minh, Attaturk, Ghandi and a few others so Mao is in good company.   So far I haven’t managed to get Mrs Thatcher or Tony Blair. I’m not sure when this immense edifice was erected because Mao was out of favour until recently although I noticed that his face is on the new banknotes.

We went to the Oasis café because we’d heard they served good food. Roger was disappointed and said that the place smelled of piss.   A sultry pouting woman of indeterminate age smiled alluringly and motioned us over to her table. She had bright red lips, her face was caked with powder and she wore clumpy shoes, half stockings, leather shorts with chains dangling from the waist and plastic clips in her hair and a tattoo of a snake on her left arm. Thankfully we hadn’t been away from home long enough to be tempted by her seduction routine.

Kashgar lies on the edge of a hostile desert in a cul-de-sac formed by the Tian Shan, Pamir and Kunlun ranges. But despite its isolation, Kashgar has been a key trading crossroads for over two thousand years and throughout time invading armies have recognised its strategic importance on the Silk Route. Surprisingly little has changed in old Kashgar with the passing of time and Id Kah Mosque still stands sentinel over the town just as it has since1442.

In the new part of the city the past has disappeared. The Mao statue and the military zone show how determinedly Beijing has stamped its authority on Kashgar and how they have successfully crushed traditional life. High-rise apartment blocks sprout on every inch of vacant land; department stores have sprung up everywhere. Sleaze and prostitution has changed Kashgar’s cultural face forever. Kashgar is slowly losing its soul as Beijing’s embrace tightens.

Old Kashgar is still in evidence if you take the trouble to scratch below the surface.   It exists in the narrow lanes where the day-to-day life of booksellers, tailors, merchants and artisans has changed little for hundreds of years. Blacksmiths carpenters and cobblers still ply their trades in the old quarter. Elderly men squat under the trees clutching caged thrushes, caught between two worlds, as they gaze at soap operas on public TV screens. Others sip tea on the balconies of crumbling houses while below coppersmiths tap rhythmically and shop owners display their wares to women wearing traditional dress. Tiny shops are piled high with spices, dried fruit, nuts and hats. The lame and blind beg outside the Mosque. In stark contrast, just across the square gangs of adolescents were bent on gambling away a few yuan at an al fresco snooker parlour. For them there is a new Kashgar.

We headed back to the Caravan café and ordered a pitcher of coffee and watched the passing show. A bewildered group of Americans were being hustled out of a small bus. They appeared vaguely disorientated and relieved not to be exposed to the real China outside. They wore name- tags. There was Connie from Iowa, Chuck from Delaware and Mary who told us that she was from “Noo Orleans”. They appeared apprehensive as they stared at the chaos in the street below but they “sure felt at home” with the huge servings of pecan-nut pie and cheesecake!

xx

We bought a couple of big blue and red bags in the market to pack all our stuff for the bus trip to Gilgit. You see these ubiquitous bags on airline carousels wherever traders move goods. Fat Russian women check them on flights from Delhi to Tashkent and African mamas from Zaire pack them with carvings.   We had enough stuff to give any of them a go!   We balanced our bags rather unsteadily on our bikes and wobbled dangerously to the bus station.

The bus station booking clerk was slumped asleep at her desk and it seemed a shame to disturb her! The fare to Sost was a rip-off forty – dollars. I asked one of the Pakistani traders how he could show a profit on ten bicycles after buying a round trip ticket and paying his living expenses for ten days. He explained that most of the passengers on the bus were not actually traders at all. Most were paid mules that carried goods for the few legitimate traders.

Residents living in northern Pakistan apply for a permit to come and go at will between Punjab, Kashgar and Urumqui. A trader explained that he did two trips a month and admitted that he declared all his purchases as being “for his own use” and in that way he avoided customs duty. A Chinese mountain-bike costing a hundred dollars sells for double in Gilgit or Lahore.

One trader had been to Urumqui to buy electrical components and said that it was worth the effort because he could make bigger profits but the two thousand kilometre round trip adds four extra days to a journey to Kashgar.

The bus driver demanded an additional fifty – yuan for each for our bikes before he would load them on the roof. The Pakistanis had to weigh their bags before loading them but a trader admitted that nobody ever paid the real rate.   He said, “We just give him a hundred yuan and he puts it in his pocket”.

We grabbed the last couple of seats and found ourselves scrunched up with very little legroom.   A man across the aisle wrote his name with a ballpoint pen on the white head cover of a seat in front. Roger was so incensed that he took out his own pen and began writing “Roger” on the man’s shalwar kameez!

Our bus was supposed to leave at eleven, but after all the messing about we were happy when we pulled out of the yard at noon.   A baby- faced policeman wearing an ill – fitting uniform that looked more like a child’s play outfit was assigned to accompany us.   He was obviously bored stiff and sat in the back picking at his fingernails and stroking his spiked hair. His presence was to discourage anyone jumping off when we were twenty minutes down the road to load illicit cargo.

An hour into the journey we stopped for lunch at a disgusting restaurant. We ate bread and drank a warm beer. I needed the toilet and was directed to a low walled enclosure with rows of holes in the ground. I gave it a miss and hoped that I could hold out for another few hours.

Roger fell asleep. I gazed out of the window hoping to spot some of the places we’d stopped at during the ride. The traders spat sunflower seeds all over the bus. We disembarked while the bus driver negotiated a fast flowing, knee- deep river across the road close to the scene of my fall. The snow had melted since we came through causing a serious wash away.

We reached Tashgurgan by six o’clock and the bus pulled up at the Traffic Hotel, which was convenient for us. We got the room with the talking shower again and it was very much a case of déjà vu. The sales manager welcomed us back like old friends.

xx

We pushed our bikes and shuffled down a long line with our heavy bags.   The traders stoically nudged their cumbersome packages and enormous cardboard boxes forward, waiting to be interrogated.   It was a shambles.   Eventually our things were cursorily inspected and we were waved through with barely a glance. I couldn’t imagine what the customs officials were searching for, as the Karakoram Highway was supposedly a trading route.   One of the traders opened a huge carton of sunglasses and surreptitiously slipped a couple of pairs to the official inspecting the goods.

Two Japanese backpackers were kicking a ball around with the Pakistanis outside the customs hall. A young Chinese policeman was hassling and haranguing passengers and herding them like cattle.   We were warned not to wander away from the building, but I was dying for a slash.   A policeman stopped me on the way to the toilet. I had to deposit my daypack containing my camera and cash with him.

Two gay Singaporeans who joined the bus in Tashgurgan said to me “Are they growing poppies in the toilet now?” There was absolutely no reason for his behaviour – it was another case of Chinese people control.

The bus driver and porters began reloading and I screamed at them not to load heavy things on top of the bicycle jockey wheel. I tried to make them understand that it would bend but undaunted they piled six red plastic chairs on top and strapped them down tightly.   A customs man operated an unofficial exchange bureau and was doing slick business with the Japanese at only seven rupees to one yuan.

The passengers were agitated by the delays and wanted to get moving, but the driver and the police insisted on counting and recounting heads. After several people had counted they still couldn’t reconcile the numbers with the details on the manifest but finally we got away.   Two minutes down the road the bus stopped at yet another check-post and two policemen boarded and conducted a systematic search of the inside of the bus while two goons crawled underneath with huge mirrors. Perhaps they suspected that political refugees were hanging on the undercarriage!

Just past Pirali, a man with a luxuriant beard pushed to the front of the bus and shoved a tape into the cassette player.   It was the full works.   An entire Muslim prayer service played at full volume on cracked speakers for over forty minutes.   Roger asked the driver to turn down the volume, but he refused.   The passengers protested that they were Muslims and that it was their prayer time. We threatened to play Christian tapes afterwards.

I don’t know what scared them the most, the threat of Christian propaganda or that Roger would write biblical texts on their shalwar kameezes but we made a fuss and they reluctantly turned down the volume!   Later the driver put on popular music tapes and Roger and I sang along to a catchy number that sounded remarkably like “Eat my doggie”.

We were hungry and we looked forward to the fried sardines in chilli oil, but they were absolutely horrendous. They smelled and tasted like cat vomit (or what I imagine cat vomit tastes like!).

We enjoyed the winding, spectacular journey down the Kunjerab Pass and I was amazed that we had mustered the strength to climb it.   An hour later we arrived in Sost to face the Pakistani Immigration and Customs interrogation, but this time it was relatively painless and in less than an hour we were free to go.

Against our better instincts we returned to the Mountain Refuge for another dose of their inedible rice and spinach to reinforce our belief that they served the worst meal in Pakistan. A few new comments had been added to the “Rumours Book”.

A Canadian was clearly pissed off about the new regulations that denied cyclists permission to ride to Tashgurgan. He’d drawn maps and described an elaborate scheme to beat the system. It involved creeping round the police post at night but it would be crazy to try. Anyone caught would be chucked in detention and next day quietly shot in the back of the head. It hardly seemed worth it.

xx

We ate ‘half fried eggs” and chapattis and surreptitiously helped ourselves to a spoonful of jam that the waiter kept hidden in the cupboard.

The hotel owner assured us that the bus would come. “No problem – don’t worry”. We spent an hour fretting until a minibus packed to the gills pulled in. The driver shoved our bikes onto an already over packed roof and shoe horned us in with another fifteen passengers.

We relived our adventures during the journey from Passu to Gulmit. We passed two cyclists supported by a back them vehicle up and somehow, seeing how easy they had it, made us feel good to have done it on our own. Children stood at the side of the road holding out bowls of cherries and apricots, but we rushed by, barely giving them a glance.

A huge rock fall just past Minapin rendered the road impassable for buses. If we’d caught the NATCO bus from Sost we would have been stuck.   Undaunted, our driver drove back a couple of kilometres forked off on a crumbling, rocky, steep gravel road.   It was the route that everybody used before the new road was built.

The villages we passed were unused to the extra activity.   Women pulled veils over their faces and scuttled to the safety of their mud walled houses.   We saw several schools and clinics that the Aga Khan had helped build. Our driver was understandably nervous of the overhanging rocks and gingerly avoided the edge of the road where it had washed out after heavy rain.   After an hour we reached a wooden bridge over the Indus and the passengers disembarked and walked across. We rejoined the road about ten kilometres past the rock- slide.

We stopped for chai at Aliabad. The route to Gilgit seemed so familiar, maybe because we’d cycled it so slowly. We reached Gilgit and the driver dropped a couple off outside their guest – house. We paid an extra seventy-five rupees for the bikes and were told to cycle to the Hunza Tourist Home.

We were greeted like long lost friends but we still had to negotiate hard for a rate of two hundred and fifty rupees. I entered my profession in the hotel register as “bulldog breeder” – the first the hotel had seen this year I wouldn’t mind betting. We unpacked, washed, planned the next phase of our trip and then slept until five o’clock.

We planned to trek to Rakaposhi so I needed a backpack. The mountaineering and trekking shops in the bazaar sold excellent used mountaineering equipment much of which was donated by foreign trekking and climbing expeditions. I spent an hour bargaining for a backpack that I eventually bought for twelve hundred rupees, but an hour later I regretted my choice.

Yacoob greeted us with a bear hugs and kiss. It was quite touching. The staff seemed genuinely happy to see us. Yacoob asked us what we thought about the Chinese people but I knew what he wanted to hear. “The country is very spectacular but the people in Pakistan are much friendlier,” I said diplomatically.

When we ordered the Thai vegetables Yacoob responded with his customary, “And why not?” While we waited I designed an advertisement for my bike although in truth I didn’t hold out much hope that I’d find a buyer. I was selling the bike and all the extras cheaply but the cycle bags and the helmet had little value to a local. If any backpacker decided on a whim to cycle to China it would be sheer good fortune.

I put my notice on the board. “$650 Nishiki Mountain Bike for Sale. Don’t confuse it with supermarket rubbish! Bargain of the Century! Do the Karakoram and then sell again! Includes camera bag, two large back panniers, carrier, water bottles, gloves, helmet, shorts and shirt”.

A man said that he would “maybe offer $100!” I wanted to rid myself of the hassle of loading the bike on buses for the next month when Roger left. But I didn’t intend to give my bike away.

Forty babbling tourists from Punjab sat at a long table on the lawn outside our room waiting for their evening meal.   The hotel manager said he didn’t know why Punjabis came to Gilgit for their holiday. “There is nothing for them to do and they don’t enjoy it anyway”. He was happy that they were leaving next day.

There once was a young man from Sost,

Who got completely and utterly lost,

When he arrived in Gilgit,

He was deep in the shit,

He bought an atlas and bugger the cost.

xx

I tuned into BBC and through the crackling airwaves I heard that the Crown Prince of Nepal had wiped out most of the Royal Family in a shooting spree.   Kathmandu declared a state of emergency and I could imagine all the edgy backpackers cloistered in their rooms. They should start heading for Pakistan because it leaves Nepal for dead when it comes to trekking.

We washed the bikes with the green shirt I’d been wearing since the start of the trip and it made an excellent cleaning rag!   It cost two dollars in Bangkok and it was a small sacrifice. Roger went for a haircut and a shave and for the princely sum of forty rupees promised to have a trim every week.

xx 

We cycled uphill past the jail and the airport to the North Inn. The game between Pakistan and England was on TV and a crowd had gathered to watch. It looked cold in London, the umpires were wearing anoraks and the players wore two sweaters. When Marcus Trescothick was given out first ball after nibbling at an out swinger from Wasim Akram there were enormous cheers and nervous glances in our direction.   We ordered curry potatoes and settled down to watch the game.

Franki sent me an e –mail. “Today is Saturday 16^th June and it is a beautiful warm sunny winter’s day.   It is a bit too hot to run Comrades. The oldest runner is a seventy three year old judge doing his twenty sixth. The guys are running at 3mins 20secs a km and they reckon that Bruce Fordyce’ record of 5hrs 24mins may be broken. The leading nine runners are local black guys and the tenth is Russian. The African TV reporter said that the runners must stay “Fok us”.

We called into in Ikram M Beg’s Bookshop and Adventure Tour Company. He told us that his father was killed in an air crash in the Karakoram Mountains and how to this day the aircraft has never been found.   Roger bought Peter Hopkirk’s “The Great Game” which is essential reading when you are travelling around the Karakoram. It’s about the 19^th century cold war between Britain and Russia and every second backpacker has a copy under his arm.

xx

Roger went out at first light to buy bread to eat with our green tea. We sat outside the room smearing our hot naan with honey before packing our hiking gear. We rode to the Madina wearing our backpacks and deposited our bikes in the care of Yacoob.   As we walked towards the bus station we saw a NATCO bus conductor touting for passengers so it meant that the road to Sost was open and the blockage had been cleared.   The rattling old bus only had ten passengers aboard.   We drove through a heavy downpour, the low grey clouds threatened more rain.

When we stopped for chai Tony joined us at our table. He was dressed in a shalwar kameez and at first we didn’t recognise him as a westerner.   I couldn’t believe it when he told us that he was a serious climber. He lived in the Derbyshire Peak District and came to Pakistan to climb Concordia, a technically difficult mountain ascent.   He was lugging sixty kilograms of ropes and specialised mountaineering equipment. He was looking for someone to share the cost, as he couldn’t afford the climb or to hire of porters on his own.

Twenty minutes later we drew to a halt behind a line of traffic that was backed up behind a huge rock fall. The road was impassable; the largest rock blocking the road was the size of a house and clearly the road maintenance team would need a few days to blast a way through. The fare for the three- hour journey was only seventy rupees but our driver refunded us thirty rupees, which I thought was extraordinarily honest.

We clambered over a four hundred-metre stretch of fallen rocks. It was far more dangerous than we first thought.   People coming from the opposite direction were running at full tilt, many carrying huge bundles on their heads. One man had blood pouring from his head where a rock had struck him.   Another was nursing a broken arm after being hit by a chunk of falling debris. A minibus driver approached us touting for passengers. He was running a shuttle service between the blockages.

A trader from Peshawar asked if we were going to Sost.   We told him that we were only going as far as Minapin, but he had no idea where it was!   Nevertheless we squeezed into the minibus. I tied my pack on the roof but as soon as we left it began to pour with rain. I cursed myself because I had packed lazily. I knew that I should have insisted on forcing the pack inside. I was worried that my journal would be waterlogged and my clothes and sleeping bag soaked.

We reached another rock fall but the driver wasn’t easily thwarted!   He back- tracked to a gravel road leading to the river and we recognised the wooden bridge that we crossed a few days earlier.

Mr Peshawar, our trader friend, was completely befuddled. He started his journey two days before and had travelled through the night from Islamabad. He was on his way to Urumqui to buy electrical components and it was the first time that he’d done the road trip. He usually went by air but he thought that it would be an adventure and a chance to get to know his own country.

I asked him how he made a profit after deducting his travel and accommodation expenses. He agreed that it wasn’t easy to make money because electrical goods were almost as cheap in Peshawar as they were in Kashgar. The traders don’t to factor their travelling time into the equation otherwise these arduous trips wouldn’t be worth it. Most probably go for the Kashgar hookers.

We got out at the Minapin turn off and headed up a jeep track towards the village. We’d walked five minutes up the track before Roger discovered that he’d lost his watch. He was convinced that it had come off when he got out of the bus and strapped on his pack. He decided to go back to search for it. I threw a stick into an apricot tree to shake some fruit down, something I hadn’t done since I went scrumping as a child. Roger came back twenty minutes later – his watch was gone.

We walked at a good pace until we came to a bridge where the village fathers had painted a very clear warning on a huge rock!

It read, “Instruction for visitors – photographing from female is prohibited”

The village of Minapin lies at the foot of Rakaposhi where the steep glacier climb to base camp begins. We found the Diran Guest House and we were pleasantly surprised to find a hostelry so far off the beaten track.   Isara, the manager, welcomed us and showed us a spotless room with a cavernous bathroom for three hundred rupees. I was despondent about my sopping wet clothes, but after I laid them out to dry and rescued my papier -mache diary I felt better.

Trekkers had been hanging around for two days waiting for the road blockages to be cleared and most were anxious to get back to Gilgit.   When we told them that we had been able to clamber over the rocks and rubble, they packed and left.

Over an outstanding vegetarian dinner we listened to Jay’s left wing philosophies. Jay spends two months at the Diran every year. He stays very comfortably in a cottage in the orchard and seems to spend most of the time with his nose in a book.

Jay was born in Lahore but he lived in England for more than forty years and studied at the London School of Economics. His early days in England, his skirmishes with the Jews in Finchley and Mrs Thatcher’s heavy-handed politics moulded his political opinions. He gave up his legal career when greater financial rewards beckoned and became a financial consultant.

xx

When Isara knocked on our door at five o’clock we were wide-awake. Even at that hour the cook was on duty to make fried eggs and toast for breakfast.

The weather was clear and the sky was a brilliant blue – there were magnificent views of Rakaposhi. We followed a track to the top of the village and made a loop round the base of the mountain. We slogged uphill along a narrow path beside an irrigation channel and skirted a grove of poplar trees. When we reached a wooden bridge over the river the glacier and the crest line was in our sights.

Our steep ascent through the woods was hampered by hundreds of goats that were being driven down the path by shepherds. Women were picking their way down with heavy woven baskets on their heads. When we greeted them they completely ignored us and averted their eyes. I suggested to Roger that he shouldn’t acknowledge them he said that he’d “felt funny” doing that.

The going was tougher than we expected and we were both breathing heavily. In spite of our cycle fitness we were still finding walking at altitude hard going. Our packs weighed about eleven kilos even though we stripped our equipment down to a minimum. Mindful that weather conditions can change rapidly in the mountains we were carrying cold weather gear.

After two hours we reached Green Garden, a summer campsite. Ali, the man in charge offered to rent us a small tent for fifty rupees. He assured us that we could reach base camp in three hours and descend in another two. If we left by ten o’clock we could make it back for overnight.

We took a short cut up a very steep path, but we got hopelessly lost and had to navigate back to the path and scramble over loose stones and moraine. The trek to base camp was easy but thankfully we didn’t have to cross the glacier.

With the forest and pastures behind us we reached a crest and had a clear view of the 7200m Diran Peak.   We worked our way gingerly along a very narrow rocky ledge that edged round a contour. There were no hand- holds and the path was very slippery and it had deteriorated badly after the recent heavy rains. The footholds were treacherous and the risk of falling was very real. The glacier field stretched far away to our left. I looked into a gaping drop- off and I didn’t feel too confident about going on. We stopped just before Tagafari at the point where it was dangerous to continue and as we didn’t relish the thought of plunging hundreds of metres into a chasm, we decided to bail out.   I wasn’t sorry to be turning back because we’d had superb views of the summit and the glaciers and we lived to fight another day.

It was tough on our knees and thighs on the way down but otherwise it was an easy descent through meadows of wild flowers.   We hired a tent from Ali and sent him off to make tea and chapattis.   We played Scrabble on the grass but by four o’clock the sun dipped below the mountain and it became bitterly cold. We ordered dinner without asking Ali the price and that is always a mistake. He served kerosene flavoured noodle soup followed by rice, spinach and dal and his piece de resistance that was bizarrely, jelly and custard!

We crawled into our tent by six thirty. When you are sleeping in the cold on hard ground in a tent under the stars, the money- mad, materialistic mentality in our society becomes irrelevant. Seeing the day-to-day struggle of ordinary people put my trouble free life into clearer focus.

xx

It was freezing during the night and our breath formed ice crystals on the canvas.   It was a struggle to get up but we crept out of our sleeping bags several times to go for a piss. The sky was absolutely clear and Rakaposhi appeared silvery in the moonlight.

Ali asked if we wanted breakfast but his overpriced dinner aggravated us both.   We told him that we would wait until we reached Minapin and he wandered off, grumbling to himself while we packed and left.

We ambled slowly towards Minapin, we were both stiff and our knees were sore. The descent was more painful than the ascent and I felt my age.   We reached the river by ten o’clock and by then we were raving hungry. We circled the village beside the irrigation channel and cut between the walled houses and the wheat and potato fields to the Diran guesthouse.

Isara set up a table in the orchard under an apricot tree and served us a stack of pancakes, fried eggs and a pot of coffee.   The walled garden was sublimely calm and peaceful and the orchard had mulberry, apricot, cherry and walnut trees and was carpeted with wild flowers. Roger was engrossed in The Great Game while I planned my trip to Chitral over the Shandur Pass.

We ate a huge plate of chips for lunch and staggered off to the room for a three-hour sleep! At four o’clock we took a leisurely stroll through the village. Kids handed us ripe juicy apricots and cracked the pips and took out the tasty young kernels for us.

Melting snow fed an ice-cold, fresh water pool in the garden. We went for a swim but we felt self-conscious wearing skimpy swimming trunks in front of an audience of gaping men. Although they must often see guests using the pool it was clear that they disapproved of such blatant display semi-nakedness as Muslims rarely take off their clothes or expose their arms and legs in public. We felt naked in front of them. The question remains, if it is so sinful and they find it so abhorrent, why did they watch?

We played scrabble in the orchard until dinner. A few guests arrived from Sost and as the road was impassable to the south they’d been forced to stay overnight. The other guests at the dinner table were a Sikh from Ontario and a young Frenchman from Lyon and they planned to climb to base camp together.

The walls in public areas of the Diran were decorated with pictures and photos of Princess Di and this quirky trademark has become something of a legend.

Over dinner of rice, dal and delicious local meat pie Jay held court. He expounded his economic theories and his liberal and left wing views were like listening to a vocal editorial of the Guardian. He launched into a conspiracy theory and said that the CIA were trying to dominate the world economy.

I asked Isara what he thought about the disgraced former president Benazir Bhutto. He said that that people in the northern areas detested the military junta and that they supported her. Isara’s father stood as a candidate in the Northern Areas Parliament, but he was narrowly defeated because he refused to buy votes. He has now retired to a village near Gilgit and farms fish.

Jay said that corruption was the greatest evil in Pakistan and until it was eradicated there was little hope for the country. I was curious about Imran Khan’s politics and why, when he stood on an anti corruption ticket he had failed to win a single seat.   Jay said he lacked a political power base and had no chance of success without it.

Imran Khan stood on an anti corruption ticket but his party Tekreek-e-Insaaf fared so badly that a British newspaper ran a headline” Clean bowled for nought”. A BBC film crew caught him during a light- hearted moment on camera.   He was on the phone to his wife Jemima as the results were announced. “It’s a landslide”, he said.   As Jemima began to congratulate him, he cut in to say” No the other way!”

xx

I woke with a steaming cold that I’d probably picked up on the ride to Minapin. I tried to doze but a persistent fly kept me awake! I gave up and went to the orchard for breakfast. We stayed for an extra day to chill out and wait until the road to Gilgit was clear. During the morning I ate so many apricots that I developed a bellyache. For lunch I had chap shore the local ground mutton pie but Roger steadfastly kept to his vegetarian diet.

Isara didn’t tot up the tea, coffees and drinks we’d had so when I asked him how much we owed for the meals and he replied, ”As you like”. I took the menu and relying on my memory I calculated that we owed about twenty – five dollars for three day’s full board!

xx

It was pitch dark when I squinted at my watch.   It was four o’clock and Roger was already in the shower.   I’d grown used to him crapping three times a day and I tolerated his limericks during the night, but this was ridiculous!   I remembered that he’d lost his watch.

“Roger” I said trying to maintain my composure. “Do you know what time it is, or are you just guessing?” “I think it’s about five thirty,” he said in total innocence.

“Well I’m going back to sleep for at least another hour”. I said rolling over and disappearing into my dream. I met Roger in the dining room for coffee. Isara confirmed that the road was open and that we’d be in Gilgit by eight.

The bus crawled slowly through the village picking up passengers.   I asked the driver if I could sit in the front seat beside him but he shook his head and said that the front seat was reserved for women. When we got to the mosque two burly men jumped into the front and an old woman squeezed in next to me!

Giant – sized graffiti in the scree on the mountainside proclaimed, “Welcome Aga Khan our glorious Imam”. It was squashed next to “Proud to be Pakistani” I wondered who wrote the slogans and how long they took.

The women in the bus had rough coarse hands and feet, luxuriant moustaches and grotesque protruding teeth. The rest of their bodies were covered but that was probably a blessing!   They hung out of the window for most of the journey – one spitting and the other vomiting!   Many Afghan widows are forced to turn to prostitution.   Were these worn and haggard women refugee hookers?

We passed a group of school – kids dressed in their gingham shirts and ties and most of them looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. They were the same bunch that chucked stones at us when we cycled past on our way north. After our first experience with stone – throwers in the Kagan Valley we learned to spot a potential threat and to make pre -emptive strikes.   When the kids picked up stones we screamed at the top of our voices, dismounted and threatened to chase them.

It was enough to send them scuttling into the bushes.

When we got to Gilgit and we strode purposefully past the post office to the Madina. We ordered our customary breakfast of coffee, pancakes and local yoghurt.

Yacoob sent one of his minions to locate the driver who was going to take us to Chitral.   After a bit of light – hearted haggling we agreed a price of eight thousand rupees for the three – day trip.   We reminded the driver that we had two bicycles but he shrugged and said that it wasn’t a problem.

I decided to do some horse – trading with my new backpack. I thought that I’d got a deal when I bought it, but it didn’t take long to realise that it was far too small for all my stuff. I’d seen a pack in the bazaar that was big enough to hold a sleeping bag plus all my other belongings and I was determined to cut a deal.   I hoped that the guy in the shop would take my small pack as part – exchange. The owner was a shrewd operator and told me that my pack was rubbish, but he said that if I paid an extra ten dollars we could strike a deal.

I tried to alter my flight date from Islamabad to Johannesburg. An email from Bev confirmed that flights from Dubai were overbooked. Roger insisted on sending a message to Brigit about our ride. I couldn’t see why it was urgent as he could contact her when he got home but he snapped at me. I was surprised because his reaction was so out of character! He was right to be aggravated as I had been nagging him like an old woman!

In the evening we went to the Madina for the last time and met old friends. It was a Karakoram reunion, as we hadn’t seen Nick and Harald since Kashgar and Malcolm and Chris since Rawalpindi.

xx 

While we sat on the veranda sipping tea and musing about the fun times we’d shared a guy rushed up to us and asked whether we had any insulin! He seemed genuinely surprised when we told him that insulin wasn’t something we routinely carried in our medical kit. His friend had just suffered a diabetes attack and he needed a doctor urgently.

Our jeep had pitched up on time and our plan was coming together so we felt mean not to offer to help. We were between a rock and a hard place because if we took him to hospital in our jeep we wouldn’t have a hope to reach Kalti Lake by evening. We had a long, arduous journey ahead of us and we couldn’t afford a delay. He eventually managed to get a taxi to take his friend to hospital so we were able to leave feeling slightly less guilty about leaving them in the lurch.

The previous evening Abdul assured us that it wouldn’t be a problem to transport our bikes. He obviously hadn’t carried one before!   Roger strapped the frames securely onto the fender while I removed the wheels. We cut up our foam sleeping mats to provide padding around the jockey wheels and to give the frames some protection against chafing. By the time we’d loaded our carry bags, backpacks and camera equipment there was barely room for passengers. I squeezed into the back seat but soft-top roof was so low that I couldn’t see when assuming a semi prone position.

The going was incredibly rough for the first two hours and we only managed to do twenty kilometres. We passed a creaking, decrepit bus on its regular run to Gupis but otherwise there was no traffic. We drove beside the Gilgit River until we got to a suspension bridge at Bargo. We rattled on to Gulapur where we made a welcome stop at a charpoy hotel for green tea. If I was cycling to Chitral this would have been my first overnight stop and it would have been a tough day. At Singal we were flagged down and directed to the police post where we had to enter our passport details.

Abdul wanted to make a stop at his home and like it or not we had little choice.   He parked his jeep, told the children to guard our things and directed us across the fields to a mud walled house. As we entered, the women covered their faces and scurried away.   We were ushered into a bare room and Abdul motioned for us to sit on the floor on a pile of dirty cushions.

Abdul’s interior decorator was on holiday when he furnished the room. On the wall an ancient calendar depicting a freedom fighter brandishing a Kalashnikov took pride of place. Next to it a vase of knitted woollen flowers had been placed high up on a shelf.

A grey haired man joined us and sat cross- legged in the corner and began picking at his teeth.   He couldn’t speak a word of English and all he could do was smile at us.   After twenty minutes a young girl arrived with a tray and served us fried eggs, chapattis and biscuits.   She sat on the floor next to the food and fanned the flies with a small bundle of leaves.   Abdul cautioned us against taking pictures of the women.   When I asked for the toilet he told me to go into the field!

We left an hour later and made slow progress to Garcuch police post – the gateway to the remote Ishkoman Valley. We’d covered seventy kilometres in five hours. The road wound out of Garcuch and climbed high above the river. Our driver pointed out the spot where a jeep plunged over the edge killing three backpackers. It was a chilling reminder of how challenging a trip could be and not for the first time a backpacker fatality was turned into a morbid tourist attraction.

We registered with the police at Gupis, the third checkpoint in less than a hundred kilometres. Two months earlier while camping by a river near Gupis a Czech girl had been murdered and her boyfriend had mysteriously disappeared.

Two months before the girl was found in a pool of blood beside the river. The police discovered her equipment, valuables and passports untouched.   A search was conducted for her boyfriend but the police found no trace of him.

I asked Jan Alam, the officer in charge of the investigation, what he thought had happened. He said that violence was very rare in Gupis. He believed that in a close knit community if a local committed the crime it wouldn’t remain secret. He dismissed my suggestion that the girl was raped and that the boy’s body was dumped in the river.

Jan allowed us to flip through the police file and confirmed that the case remained open. He shrugged at the suggestion that the boyfriend probably murdered her. The murder remains a mystery and the story becomes more gruesome with every telling. The girl’s family erected a shrine and the Czech flag fluttered at half-mast.

Kalti Lake was formed after a major flood and we’d hoped to see the deep aquamarine colours for which it is famed, but it was dull and overcast.

There was no other alternative to the Karim Lake View. The terrace would be a great spot to enjoy a cold beer, but we had to make do with tea.

It was bone chillingly cold so we crept into bed to warm up and slept for an hour.   Roger went for his customary wander but he found little more than a couple of small houses and a shop selling candles and biscuits. We dined on rice, dal, chapatti and the dreaded spinach!

 xx

We breakfasted on chapattis and honey on the veranda. I went to settle for our room and food and found the chowdikar huddled over a Primus stove in a dingy kitchen. He totted up our bill and it came to five dollars including dinner and breakfast!

We followed a rough track beside the Ghizr River until it merged with the emerald green Bathraiz River at Dahimal. Schomberg ventured here over a hundred years before and an interesting insight into life at that time can be gleaned from his book Between the Oxus and the Indus. He was the archetype acerbic British officer that clearly found the dramatic landscape nobler than the people. The old buffer was clearly bigoted. From his account very little seemed to have changed since he passed through.

When he questioned the people about their squalid houses, they told him that they were lazy and hated hard work. They admitted that their houses were humble and miserable but they simply couldn’t be bothered to build better ones. Did it strike Schomberg, I wonder, that the villagers spend six months inside their houses in winter sheltering from the snow?

We noticed that the houses had open skylights in their roofs at Chashi. When Schomberg saw then over a hundred years ago he commented, “The temptation to lob stones into some of them was hard to resist”.

We crossed the river over a narrow wooden bridge and climbed steadily to Phandur along a track dug from the moraine of a receding glacier.   We hoped to find food at “Over the Lak Hotel” (sic) but other than a wooden small hut where a chowdikar was brewing tea on kerosene stove, the place looked deserted. Nobody other than a desperate cyclist would dream of patronising the place.

The houses were built so close to the track that the jeep could barely squeeze past. We stopped at a hut where a huddle of men sat cross-legged eating steaming bowls of channa. There weren’t any tables or chairs, just a couple of wooden platforms. We stretched out and slept for half an hour while our spinach, dal and chapattis were prepared.

The jeep track continued through fields of bright yellow flax to Barsat, the last settlement before the Shandur Pass. The government declared a moratorium on illegal weapons and police had set up a temporary post in a tent. People with their own personal arsenal were being urged to surrender their guns and ammunition. Hundreds of rifles and dozens of automatic weapons were piled in the tent so I jokingly remarked that the police were having a successful day. The officer said that the arms they’d collected didn’t represent a tiny percentage of the estimated number of weapons in circulation. He posed for a photo and obligingly slung a Kaleshnikov over his shoulder and gave me a beaming smile.

We began the tortuous ascent of the 3734m Shandur Pass on a track that wasn’t particularly steep or high, but the rocks and gullies made it very slow, rough going. If I’d attempted the journey by bike I’d have been pushed to the limit for most of this stretch.

In 1895 Colonel James Kelly made the most famous traverse of the pass. He led an expeditionary party to relieve the British forces besieged in Chitral Fort during the depths of winter. His men hauled heavy canons to Chitral through shoulder deep snow. Undaunted, the two hundred and fifty Hindus and Muslims working shoulder to shoulder dragged two mounted guns with their carriages and supplies of ammunition across more than thirty kilometres of deep soft snow and over the Shandur Pass. They finally relieved the siege of Chitral.

Since 1936 the polo ground at the top of the Shandur Pass has been the annual venue for the most spectacular tournament in the world. In early June Gilgit and Chitral play the polo match of the year in front of thousands of enthusiastic spectators.   It is the equivalent of Spurs v Arsenal only with considerably more passion, but when the people, ponies and jeeps leave the windswept plain is deserted save for a few isolated tented chai places.

Abdul stopped at a tent for chai but we were keen to ramble over the polo ground and walk a couple of kilometres down the pass.   He picked us up again an hour later and we drove at snails pace over an atrocious road down to Sor Laspur. Abdul was keen for us to stay the night at his friend’s house, but we urged him to carry on to Mastuj.

The mountain road winds alongside rock and scree slopes to Mastuj. The village sprawls out across a large alluvial plain in a sublime setting. Apricot and jujube trees dot the village and bubbling streams and irrigation channels run between golden wheat and barley fields.

Abdul pulled to a halt at the top of a narrow alley. A couple of small kids rushed from a house, grabbed our bags and showed us to a basic but light and airy room.

In my wildest imagination I didn’t think that Roger could drag out a limerick about Sor Laspur, but he was equal to the task and I awarded him ten out of ten for bad taste!

Anyone reading this account that may be of delicate disposition or who will be even the slightest bit offended by anything not politically correct should skip the next few lines. Given the circumstances I make no apologies, vulgarity is the whole point!

There was a young man named Jasper,

Who had anal sex in a Casper,

With a glint in his eye,

He unbuttoned his fly.

And said this will be Sor Laspur

xx 

“I don’t want to think about going home”, Roger said. He also didn’t want to think about work or where he was going with his life!   He wanted to forget the world and enjoy his breakfast. Who wouldn’t – the Chitrali bread – ’Khasta Shapik’ a thick baked round loaf and ‘shupinak’ a delicious, thick, creamy cheese was delicious.

The relaxed, welcoming atmosphere at the Tourist Inn was like a breath of fresh air after the more conservative villages we’d stayed in.

Roger put on a magic show and made a cigarette disappear to the delight of the kids, but it was Shahid the owner who pestered Roger to show him how it was done and tried to persuade him to spill the beans!

We left Mastuj over a narrow suspension bridge across the Laspur River and immediately were rewarded with views of the majestic snow – covered peaks of Tirich Mir. In the folds of the barren rocky mountainside there were isolated oases of rich green irrigated farmland. Gnarled old women were hard at work in the fields. They wore brightly coloured caps over their long plaited hair. We watched small boys chase a soccer ball around in the dust, but we never saw anyone wielding a cricket bat while we were in the mountains. .As we neared Chitral the women covered their faces and the villages were obviously far more fundamental.

We stopped in a shady garden in Buni for tea. The weather was exceptionally hot for June and it was a relief to escape from the searing heat and be able to stretch out on a charpoy for an hour.

Abdul dropped us at the Chinar Inn in Chitral. The rooms are clustered inside a small walled garden and it is a quiet haven a million miles from the hustle of the bazaar.   We did our laundry, hosed the dust off our bikes, showered and crashed out for two hours.

Foreigners must register with the police when they arrive in Chitral. When we got to the registration office it was crowded and chaotic and typical of most government institutions in Pakistan. Huge bundles of dusty files lay in long forgotten stacks and clerks laboriously filled out the permits by hand. We stood in the queue, shuffled forward, filled in a thick yellowing book and left. But what did it mean to anybody?

A couple of jeep drivers we’d seen in Gilgit hung around outside touting for passengers for the return trip but they complained about the lack of business. How long I wondered would they have to wait.

We’d been told that Anwar’s was the best restaurant in town. We were looking for somewhere for our Last Supper but it was dreary and uninspiring. Nevertheless, Roger ordered a bowl of soup even though we were going to eat dinner in another hour. He was ravenous. That is Roger, sometimes impulsive, nearly always hungry and unfazed about eating two meals within the space of sixty minutes!

We rode to the Mountain Refuge Hotel to send an e -mail but there are only four telephone lines in the whole of Chitral and it was impossible to get a connection.

We went back to Anwar’s where I ate a tough, bland and vastly overpriced mutton biryani. It wasn’t gourmet dining by any stretch of the imagination, but it was made considerably worse by the proprietor. He suffered from serious verbal diarrhoea and   he was hell – bent on boring us shitless with an incoherent, garrulous history of the Kalash from the time of Alexander the Great.

When we returned to the Chinar we found that the place was full to the gills. We got speaking to our next – door neighbour. Michael was 40ish and came from Seattle. He wore his blonde hair in long greasy shanks and dressed in black jeans and a Harley Davidson T-shirt. He planned to cycle over the Shandur Pass. Five years earlier he’d cycled on his Cannondale bike round India for a year. He was no raw novice in these wild areas. He said that he’d sleep outside or bum accommodation with the local villagers so he didn’t carry a tent or cooking equipment. I think that my account of the condition of the road made him nervous. He was worried that his chain would break so I sold him my spare for fifteen dollars.

xx 

We packed and rode shakily towards the bus depot – it was still barely light. Roger had a massively overloaded bag because he’d offered to carry my panniers home.

We drank a pot of sweet green tea at a chai stall and said an emotional goodbye.   Roger gave me a huge hug. I handle farewells pretty well, but we’d some shared incredible experiences and I had a lump in my throat. As Roger boarded the jeep he slipped me a present wrapped in newspaper. It was strange to think that I’d be travelling alone.

I ate my naan with the last of our honey and stored my bike and luggage at the Chinar.   I intended to find a jeep going to Ayun and then I’d try to get to the Kalash Valley from there. I opened my present, it was the all-purpose brush we’d been using it to clean the bikes, our nails and our dirty clothes.   His note read, “To remind you of those Afghan scrubbers”.

After spending two hours kicking around at the jeep station I was beginning to get bored. A fight broke out and it livened up the proceedings. Two jeep drivers were arguing about whose turn it was to leave first and what began as an innocuous verbal sparring match turned into a full on punch up.

After a furious exchange of blows blood began to ooze from one of the drivers’ eyes. It looked like a serious cut. The crowd managed to separate the adversaries, but in the absence of a referee, the injured driver grabbed a rock and rushed at his opponent. He dealt a sickening blow on the side of the head and the other driver was pole – axed. He got to his feet and charged like a raging bull but after another flurry of punches the police stepped in to quell the dispute. I never found out who left first – within five minutes I was on my way.

I squeezed into the front seat of a dilapidated jeep. Habib introduced himself and asked if I was an American. He worked at a bank in Ayun and he’d been commuting every day for three years from Chitral. He was curious about why I was apparently floating aimlessly around this part of Pakistan. We had barely set off when Habib asked if I was happy with my wife and although I was flabbergasted I kept my cool.

Without waiting for my reply he said, “I’m not,”

Then he said, “Are you wanton?”

Wanton was a word that I’d only stumbled across in a biblical context and I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly.

He launched into a confessional monologue.

“I am wanton, I have feelings for other women but they are repressed. Do you have feelings for other women? Because you are old, perhaps you don’t have wanton feelings, but I am only forty and I can’t stop myself from looking at many young girls and I think that makes me wanton” he said in a matter of fact voice.

I was momentarily caught off guard. I regained my composure and explained that in western society there is more natural contact between men and women than in strict Muslim countries.   I was floundering and trying desperately to squash the discussion.

He pressed on, ”Our Imams forbid women working in offices because their presence encourages men to be wanton. Many men meet women at work in the city and they can’t control themselves.   How do you control yourself?”

“I just don’t think about it. It doesn’t really affect me”. I said, pointedly gazing out of the window.

He was not deflected that easily. “Many men in Pakistan are homosexual are you homosexual sometimes?”

It was time to kill off this line of questioning. “No I am not and I don’t want to talk to you about personal things”.

“OK, can I ask you the meaning of the word euthanasia?” I was relieved to escape from his obnoxious line of questioning.

When we reached the grubby, ramshackle main street at Ayun I alighted and attempted to orientate myself. I was met by unfriendly stares. When I asked at a shop where I could get a jeep to Balanguru, but he pointed up the hill and told me to flag down any vehicle.

Within minutes a jeep pulled up with dozens of men packed inside, even more were hanging on the back. A mental picture of the wild Taliban zealots one sees pictured in National Geographic flashed before me. I threw my backpack on the jeep and jostled to secure a handhold and I struggled to find a place for my feet on the bumper. I was clinging on for dear life as the jeep careered along at breakneck speed. The standing passengers had to duck as the jeep passed under the overhanging rocks and at times I thought that my arm muscles would give out as we rattled down a boulder-strewn road.   A man grinned and said “Kalash bus”.

Twenty minutes later we reached a fork and the jeep turned off towards the Bumburet Valley. The driver motioned for me to get off and waved me away to a police post. Two Chitral Scouts in smart uniforms and feathered hats manned it – they asked for 100rupees and said that the toll was a contribution towards the welfare of the Kalash people. I started walking uphill to Balanguru.

It was blisteringly hot and there was no shade. I had a bottle of water that I knew wouldn’t last for long but I hoped to find a spring or stream to top up. I followed the Rumbur River valley past a track that forked off to the summer – grazing pastures.

I walked through the Kalash villages of Kot Desh and Baladesh before reaching Grum where I splashed water on my face and filled my bottle in a bubbling stream.

I could see animals grazing higher up the slope and I hoped that the water was not contaminated. As I walked I helped myself to apricots from trees hanging over the track.

Three hours after I left the police check post I crossed the river and entered Balanguru, a picturesque, traditional Kalash village that lies in the shade of huge spreading walnut and jujube trees. Wooden houses clung to the hill so close to each other that a roof of one formed the front yard of the next.   I asked where I could sleep and a man directed me to a house perched on a ledge high above the river. The house was in a quiet garden and the room was good value for six dollars including meals. The bed was designed for a midget and the ablutions were primitive, but I wouldn’t find better.

Phil Borges had been in Balanguru for the past week and he was hoping to meet and photograph the village shaman. He gave up his orthodontic practice in Seattle seven years ago and took up professional photography. Since then he has undertaken assignments in Iriyan Jaya, Mexico, Mongolia, Peru and Ecuador in search of unique pictures. He made his professional breakthrough with his work in Tibet and Amnesty International commissioned him to do a book. Phil said that there was no money in photographic books but he used them as a showcase to get more lucrative work.

The Kalash Valleys used to be an integral part of British India before they were incorporated into modern day Pakistan. The steadily shrinking Kalash community now numbers about three thousand and they make up the smallest minority group in Pakistan. As their numbers dwindled they settled in the valleys around Chitral and the refugees were granted land in the valleys of Birir, Bumburet and Rumbur.

During the days of British rule the Kalash people were protected from forcible conversion to Islam. Muslims labelled the Kalash people as kaffirs because they don’t believe in God, as they understand the word. The Kalash believe in Khodai or Dezao, the Creator whom they believe can be worshiped anywhere. In times of natural disaster or serious illness, the Kalash appease God with prayers or sacrifices.

A wizened old gnome named Lami came to see Phil. He spoke almost no English and he is one of the few people left in Balanguru that can still recall and recount the legends and myths handed down by generations and he claims to communicate with spirits and gods. He is funded to the tune of thirty dollars a month by a French aid organisation. In return he conducts Kalash folklore to the local children.

Saiffullah Jan is the first Kalash to be educated outside the valleys and he now acts as the official spokesman for the community and works tirelessly to protect the valley forests from commercial logging. He introduced me to Karen, a Danish woman on her twelfth visit to Balanguru. She first visited Balanguru in 1989 and she has developed a close affinity and friendship with the villagers. She is fiercely protective of the Kalash, adopts traditional dress and speaks the language fluently.

When Phil told her that Lani was taking him to meet the shaman she reacted sharply and said, “You should pay him well, not like a porter, you should treat him fairly and reward him properly!”

I asked Phil why she had such an obsessive interest in the Kalash.   He said that he encountered people like her all over the world and described her relationship with the Kalash as possessive rather than protective. It was the old “noble savage” syndrome and in effect she was saying,

“These are my pet people don’t come near them, don’t spoil them or even try to bring them into the 21^st century.   I discovered them and I want to keep them just the way they are!”

xx 

While I tucked into my eggs, chapattis and milky tea I asked Saiffulah if tourism really benefited the Kalash people. After all Muslims own most of the guesthouses in the Kalash valleys. The Punjabi day-trippers that come to Balanguru for an hour and click off photos of the local people as if they were at the zoo irritated him. He is also disturbed when packs of young Muslim men hassle the women and confuse the Kalash women’s freedom from purdah with sexual promiscuity.

Both anthropologists and tourists seemed to be trying to keep the Kalash valleys as a living museum. Even the backpackers I’d spoken to in Chitral whinged that electricity and clean water had been installed in the valleys!

When tourists visit minority groups they want to see the unique and colourful aspects of traditional life and initiation rites. People are encouraged to adopt local costume and give demonstrations of their daily activities just for the sake of money. If they wore jeans and T- shirts, the supposed authenticity disappears and tourists would lose interest. In the case of the Kalash, there is a grave danger that their sacred religious rites and traditions are being reduced to tourist side – shows. Nevertheless Kalash women have grasped the idea that just by wearing their colourful costumes they can earn good money. The income they generate enables them to embellish their costumes

I walked to Shaikhanandeh at the head of in the Rumbur Valley. The village was dry and dusty and the houses were clustered together on the hillside. They appeared no different from those in Balanguru even though it was a Muslim community. I headed towards a mosque with a corrugated iron minaret. There were five clocks on the wall each set to indicate different prayer times. A teacher at the mosque told me that the villagers had converted from the Kalash faith to Islam generations before. The lives of the Muslim women in Shaikhanandeh are a world apart from the colourful Kalash women living just a few kilometres down the valley.

I left the village through the wheat fields and crossed the river to rejoin the path from where I had a clear view of the sacred mountain where Kalash shepherds graze their sheep in the summer months. I knelt by an irrigation channel to wet my face and head to cool down and then went to sit under a grove of mulberry trees by the river.

Women were laying out the apricots to dry in the sun. I asked if I could photograph them sitting under the walnut trees. They held out their hands and asked me for money. Although it went against the grain, I offered an old woman fifty rupees and took her photo. When was about to take a second shot, she waved me away angrily saying “Bas bas” (enough, enough).

In the afternoon I walked to Grum.   A young man called from a shop, “Hi there, Hansie Cronje!”   I found it incredible that in this cloistered community where there was no TV or newspapers that they had heard of Hansie. I was even more surprised when they reeled off the names of other South African cricketers.   When I asked how he knew that I was South African he laughingly replied, “ Here in Balanguru we know everything!”

A group of visitors from Lahore came into the shop to buy cool drinks. They seemed affluent and less conservative than the women in Chitral and only their heads were covered.   A teenage girl with an American accent told me that she had been living in Georgia for twelve years. I asked her whether she covered her head when she was in America and she said. “Don’t be ridiculous we only do it here out of respect for our elders!” She was trapped between two worlds and didn’t feel either Pakistani or American.

I spoke to her aunt about life in Lahore and when she left I instinctively held out my hand.   She returned my handshake and immediately looked down and said, “That is the first time that I have ever shaken a man’s hand. I don’t know why I did it. It is against our culture”. I mustered a wry smile as words escaped me.

A mathematics teacher invited me to visit the school. I asked how teaching mixed classes of Kalash kids conflicted with his Muslim beliefs. He said that the kids didn’t care but the parents disliked and mistrusted all Muslims.

Later when I got back to the house I sat with Saiffulah’s son. He was a spotty, weasely youth with ginger coloured hair. I suspected that his xenophobic attitude towards Muslims had been sparked by his father’s views but nevertheless I urged him to tell me more about Kalash family life.

He said that the Kalash people pool their labour and wealth. Family ties are strong and households comprise both close and distant relatives. Several generations live under the same roof. The Kalash are generous, diligent, religious and honest and   greed is despised.

Women live under a strict code of rules. They are forbidden to enter an area of the house referred to as Omjesta and their living space is smaller than that of the men. By day women must stay below the highest water channels in the fields and village. In summer they go to the lower pastures. When they return to the village in autumn the common areas of the house are purified and they cannot enter.

If there is a funeral procession to another valley, it is led by the women. They enjoy total freedom in their personal life and within the strict rules governing incest and periods of abstinence; a woman can decide whom she wants to marry. If a man pulls his wife’s plaits or insults her, she can leave the house and can take a lover.   She can even select the man she wants sex with!   Men complain bitterly about “women’s choice” but they accept the situation stoically!   I didn’t dare ask how frequently men claim to have headaches! Disputes over fields and women’s elopements are the main causes of jealousy and community conflicts.

Women plait their hair at the front and back and wear a small ring – like headdress with a long tail – piece hanging down at the back. They wear a ’ku pas’ for protection against the sun on top and adorn their heads with cowries, buttons, beads and brass.   These embellishments indicate the valley they live in, but nowadays new local fashions have become popular.   When a woman dies a close female relative wears her ‘kupas’ during the mourning period and they tie their black baggy dress with a broad scarf. Dresses used to be woven from homespun wool but women now buy ready made dyes and printed borders. The heavy bead necklaces that cover the necks and breasts of the women may only be removed during mourning.

Phil was conducting a feasibility study with a view to installing a satellite to link Kalash kids with schools in Seattle, children in a remote Iriyan Jaya valley and a Samburu school in Northern Kenya. Bill Gates has provided the finance and $350.000 has been set aside for the project.

In view of the amount of money involved it was hardly surprising that Phil was able to get the odd grudging picture from the village women! I remarked to Phil that the village women asked me for money to take their photo and that I’d been wrong – footed by such blatant commercial exploitation. I asked Phil if he ever paid for photos of “lost tribes”.

He said, “I pay for all my good pictures! Sometimes its cash, but often I buy footballs, clothes, food or even a new roof for a community hall.”

xx

When I came to settle my bill with Saiffulah he told me that nobody kept change in Balanguru! I knew that he was bullshitting and that he expected me to overpay. I didn’t trust him, and thought that his motives when dealing with Phil were self-seeking.

Phil arranged for a battered Datsun truck to take him to Bumburet and he offered me a lift. I squatted in the back with Phil while Saiffulah rode in front! The road was terrible and I was glad that I had walked to Balanguru and didn’t have to do the trip twice.

Bumburet is the Kalash valley most accessible by passenger jeep.   It is also the most picturesque and there are villages scattered between long fertile stretches of cultivated land.   The jeep track climbs through the villages of Gadiandeh and Anish to Brun. I looked for a place to stay.

The Afghan cook greeted me at the Ishpatta Inn in Brun.   He showed me to a dark dingy room with a wet and slimy bathroom. The price was two dollars, but I wasn’t in the mood to search for anywhere else.

Dale told me that his wife and five children had been living at the Ishpatta for two months. He and his family have adopted Kalash dress and he said that visitors sometimes mistake his children for Kalash kids. Visitors sometimes ask permission to take pictures! His wife was pasty faced and unfriendly. She looked as if she had jumped off the pages of a National Geographic magazine!   Dale was a linguistics professor and he was in the process of compiling an “English to Kalash” dictionary. The Australian government provided his funding. After chatting with him it occurred to me that his own command of English was limited.   I asked about his previous experience and he told me that he had studied Turkish at university.

I’m sure that as time passes he will find an acceptable Kalash translation for “G’day cobber that’s hard yakker yer doing” and “Don’t come the raw prawn”

I ordered a plate of chips and a pot of milky tea and sat on my veranda.   For the first time I felt that I was truly alone. The sun was belting down so I slept until urgent drumming from Grum woke me. In celebration of the harvest the villagers dance and sing all night and only stop at first light.

As I walked through the village a group of Kalash children pulled faces at me.   It happened before in Balanguru, the kids obviously thought that it was funny but it was rude and ill disciplined. I got the impression that the people were unfriendly and were driving their livelihood (tourists) away.   I met a man who I’d last seen hanging off the back of the jeep I travelled on from Ayun. I bought a Pepsi and sat down on a low stool with my new friend. Minutes later he offered me a joint!

I stopped to watch the men shaking the branches of a mulberry tree while a group of women caught the fruit in a sheet.   The kids were streaming away from the school.   In stark contrast with the Kalash kids young Muslim girls were covered from head to toe and looked like sad little bundles of laundry.

xx

It was seven o’clock and I was hungry, but only the flies were awake.

I saved some dal from last night and ate it with some stale chapatti. The bleary – eyed Afghan cook shuffled from the kitchen at six with a tray of sugary, milky tea and dumped it in front of me.

I set off while it was still cool and wandered slowly up through the villages leading to the head of the valley. The shade of the mulberry, willow and walnut trees formed a canopy over the path.   Women pulled faces at me but as I didn’t raise my camera I wondered why they did it.   A woman wearing Kalash dress asked whether I had medicine to cure her baby’s pus-infected eyes. I passed a scruffy campsite where a group of bored and feckless Punjabi youths were kicking a soccer ball around.

When I reached Shaikhanandeh the last village in the valley I stopped to chat with a man who was busy mending his roof. He offered to take me on a nine-day trek over the mountains to Afghanistan. As I was leaving he called out, “Bring me a bicycle next year”!

I sat on the lawn at a trout hatchery with a man I’d met while I was walking from Ayun. He offered me a joint and then asked whether I could help him with his English pronunciation.   He was learning spoken English from his “Teach Yourself English Conversation” book and pointed to the page. I asked him to repeat after me, “Business is not very good today!”

When I got back to the Ishpatta Inn I ordered a plate of chips. I could have done with some company but Dale and his family were downright anti social. They would become very bored after six months if they remained so insular. They would soon be crying out for some mental stimulation – even from an itinerant backpacker. They can look forward to a lonely experience because neither Muslims nor Kalash people will accept them – with or without local dress.

BBC announced that Slobodan Milosovic had been taken into custody and would stand trial in The Hague for war crimes.   *The U.S. Ambassador in Pakistan paid a visit to the Taliban government in Kabul and he warned that they would be accountable for any strike against America by Al Quaida.

*Who would have predicted the horrific events of September 11 that occurred barely two months later?

I shared my chapattis and dal with millions of flies and mosquitoes. I sat in darkness on the veranda outside my room and drank endless cups of milky tea for which I’d developed a taste and waited for the generator to kick in at eight o’clock.

xx 

I left by six and walked towards Grun.   Within minutes I stopped a cargo jeep going to Ayun. The seats soon filled up and another ten people clung to the back.   I paid ten rupees for the trip to Ayun and it was more thrilling than any fairground ride.

When we reached Ayun passengers stampeded towards another battered jeep. As usual, when you can’t speak the language and haven’t got a clue what is going on you get left behind.   I wandered aimlessly around the bazaar trying to find out when the next one was leaving for Chitral. When a jeep screeched to a halt I sprinted towards it, slung my bag into the back and won the battle for standing space on the back bumper.   Eventually I wormed my way into a “knee screaming” crouch inside and I jostled for leg space with twenty bearded old men and a couple of children.   An hour later, nursing stiff and aching muscles we reached Chitral.

I retrieved my bike and baggage from the Chinar Inn storeroom. There didn’t seem to be anybody else about but people usually only arrived after lunch. It was wonderful to shit and shower in a bathroom that was not a festering swamp.   I was mindful that I would soon be home and I would have to start looking respectable. I clipped my nails, trimmed my eyebrows and shaved until I was fit to take my place in a corporate boardroom!

I went to the Mountain Inn and ordered a large pot of coffee and sat in the shade under the trees.   My only tasks for the day were to make a bus booking to Peshawar, pay my 250 rupees and arrange for the driver to collect me from the Chinar Inn.   No problem, don’t worry, be happy!

The room was hot and stifling even with the windows and door wide open. I tried to cram my equipment into my backpack. It didn’t fit but I managed to squash everything into the big plastic Chinese bag and hoped that my things would be protected from the dirt and dust during the trip over the Lowari Pass.

I joked with shop owners along Shahi bazaar about the massive bundles of useless Afghan currency they were trying to change for dollars. You could get a bundle of Afghanis the size of a brick for a dollar but there were no takers. Many Afghan refugees glad of finding sanctuary away from the repressive Taliban laws have opened cheap restaurants in the lower part of town.

Piles of Afghan and Chitrali rugs and carpets, antique tribal jewellery, lapis and turquoise stones, embroidery work and wooden chests and more boxes than you could shake a stick at were everywhere. Wizened tailors sat in dark shops stitching a soft hand woven woollen material into intricately embroidered gowns, rugs and bags.

I was mystified to see so many gun shops in the main bazaar. Who needed shooting?

xx

I had a terrible night.   It was so hot that I took five cold showers to cool down. I lay dripping wet directly under the fan and allowed the water to evaporate. This method of cooling guarantees a raging cold and skin dry enough to turn you into a lizard.

I was nervous that I wouldn’t wake up in time but I needn’t have worried. On the dot of 4.30 there was an urgent rap on my door.   The driver stood there ready to load my bike and bags!

For the next hour the minibus trawled Chitral’s fleapit hotels picking up passengers.   Six Afghans boarded at a decrepit hotel in the main bazaar and slung their huge bundles on the roof. We stopped at the army housing quarters to pick up a man, his three children and two wives, each of whom wore a long black dress and veil.

The road to Drosh ran next to the river – it’s the town where the Chitral Scouts have their HQ. I registered at the police check – point at Ziarat at the start of the long and tortuous climb over the Lowari Pass.

I ask myself the question. Why do bus drivers stop at the darkest, dirtiest restaurants? Most of them deserve an Egon Ronay prize for the shittiest establishments in the universe? It remains one of life’s great mysteries!

As if to prove me right, the driver pulled up at Abdul’s Greasy Spoon for the first of his six daily doses of goat stew and naan.

I sat in a dark corner drinking chai. Two men motioned me to share their naan and raita. When I said that I was South African they told me that Nelson Mandela was the greatest freedom fighter the world has known.

I wouldn’t have made it if I was cycling over the pass; it would have been a killer, as the road to the 3118m summit was little more than a track. We crawled through the switchbacks in the cold and mist. The Lowari Pass is only officially open from June to October, but drivers attempt the journey too early in the season when the ice and snow on the road is treacherous. Many die in horrific crashes.   Rusting trucks and buses littered the mountainside.

The driver stopped at Dir for yet another helping of goat stew. Afterwards while he hosed down his minibus I grabbed a carton of mango juice and a packet of coconut creams. I feared that I was becoming addicted to these sickly biscuits.

In the Dir sweatshops legions of artisans produce pen- knives, large knives, swords and daggers – the ornamental type of weapon that one sees in any Asian shop from Bradford to Ladysmith. It is the biggest industry in the region by far. Who buys this junk?

We left Dir behind and descended to the chaos, squalor, dirt and heat of the real Pakistan. In the crowded, noisy bazaars there were piles of melons, chickens in cages, donkeys tethered on stakes, mountains of plastic and mosques. I was already nostalgic for the purity of the mountains.

The bus stopped to let the men off for prayers. While they prostrated themselves I calculated that a devout Muslim living for another twenty years would spend three years on his knees!

We veered off the busy trunk road to Peshawar and raced through several small villages until we emerged at a busy crossroads. It seemed to be either a squatter camp or a place to catch transport to the border. The Afghans piled out and I wondered if they were returning home and why?

As we neared the city I searched frantically for a recognisable landmark. The streets were chaotic and congested and a choking, eye-stinging blue haze of fumes hung over the city in a permanent cloud. The driver asked where I was going. I said that I wanted the old city and he shot me a quizzical look and ordered me to get out. He asked for a hundred rupees for transporting the bike on the roof.   I hoped that he had forgotten, as I hadn’t paid him in Chitral.   I was pissed off, as the extra charge was a big rip off.

I established that I was at Bala Hisar Fort. I strapped on my backpack and cycled towards the main road.   I just had one problem – I had no idea where I was going!   I stopped to consult my map and a group of curious onlookers quickly gathered round. Even though most of them had no concept of how to read a map they irritatingly snatched it from my grasp and began talking animatedly. I reclaimed the map and none the wiser cycled in the general direction of where I hoped to find a suitably cheap hotel.

My brain was boiling and I was streaming with perspiration as I lugged my bike into the lobby. Within minutes I was embroiled in a verbal sparring match with the manager of the Heritage Hotel over the room that he allocated to me. It was a small claustrophobic monk’s cell with no windows and no fan. When I went to the front desk and rattled the cage, Asif, the manager grudgingly agreed to throw in a free breakfast if I agreed to stay for three nights.

Having nothing more productive to do, I watched Zimbabwe lose narrowly to Pakistan on a black and white TV. Then I enjoyed several cold showers.

I walked to the old city where I found a lively Afghan restaurant. The chef stood over a row of baltis cooking Qeema – a minced mutton in tomato and onion gravy – over a flaming fire.   I ate until I was ready to burst and settled my bill – twenty rupees.

xx

I got up late and went to the dining room for my free breakfast. I had my own waiter, in fact I was the only customer – probably the first they’d had for weeks. Breakfast was far better than I expected – fried eggs, toast and jam and a bottomless pot of coffee. It made change from spinach and naan.

I stepped out of my cocoon and into the real world.

Guns for sale

Within minutes of getting off the bus in Peshawar I passed a dozen shops selling guns and ammunition. I soon grasped the fact that in Pakistan it would be a doddle if you wanted to shoot your wife or blow away your boss!   You can buy a gun more easily than a pair of shoes and you don’t need to wear it in.

Thousands of meticulously crafted firearms are being churned out in primitive workshops deep in Pakistan’s tribal mountain region. Artisans produce faithful copies of Kalashnikov assault rifles. Berettas and Chinese pistols are ten a penny. The wild and lawless people in the rugged mountain region along the Afghan border fervently believe that freedom and the right to carry arms go hand in hand Islamic militants steadfastly ignore the call to voluntarily surrender their weapons and there is a sinister fanaticism that flourishes in the hearts and minds of their rapidly swelling ranks.

Overwhelmed by curiosity I called into a gun shop to enquire about a Kalashnikov – thinking that it would make quite a cool fashion statement.   The owner enthusiastically demonstrated the twelve bore pump action and said that I could take it for five thousand rupees.

“What identification do I need?” I asked.

He looked at me with a mixture of indifference and bewilderment.

I explained that although the price seemed reasonable I hadn’t had time to shop around for quotes before I left home so I’d need an hour or so to think it over.   I weighed up the merits of owning one. It seemed to be quite a bargain and it would certainly work out cheaper than paying ADT to keep assailants at bay.

A quick volley from a Kalashnikov would be more effective than a barking dog. It wouldn’t take an intruder very long to understand how serious you were about security.

G.T. road is a madhouse – a cacophony of noise, choking fumes and more battered vehicles than I’d seen since I was in Bangladesh. Passengers clung onto the backs of colourfully painted buses as if they were enjoying some kind of manic fairground ride.

It was local Election Day so Peshawar was on holiday. 270,000 voters were going to the polls to elect representatives from more than 1,200 candidates. An election monitor explained that candidates were depicted as symbols on the voting forms.         You could vote for a hockey stick, a cup and saucer, a lock, a bicycle, a lamp or an electric iron – even a donkey. The streets were festooned with bunting and the walls were covered with posters and political slogans, but there appeared to be voter apathy.   I wondered what the politics of the bicycle could be. I understood the donkey.   A man told me that the hockey stick was his friend.   “What does he stand for?” I asked. He shrugged and said. “He doesn’t like Afghans. He wants them to send them back”.

A man called me into his bookshop.   While we squatted on the carpet he offered me tea.   He told me that he owned a bookstore in Kabul until the Taliban accused him of selling non- Islamic books and burned down his shop, torched his house and cut down his fruit trees. Now he’d shaved off his beard so that he wouldn’t be mistaken for a Taliban supporter. He showed me a couple of ancient books and translated passages written by the Afghan king. He dramatically put his hand on his heart and declared his undying allegiance to him. He thrust a copy of an illegal underground newsletter that condemned the Taliban’s defacing and destruction of the Buddhist images at Bamian.

While we were talking he fiddled incessantly with a sheaf of crumpled papers and then unfolded a letter from an American consular official who was, he claimed, helping him enter the USA as a refugee. He asked his son to read to me from his school English book and then asked how many sons I had. When I told him that I had just one daughter he stared balefully at me as if expressing his condolences!

The bazaars in the old city were a kaleidoscope of colour, sounds and smells. Crowds jostled against a tide of bicycles, donkey carts and rickshaws. Narrow alleyways led to shops selling everything from vegetables to ornate gold and silver jewellery. There was a street where more than thirty pharmacies sold pills and potions. Deep in the recesses of Islamic bookshops old men with henna – red beards and thick glasses poured over religious texts. They conducted business over cups of green tea, their endless small talk interspersed with tough bargaining. At first I couldn’t understand why bundles of discarded clothes had been thrown into the road until I realised that they were veiled women who were crouching with begging bowls at their feet.

I stopped for a bowl of rice pudding in a tea – shop in the crowded Afghan bazaar and it was good, but not like my mother made! Then I bought mangoes and a freshly baked naan wrapped in newspaper and headed back to the hotel to escape the oppressive heat of the streets. In my stuffy furnace of a room it was ten times worse!

xx

The room boy greeted me as I opened my door.   I told him that I was going to cycle to the museum and he responded with a huge smile. He said, “You are a very beautiful man, are you a sportsman?” To which I was forced to reply -”Say no more, nod nod, wink wink know what I mean?”

I cycled over Rail Bridge to new Peshawar. My guidebook said that entry to the museum entry was free but the rule had changed and they were charging foreigners a hundred rupees, so I gave it a miss. Instead I idled the morning away in a subterranean e-mail place where the computers had been rescued from the ark. It was the cheapest place that I’d found anywhere in the world and at twenty rupees an hour I could afford to peck at the keyboard with two fingers. I produced what I thought was a mini- masterpiece until the computer bombed out and I had to start my epic from scratch.

A shady character sidled up and tried to strike up a conversation with me. I told him that I’d been to Afghanistan in the 60’s. He asked if I wanted to visit a hashish factory in the Khyber Pass.   When he realised that he was wasting his time he volunteered to show me his carpet shop. “What do you have to sell, I buy anything – camera, watch very good price!” he said as I walked away.

I flicked TV channels and tuned in to the ”Sub Continent Swimming Championships” in which India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Maldives were competing.   It was like watching a cricket tournament involving Paraguay, Somalia, Togo and Hungary – only not as good.   I may be doing the competition an injustice, but Somali century makers and Hungarian leg break bowlers are rather thin on the ground.

Most events followed the same pattern.   India failed to make the starting line, Bangladesh won by a mile and the Maldives competitors finished just as the rest had showered and were boarding the team bus. Funny! When I was in Bangladesh I didn’t see a single swimming pool and at Cox Bazaar, the only beach in the country, any man that braved the waves did so in their long trousers or shalwar kameez.

I found a crowded restaurant serving chapli kebab – a round flat burger made with mince, chopped onions, eggs and tomatoes that for less than a dollar put a Big Mac to shame.

xx

Clean, calm and organised were not words that immediately sprung to mind as I cycled through the gates of Peshawar’s main bus terminus.   Frankly it was chaotic.

I was assailed by a pack of jostling touts. They grabbed my bike and began to hoist it onto the roof of a bus even before they’d established where I was going. They were desperate to earn a few rupees commission. I’d promised myself that I would stay calm and take my time to find a decent bus for the journey to Lahore, but the hangers on continued to snap at my heels. They hounded me until my resolve crumbled. They urged me to rush because the bus was about to depart and before I’d collected my thoughts they’d shoehorned me into a seat over a wheel.   I forgot to remove my water bottle from the bike, I didn’t even check if it was secure or whether it was still on the roof and not halfway to Kabul.   I didn’t check the fare. So much for the experienced traveller!

The driver’s ferret-like face was underlined with a neat moustache.   He looked like Ian Rush the Liverpool striker. He revved the engine and spun the wheels and in no time he was out of the bus station! He was clearly aiming to set his personal best time to Lahore.   Sure enough within ten minutes a traffic cop waved him down and issued him with a speeding fine.

It was only the first of twenty police checks.   During one of them two policemen boarded and tried to appear intimidating. They demanded to see passengers’ identity documents and rummaged under the seats.   I asked a man sitting behind me what they were searching for. He replied, “Just checking!” – As if that explained everything.   It was comforting to gain such an incisive insight into the covert operations of the Pakistani security forces.   I relaxed knowing that I was safe from Afghan gun- runners. The man in front looked capable of carrying a bomb but I dismissed it as paranoia.

Asif, the Heritage manager had shown uncharacteristic enthusiasm when I mentioned my trip to Lahore. He had gushed extravagantly, “The scenery is beautiful”. I don’t know if he was on dope, but I must disagree. Fired by Asif’s description, I visualised lush water meadows, snow- capped mountains and carpets of wild flowers, but instead I gazed out of the window on a dull, dry, flat and featureless landscape. Except for the fifteen minutes we spent winding down through the Salt Range it was grindingly boring.

I had eight hours to amuse myself and after playing a solo game of I Spy and after ticking off ‘Mujahadin’ I declared myself the winner.

I tried to match the faces of my fellow passengers with those of celebrities.   I found a Kurt Russell and a Robert De Niro (both with moustaches) and then I spotted a Rob Lowe. Unfortunately on closer inspection I realised Rob was a woman. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall whether Rob had a moustache in Oxford Blues, but I was pretty sure that he didn’t have a tablecloth over his head or a ring through his nose.   I gave up the game and tried to concentrate on the places we were passed. Most names on the signs sounded more like Lockerbie Trial suspects.

An interesting road sign depicted a tortoise. I scanned the highway, but didn’t spot any crushed shells. I assumed that the sign was to tell drivers to slow down, but as most drivers had never seen a tortoise, they put their foot to the boards.

My throat was parched and I was verging on dehydration so I was relieved when I was offered water. The cup had been passed round the bus three times and I hesitated. Finally I thought – to hell with HIV or hepatitis!

On the outskirts of Lahore we passed a Coca- Cola billboard on which two buxom, but modestly attired girls (by western standards) were depicted sipping coke. Simultaneously fifty heads turned left, drooling over what they would never have.

I searched feverishly in my book to establish where we were. As I glanced up a wall of halitosis hit me full on. “What is your country?” the breath asked! As I was recovering from this odious assault the bus pulled into a filling station and I was dumped there. A skinny lad of eight who appeared to be held together by little more than oil and engine grease lowered my bike from the bus.

I established that I was on the edge of the city in the area known as Australia Chowk.   I could see Lahore Fort so all I had to do was turn the map upside down and navigate ten kilometres through the choking fumes wearing a backpack in forty – five degrees of oppressive heat.

When I stopped at an intersection to read the map it was wrenched from my hand by a grossly fat man. He turned it round three times looked blankly and returned it to me.

I eventually reached the Mall and rested in the shade under Lahore’s only tree.   I must have shed two litres of sweat during the ride from the bus station. A street trader selling second-hand electronic components on the pavement looked puzzled by my sudden appearance. Moments later he bought me a tray of tea, smiled deferentially, and went back to his friends. It never ceases to amaze me that small acts of kindness often come when you most need them and when you morale is lowest.

I hauled my bike up a steep flight of stairs and into the air- conditioned lobby of the National Hotel.   Air conditioning?   In the dark corner of my mind I recalled air conditioning from a previous life.   I liked it and I wanted it.   It was time to spoil myself and I did.   For ten dollars I got air- conditioning, a fridge, an all-channel TV and a bed with a sheet that offered only the faintest suggestion that it had been slept on before – that was living! I entered my occupation in the register as ‘arsonist’ but the receptionist appeared totally nonplussed when I looked pointedly at the fire escape.   He told me that the teams in the Pakistan domestic cricket competition always stay at the National when they are in Lahore.   I went up to my room I searched for clues that Inzamam ul Haq had been in my bed.

xx

I sat in the dark, gloomy breakfast room surrounded by jabbering business executives in suits. That alone was a culture shock.   I gorged myself on potato curry, halwa and semi-sweet oily semolina from the buffet and staggered back to the room feeling slightly sick and bloated.

I had a vague idea how to get to Lahore Fort was and I was sure that I could navigate there on my bike. I hadn’t reckoned on running into a cavalcade of cars shepherding a political heavy through the traffic chaos.   The police had sealed off most main roads.

Lahore Fort ranks with its Mughal counterparts in Delhi and Agra. The buildings are embellished with carved red sandstone, marble, glazed tiles and ceramic work. The oppressive heat dulled my enthusiasm for energetic sight seeing so I went to lie on the lawn – far from anyone who might be remotely tempted to engage me in conversation. Within minutes two men plonked themselves next to me and said, “What is your country?”   Their questions were slowly but surely wearing me down!

Two plump, pimply girls asked if they could pose next to me for a photo.   I was stunned when one of them said out of the blue “Do you like me?” I was speechless, as I had never experienced such forward behaviour by girls in Pakistan.   Before answering I looked nervously over my shoulder to check whether a big brother was lurking behind a tree with a hidden weapon or a tape recorder. Just suppose that I had said that I fancied her, would that be construed as proposal of marriage?   One could never be too careful in this weirdo society!

In Pakistan there was rarely a risk that ones personal possessions were in danger of being stolen. My South African caution was second nature so I was somewhat surprised to find that my bike was still chained to the railings where I’d left it.

It was one of those white – hot days when the skies were colourless. There was a shimmering heat haze and even the crows were taking shelter. A young Australian approached me for directions. When he saw my bike I suppose he thought that I was an old hand and to be honest I did feel like a hardcore traveller.

When I told Nick that I lived in Johannesburg he said that he had fond memories of the place. I thought to myself, Cape Town yes, even Durban but surely nobody has fond memories of Joburg?

“Yes, I worked at Baragwanath Hospital in the casualty department. It was a fantastic experience.   I spent a year doing the rounds in the trauma ward where I attended to stab and gun shot wounds and stitched up domestic violence victims”.   Nick probably saw more arms separated from their owners and more blood in an average Baragwanath day than he’d see in a year in Melbourne.

Badshahi Mosque is just across from the fort. You enter through an impressive twenty metre high gateway and a fifty – metre high red sandstone minaret stands sentinel. I stood for several moments admiring its pure symmetry.

The entrance opens onto a vast white marble courtyard the size of several football pitches. Worshipers are expected to remove their shoes before entering, but the marble was blisteringly hot. I needn’t have worried. A long maroon carpet had been rolled out to allow access to Jahangir’s Tomb. Even so it was too hot for non-fire walkers, but a gang of helpers armed with watering cans acted as ‘carpet coolers’.

The museum displayed a few of Mohammed’s possessions such as his slippers, stick, cloak and pants. There are so many of his hairs dotted around the Muslim world that I seriously doubt that the hairs in a showcase would pass a DNA test!

I went back to the hotel and crashed out for the rest of the day.   The cricket test between Australia and England was being screened on Star TV and the advertising was obviously aimed at Indian audiences.   Was it mere coincidence that when Sachin Tendulkar paused to adjust his protector that an ad for “Genuine Jockey” underpants was screened?

A food stall close to the hotel sold great deep fried chicken and chicken livers. It was the second night running that I’d sat in the street and eaten dinner – I wondered what odds an actuary would give against me contracting a life threatening strain of food poisoning?

xx

It was sheer luxury to flick on CNN News as I opened my eyes. Even though the excruciatingly bad advertisement breaks for laxative tablets and indigestion were hardly welcome at six in the morning!

One for itching powder was so atrocious that I got perverse pleasure from seeing it over and over again. It was set in a lounge that had been furnished by a colour-blind interior decorator with a hangover.   An elegant woman in a sari was delicately serving tea to her mother in law.   A look of anguish suddenly crossed her face and she began scratching uncontrollably at her arm.   The camera moved in for a close – up of her troublesome elbow.   Her mother in law’s face expressed a look of utter revulsion.   She gazed at the affected area disapprovingly as if to say.” I knew that if my son married this low caste girl there would be trouble”.   The ‘voice over’ chipped in with the final punch line” And Baboo’s itching powder cures ringworm too!”

Indian advertisements feature girls with beautiful faces and grand piano legs. Dancers swan around in sequences lifted from the 1950’s. They drape themselves over 100cc motorbikes, washing machines, and lounge – suites or just about anything a self-respecting middle class Mumbai aspires to.

In the real world 500 million rural Indians face a daily struggle to feed themselves. Clean water is a bonus. They don’t watch Coca-Cola advertisements on television.   But zillions of rupees are spent bombarding viewers with a coy ‘boy meets girl’ tap dance routines in which the handsome boy and starry- eyed girl link arms, gaze at the moon and sip at their cool drinks.   There is never the remotest suggestion that they might go off for a quick shag after slaking their thirst. That would be just a touch too risqué even for modern Indians!

I chained my bike to the museum railings, but when I discovered that the authorities in their infinite wisdom had hiked the price for foreign visitors to ten times more than a local, I went to moan about it to Muzar at Arts & Oriental Books.

Muzar said with his head wagging from side to side, “All foreign friends are complaining, it is ruining my business”.   He urged me to write a letter of complaint to the Director of Antiquities. When I took my painstakingly phrased letter to the office, the guard threw it in a drawer.

We drank a pot of green tea together and Muzar confided that he dreamed of visiting the Kruger Park.   He wanted to see lions in the wild.

I wandered down the Mall past the General Post Office, High Court and Aitchison College and was agreeably surprised to find that such fine examples of red sandstone colonial architecture had survived. At the end of the street I saw the Zama Zama gun once immortalised in Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”, but it now appears neglected and does little more than act as a kind of unofficial traffic circle.

I found a likely looking barber – shop. I tried to explain how much I wanted snipped off but the barber didn’t understand and left me with tiny tufts about a centimetre long.

My guidebook was disparaging about the area around the National Hotel. “There are persistent reports of theft from hotel rooms, often involving drugged food or drink. Travellers tell of paying huge bribes to police after having drugs planted in their rooms”. I decided to ditch the aspirin.

I didn’t worry too much about the goat tethered to an iron rail outside the hotel even though it stood in three days worth of its own excrement. It added to the flavour of the neighbourhood even though it served to underline it’s less than salubrious nature. The goat possessed a pair of balls resembling a small sack of potatoes and sadly (for the goat) it was only a matter of time before some hungry customer ordered its prize pair of knackers grilled and served between two freshly baked naans.

A plethora of open – air “broast” restaurants were clustered around the hotel. The chefs were grilling livers, brains, tripe, kidneys, hearts or anything that usually resides deep inside the animal. Slimy intestines were in great demand and I assumed that discerning diners order by the metre.

I gave these delicacies a miss and made for Pizza Hut. I guessed that it was the place that the Lahore glitterati went for an offal pizza with an intestine and goat – balls topping.

xx

I was disappointed not to find any salacious stories in “The Dawn”. There were no sensational exposés about national hockey players being ejected from a nightclub after a drunken brawl. No squash player had been caught in bed with a politician’s wife.

My eyes were drawn to an article by Bazgha Iqbal who according to the intro –

“Moves around to witness the scenes at the railway station”

“The roundabout at the Lahore Railway Station may have been constructed for some specific purposes by the authorities concerned. But the people who have placed their shops around it have certainly added their own touch to it. Inside you can see many people sleeping; unaware of what is happening around. The addicts have also set up their separate corners and are engaged in their own concern with complete devotion. People eating fruit and throwing the peels around are also one of the very common sights here. There is also a great rush of Afghan boys who are seen roaming with small ovens and steel buckets selling unimaginable small cups of tea to the different kinds of roamers there”

Bazgha certainly had a keen eye for detail.

“Outside, the roundabout is a whole mini-bazaar selling commodities of all kinds and is useful if the passenger has an urgent need, it can be fulfilled on the spot. Even the shopping bags being sold on the beautifully decorated bicycles depict the aesthetic sense of the sellers here”.

The writer was clearly getting into full stride.

“The particular shouts from the routine bargain trend are also heard as one tries to get a bit intimate with the inner and pure atmosphere of the station. The Pathans seem to be winning the day as they sell most of the popular items here. Never you take these brothers even a simple request as the rates told are seldom accessible and moreover they succeed in convincing the customers on the charges of their own willingness. Plastic shoes are quite favourably purchased items for them and they manage to earn a reasonable profit for themselves even in the business of shoes- run on the basis of shop, no shop or particular place”

“Inner and pure atmosphere” seemed to be ripping the ring a little.

“Closer to the main hole, a strange and interesting site is also waiting. A man is getting his ears cleaned but he need not worry, as the man is sitting there to solve this problem. The ‘desi ear doctor’ is cleaning the ears and even professional doctors cannot do the job this way. He has stuffed a lot of black cotton in the ear with a metal rod and is now rubbing with full force. All the filth with the tissues will be out today! And what are you to say about those professional dentists?   Not a single one but several are scattered at different places. If you do not need your tooth anymore you should at once visit them and for the rest of your life, you will never have a toothache again”.

“There are not only men working at the station but ladies can also be seen.   A woman has been seen selling fruits for the last fifteen years and she is satisfied with her occupation.   That very feeble lady can also be seen selling sun- glasses that have the tag Rayban and other big shot companies. Another lady hawker is selling handkerchiefs in a basket with her baby in one arm. She is looking at people with demanding eyes that maybe one customer would buy handkerchief and she would go home with money”.

A triumph for oppressed minorities!

“Why roam the city to find somebody to repair your watch? There are experts who if they fail to mend the watch a new one will be thrusted to the customer. Music is a must for life. While going on a journey if one gets the opportunity to listen to good music, nothing is worth like it. For a small radio set you need look no further than the electronic corner. It is said that books are the best companions of a man. The ’baba jee’ selling books always has a timid smile on his face. The books here are not recommended for difficulties with heart patients”.

I must remember to contact him when my Cartier watch packs up!

“A man being very considerate and affectionately thinking for others has set up a shop of perfumes. He after a lot of hard work prepares these strong smelling ‘itars’. These may help the people to free themselves from the stinking odour of the surroundings.

Writing the names of beloveds on the hands and arms with a knife may be difficult for some and not everyone can take the risk of getting their veins cut. To solve this problem a man called Razzaq is sitting at the station. You can get a picture made or alphabet written with a payment of 10 rupees per word. The man has an electric device with a needle fixed on it.

Ah! Yes but can he do “Love and Hate” on my knuckles?

“Then how can we miss the most important stall of the palmists? This business is flourishing at a very high rate. The man always has a huge majority sitting near the shop waiting for the fateful predictions. If you are gaining weight rush to the station to get it checked immediately. You are given this facility at the cost of only one rupee and it is cheap and useful enough.

Many depend on the commodities sold here and many are to earn a living from this because all are not born with a golden spoon- there are many who are to struggle before they can sit and eat”.

I cycled to the station to look at this “microcosm of Pakistani life” for myself. I wheeled my bike into the main station concourse.   My timing was obviously bad as the twice- weekly train between India and Pakistan was due. Two policemen rushed forward and hustled me away.   The station is on permanent high alert against terrorist attacks and the last thing that they want are tourists nosing around. Even if they only want their fortune told or want to lose weight in a hurry.

It was a pity as I was seriously thinking of a visit to the platform dentist.   Last time I had root canal treatment it cost me more than $1000 maybe he would quote me a better price.

It would be worth a visit to the man with the electric needle.   Ten rupees a letter is a bargain if you can’t face self – mutilation with a pen – knife.

I could have “Ian” tattooed on my arm for only thirty rupees.   Whenever somebody asked my name I could just stick out my arm and it would be there in black and white.   I calculated that I could have my name, address and my country done for little more than the price of a “Big Mac” and coke.   It would certainly last longer than a packet of greasy food and the nutritional value of the ink would be roughly the same.   I could add my occupation to the other details at some future time when I became more flush.

If I had ‘arsonist’ tattooed on my arm it would cost less than the price of a beer and if I ever I went on the dole in Britain nobody would ever question my commitment to the job.

I cut through the old walled city at Delhi Gate and wandered into the Wazir Khan Mosque. It was divided into five halls each surmounted by a dome. In one hall a row of young boys wearing a snow – white shalwaar kameezs sat chanting from the Koran.   A stern Imam with a flowing white beard mouthed the words and nodded his pleasure at his charges’ performance. When I sat down quietly in a corner to rest, the Imam sent a small boy to switch on the fan.

As I was unchaining my bike and mopping sweat from my eyes a man from a shop called me over and handed me a coke.   I cycled back to the National and settled down to watch India in the final throes of defeat at the hands of the West Indies.

There was a knock on the door. It was the first time that anyone had been near my room for three days.   I was mindful of the dire warning in my guidebook.

“Be suspicious of hotel managers that demand to see your passport themselves. If there are repeated knocks at the door by somebody requesting to check the plumbing when you are alone in the room, it may be time to pack your bag”. As there was only one knock I decided that it was safe. It turned out to be the room boy asking if I would like some cold water.

I stood by the fire escape door and gazed over Lahore.   The sun was a massive blood red – globe shining through a haze of fog and fumes. Temporary shacks were erected on rooftops, on others charpoys stood in rows.   I wondered about the impossible tangle of electric cables and wires leading to the millions of illicit connections. No wonder that there were infuriating daily power cuts. Below the snarl of cars battled through the blue, choking traffic fumes. The naan makers rolled and spun the dough and small boys served trays of tea to old men. Garish posters of voluptuous movie stars toting automatic rifles were pasted on walls next to a mosque where the faithful gathered for prayers. At no time during my trip did I feel in danger.

In a few days I would be home to relative calm and order but it would be in a place of high walls, electric fences, razor wire, hijacks, knifings, satellite tracking. I was not sure that I was ready for it.This last statement proved to be prophetic. On Tuesday 2 October whilst walking at Emmarentia Dam three men wielding knives attacked me!   I was ambushed whilst on my daily walk near Melville Kopjies. They roughed me up and relieved me of a radio, cash, phone cards and a watch.   One of them shouted “stab him, stab him one time” I turned and ran away shaking like a leaf!

I flagged down three men in a truck. They couldn’t wait to part of the action and said, “Let’s go get them”

 

We managed to corner one of the assailants who threw down his knife and a stolen cell phone.   We tied him to a fence until the Parkview police arrived.   A second attacker was apprehended shortly afterwards. Two years on there has been no further police action and no prosecution!

8 July – Lahore

 

I was just waiting for the time to pass – I wanted to go home.

 

Over breakfast I eavesdropped on a couple of Americans that were having an animated conversation. Why are Americans so intense? Why do they talk so loudly?

I breakfasted on soggy toast and the ubiquitous mixed fruit jam.

 

It was raining heavily and I had no intention of venturing outside. I lay on my bed watching the Australian attack complete the ritual humiliation of the English top order batsmen. I decided that it was better to get wet.

 

I didn’t fancy wading knee deep through the flooded streets, nor did I want a dose of cholera or Legionaries disease.   Lahore, in common with many Asian cities has a rainwater system that just can’t cope.   Dead rats or unwanted wives are probably blocking the drains.   When it pisses down, non-swimmers run for cover. When a bus swishes by and drenches you even water wings don’t help.

 

Eventually it did stop raining. Scrawny chickens poked their heads through the slats in wire cages piled high as apartment blocks outside the broast restaurants. They pecked at each other’s eyes, but time was short for them. It was as pointless as a man arguing with his wife on his way to the gallows.

 

The goats probably sensed that they too were destined for the charcoal grill, but as it was early maybe they hoped for a last minute stay of execution.

 

I sent a message to Roger asking for a limerick about Lahore, as there seemed to me to be infinite possibilities. Our limericks had to be vulgar – the more shocking the better.   I promised him a night of illicit love with an Afghan hooker if he could come up with a great last line. I’d even get her to remove the veil.

 

There was a young man from Lahore,

Who knocked at a prostitute’s door,

She laughed herself sick,

When she spotted his dick,

———————————–!

 

I sent my last note to Franki, “ I’m on the last leg, just a thirty minute ride to the bus station and a five hour ride to Islamabad.   A couple of bowls of dal with roti and I’m home”

 

It sounded easy but it didn’t quite work out like that!

 

9 July – Lahore to Rawalpindi

 

Breakfast was a rush job of curried potatoes and paranthas.   I hauled the bike down seven flights of stairs and hit the choking traffic. By the time I reached the bus station I was drenched in sweat and wasn’t in the frame of mind to bargain over the price of the bus ticket to Rawalpindi. But in Pakistan things rarely go according to plan.

 

“Does this bus go to Rawalpindi?” I asked.

 

“Yes, yes, two – fifty rupees and a hundred for the bike” the touts shouted in unison.

 

“That’s utter bullshit, the fare should be one fifty and the bike should be free” I replied confidently.

 

“Yes, yes, OK get in. One fifty and fifty for the bike” they said urgently.

 

I sat at the back and hid behind my newspaper. A young guy worked his way from the front of the bus and parked himself next to me.   He began his “Lahore Inquisition”. Name, country, occupation, religion, inside leg measurement and name of wife’s gynaecologist! No personal question was beyond his probing. After fifteen minutes I told him to piss off. The bus was nearly full and we were ready to go.

 

As we swung into the maelstrom of Lahore’s traffic a man sitting behind me asked. “Is Pakistan beautiful?”

 

At that moment I was gazing out onto heaps of rotting vegetables, pools of stagnant water and ramshackle houses. A grotesquely deformed man with no legs was propelling himself along the pavement on a trolley. I turned round, looked him in the eye and lied through my teeth.

 

“Yes, very beautiful, the most beautiful country in the world!”   My fellow passenger showed me his arm. “Waqar” was neatly tattooed on his wrist. He had obviously been to see the electric needle man.

 

We were barrelling along the highway. I was dying for a pee and something to drink and I eyed the deserted restaurants. The banner headline on the morning newspaper screamed, “Probe into overcharging at highway restaurants”.

 

We reached Gujrat, the town where infertile women come to pray at the shrine of a 17^th century local saint, Shah Daula. If her prayers are answered, her first child will be born with a grotesquely shrunken head. These unfortunates are known as ‘chuhas’ or rat children.

 

There are over ten thousand ‘chuhas’ in Pakistan and most are controlled and exploited by organised crime syndicates.   The gangs buy children from the parents and put them on to the streets where they earn up to ten dollars a day by begging. Many children not born as ‘chuhas’ become victims of mutilation. Evil criminals deform the children by the use of a medieval-like head brace.

 

The authorities seem reluctant to intervene because they fear that interference may breach religious beliefs. Health authorities have tried to squash the myth by publicly stating that the children are born with a disease called microcephaly, but few people in Gujrat believe them.

Suddenly the bus pulled over to the side of the highway and the busboy said, “You get out here!”

 

“But this is not Rawalpindi this is the middle of nowhere. Where the fuck are we? You told me that the bus was going to the centre of Rawalpindi!” I said angrily.

 

“This is Peshawar bus, you get out”. He said mockingly.   There was no point in arguing or shouting as my bike had already been dumped against a tree and the driver was revving the engine impatiently.   I was on a highway, miles from anywhere, it was at least forty degrees and I had drunk all my water.   I didn’t even know which direction to go!

 

A taxi driver pointed me towards the city and I set off on the twenty – kilometre ride. I was pouring sweat and I knew that I was dehydrating fast, but there was nothing I could do about it.   I reached the outskirts of Rawalpindi and asked directions but nobody could read a map and nobody knew street names.   Psychologically I hit rock bottom.   I stopped under a tree and retched and started shivering violently.

 

I decided to check into the first dump that I found. This was the action of a desperate man because I am known in certain circles to be rather parsimonious when it comes to throwing away money on accommodation. The Holiday Crown Palace was described in the guidebook as “rather shabby and run down, but with helpful staff”. It cost eight hundred rupees and the staff were a pain in the arse. Added to that it was the worst hotel deal I’d ever driven, but I was past caring.

 

The Wimbledon Men’s Singles Final between Goran Ivanisavic and Patrick Rafter was being screened on the world’s smallest black and white television. Frankly it surprised me that they were playing in such a heavy snowstorm, but they were obviously anxious to complete the match as it had been held over from Sunday.

 

I didn’t go out, I was exhausted and I felt sick. I channel hopped. There was a bewildering choice of channels, two of which were Islamic prayer programmes. There was also a Russian news channel, an Indian movie channel and bizarrely Supersport from South Africa.

 

10 July – Rawalpindi to Dubai and Home

 

There was a young man from Rawalpindi— hell!   Nothing rhymes with that, its like orange, but hey, who cares when you’ve got a Russian news bulletin to watch!

 

I went for a walk through the army enclave where rich kids play in parks with real grass and uniformed men walk with a swagger.   An army officer is king in Pakistan.

 

When I managed to establish exactly where I’d spent the night I realised just how close I was to Saddar Bazaar. I could have gone back to the New Kamran for a quarter of the cost.

 

I was losing the plot. Yesterday when I was dehydrated I drunk five litres of tap water and now for some unaccountable reason I had an overwhelming urge to buy an ice cream from a street seller.

 

I planned my day as follows.   Find somewhere to send an email, eat spinach pie, sleep, and catch an Indian movie on TV and then sleep again.   I was petrified that I would fall into a coma, as I had to check in for my flight at midnight. I wrote a note for reception reminding them to order any taxi that was happy to sling a bicycle on the roof.   I was becoming paranoid and they thought I was nutty.

 

I was ready.   In a way I was relieved, happy to be going home, but sad to be leaving this crazy country behind.   The driver hoisted the bike onto the roof and drove to the airport through the dark deserted streets. It was déjà vu.   Was it really only two months ago that Roger and I were wobbling towards Rawalpindi on our overloaded bikes?   I looked out for the watchman who gave us directions.   He was still asleep in his hut.

 

I joined the line for the security check.   The inspector asked me to deflate the tyres, he lifted the bike, feeling the weight and then he turned my backpack inside out.   He told me that he was searching for drugs.

 

“Do you search people going out?” I asked. I wondered how much my bike would weigh if the frame was packed with dope.

 

The flight from Dubai was delayed three hours. I was given a chit to buy a Big Mac. They didn’t have channa and naan.   I slept on the floor until they called the flight.

 

 

 

I sent my last note to Franki, “ I’m on the last leg, just a thirty minute ride to the bus station and a five hour ride to Islamabad.   A couple of bowls of dal with roti and I’m home”

 

It sounded easy but it didn’t quite work out like that!

 

9 July – Lahore to Rawalpindi

 

Breakfast was a rush job of curried potatoes and paranthas.   I hauled the bike down seven flights of stairs and hit the choking traffic. By the time I reached the bus station I was drenched in sweat and wasn’t in the frame of mind to bargain over the price of the bus ticket to Rawalpindi. But in Pakistan things rarely go according to plan.

 

“Does this bus go to Rawalpindi?” I asked.

 

“Yes, yes, two – fifty rupees and a hundred for the bike” the touts shouted in unison.

 

“That’s utter bullshit, the fare should be one fifty and the bike should be free” I replied confidently.

 

“Yes, yes, OK get in. One fifty and fifty for the bike” they said urgently.

 

I sat at the back and hid behind my newspaper. A young guy worked his way from the front of the bus and parked himself next to me.   He began his “Lahore Inquisition”. Name, country, occupation, religion, inside leg measurement and name of wife’s gynaecologist! No personal question was beyond his probing. After fifteen minutes I told him to piss off. The bus was nearly full and we were ready to go.

 

As we swung into the maelstrom of Lahore’s traffic a man sitting behind me asked. “Is Pakistan beautiful?”

 

At that moment I was gazing out onto heaps of rotting vegetables, pools of stagnant water and ramshackle houses. A grotesquely deformed man with no legs was propelling himself along the pavement on a trolley. I turned round, looked him in the eye and lied through my teeth.

 

“Yes, very beautiful, the most beautiful country in the world!”   My fellow passenger showed me his arm. “Waqar” was neatly tattooed on his wrist. He had obviously been to see the electric needle man.

 

We were barrelling along the highway. I was dying for a pee and something to drink and I eyed the deserted restaurants. The banner headline on the morning newspaper screamed, “Probe into overcharging at highway restaurants”.

 

We reached Gujrat, the town where infertile women come to pray at the shrine of a 17^th century local saint, Shah Daula. If her prayers are answered, her first child will be born with a grotesquely shrunken head. These unfortunates are known as ‘chuhas’ or rat children.

 

There are over ten thousand ‘chuhas’ in Pakistan and most are controlled and exploited by organised crime syndicates.   The gangs buy children from the parents and put them on to the streets where they earn up to ten dollars a day by begging. Many children not born as ‘chuhas’ become victims of mutilation. Evil criminals deform the children by the use of a medieval-like head brace.

 

The authorities seem reluctant to intervene because they fear that interference may breach religious beliefs. Health authorities have tried to squash the myth by publicly stating that the children are born with a disease called microcephaly, but few people in Gujrat believe them.

Suddenly the bus pulled over to the side of the highway and the busboy said, “You get out here!”

 

“But this is not Rawalpindi this is the middle of nowhere. Where the fuck are we? You told me that the bus was going to the centre of Rawalpindi!” I said angrily.

 

“This is Peshawar bus, you get out”. He said mockingly.   There was no point in arguing or shouting as my bike had already been dumped against a tree and the driver was revving the engine impatiently.   I was on a highway, miles from anywhere, it was at least forty degrees and I had drunk all my water.   I didn’t even know which direction to go!

 

A taxi driver pointed me towards the city and I set off on the twenty – kilometre ride. I was pouring sweat and I knew that I was dehydrating fast, but there was nothing I could do about it.   I reached the outskirts of Rawalpindi and asked directions but nobody could read a map and nobody knew street names.   Psychologically I hit rock bottom.   I stopped under a tree and retched and started shivering violently.

 

I decided to check into the first dump that I found. This was the action of a desperate man because I am known in certain circles to be rather parsimonious when it comes to throwing away money on accommodation. The Holiday Crown Palace was described in the guidebook as “rather shabby and run down, but with helpful staff”. It cost eight hundred rupees and the staff were a pain in the arse. Added to that it was the worst hotel deal I’d ever driven, but I was past caring.

 

The Wimbledon Men’s Singles Final between Goran Ivanisavic and Patrick Rafter was being screened on the world’s smallest black and white television. Frankly it surprised me that they were playing in such a heavy snowstorm, but they were obviously anxious to complete the match as it had been held over from Sunday.

 

I didn’t go out, I was exhausted and I felt sick. I channel hopped. There was a bewildering choice of channels, two of which were Islamic prayer programmes. There was also a Russian news channel, an Indian movie channel and bizarrely Supersport from South Africa.

 

10 July – Rawalpindi to Dubai and Home

 

There was a young man from Rawalpindi— hell!   Nothing rhymes with that, its like orange, but hey, who cares when you’ve got a Russian news bulletin to watch!

 

I went for a walk through the army enclave where rich kids play in parks with real grass and uniformed men walk with a swagger.   An army officer is king in Pakistan.

 

When I managed to establish exactly where I’d spent the night I realised just how close I was to Saddar Bazaar. I could have gone back to the New Kamran for a quarter of the cost.

 

I was losing the plot. Yesterday when I was dehydrated I drunk five litres of tap water and now for some unaccountable reason I had an overwhelming urge to buy an ice cream from a street seller.

 

I planned my day as follows.   Find somewhere to send an email, eat spinach pie, sleep, and catch an Indian movie on TV and then sleep again.   I was petrified that I would fall into a coma, as I had to check in for my flight at midnight. I wrote a note for reception reminding them to order any taxi that was happy to sling a bicycle on the roof.   I was becoming paranoid and they thought I was nutty.

 

I was ready.   In a way I was relieved, happy to be going home, but sad to be leaving this crazy country behind.   The driver hoisted the bike onto the roof and drove to the airport through the dark deserted streets. It was déjà vu.   Was it really only two months ago that Roger and I were wobbling towards Rawalpindi on our overloaded bikes?   I looked out for the watchman who gave us directions.   He was still asleep in his hut.

 

I joined the line for the security check.   The inspector asked me to deflate the tyres, he lifted the bike, feeling the weight and then he turned my backpack inside out.   He told me that he was searching for drugs.

 

“Do you search people going out?” I asked. I wondered how much my bike would weigh if the frame was packed with dope.

 

The flight from Dubai was delayed three hours. I was given a chit to buy a Big Mac. They didn’t have channa and naan.   I slept on the floor until they called the flight.