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Incidents on the Karakorum Highway Although it starts at Rawalpindi in Pakistani Punjab and ends at Kashgar in China's Xinjiang Province, the territory that the Karakorum Highway traverses principally is the Northern Areas. On the map below,
the knob that bends around India is the NA. Comprised of the remote ancient kingdoms of Hunza, Baltistan and Gilgit, what are today the Northern Areas became part of the Sikh Empire in the 18th century, along with Kashmir and Ladakh. These the British annexed and repackaged as the State of Jammu & Kashmir in the 1840s and then sold off to some Hindu prince. In 1947, at the time of Partition, the Maharaja of Kashmir gave Kashmir to India, but the local rulers of the NA revolted and the area devolved to Pakistan. To this day, the Northern Areas remain officially part of the disputed Kashmir state. Though under Pakistani administration, the Northern Areas exist in administrative limbo, neither a province nor an independent entity. Its people aren't even represented in the National Assembly. This is because according to the phony official Pakistani policy the NA don't belong to any country until the Kashmir issue is formally resolved by the two countries and a referendum decides its fate. That didn't stop the Pakistanis from building the Karakorum Highway, though. Although the rest of Pakistan isn't exactly a mass of linguistic uniformity, nonetheless there are more languages spoken in the Northern Areas than elsewhere in the country. One curiosity is Burushaski, a language isolate, totally unrelated to any other language in South & Central Asia. Its presence is as mysterious as Basque. Also, unlike most of Pakistan which is Sunni, the NA have got lots of Shiite Muslims as well as most of Pakistan's Ismaili Muslims who revere the Aga Khan. Earlier, in my comments about the Bolan Pass, I tried to make people appreciate the incredible barriers that separate the Indian subcontinent from the lands up north. But I didn't really make clear how enormous and extensive those barriers are. The inhospitable terrain that separates India from the Russian Federation is probably nearly as large as the continental United States. Consider this map:
We all know about the Himalayas that extend from Burma to northern Pakistan, but this forest of mountains exceeding 7000 metres is actually a relatively small component of this sheer impenetrability. Like the outline of a hand holding a cloud, the Himalayan range marks the southern border of Tibet, a country which is wholly located on a plateau whose average elevation is 4500 metres! And as if that weren't enough, Tibet is protected in the north by the Kunlun Shan, a mountain range which rivals the Himalayas in extent and elevations. If you continue westward along the Himalayas, you eventually hit a point where three mountain ranges clash and converge into a jumble of glacial peaks: the Hindu Kush, the Karakorum and the Pamirs. In these ranges are hundreds of mountains exceeding 6000 metres, including four of the ten tallest in the world. To the south of this mountainous convergence is another plateau called Afghanistan. To the north, the Pamirs blend into the High Tien Shan mountains that form the border between China and the former Soviet Central Asian republics. The Tian Shan curls around what is allegedly the world's driest desert, the Taklamakan, and eventually merges with the Altai mountains of Russia and Mongolia, home to the highest peaks in the former Soviet Union. Mongolia, by the way, is yet another country lying wholly on a plateau. Well, back in the 1960s, Pakistan and China agreed to construct a modern road through a part of this beautiful mess of mountains. A route of sorts had already existed since antiquity loosely following the course of the Indus River and passing through the Khunjerab Pass to the Pamir highlands. This section of the southern Silk Route connected the Mediterranean ports with Genghis Khan's capital at Karakorum. It was therefore a matter of blasting through mountains and paving over dirt and stones in order to make the route navigable for serious traffic. The monstrous undertaking called the Karakorum Highway, the pencil line of a road drawn through sheer rockface, was finally completed in 1984 after one worker had died for each kilometre of road.
I set off on the Karakorum Highway from Abbottabad, a British hill station founded by the British and named after one of its district commissioners James Abbott. About 75km north of Islamabad and 75km west of the Indo-Pak Line of Control, this is where my great-uncle keeps a country house and stays when he's not in Peshawar or Islamabad. He was kind enough to lend me his Chitrali driver to drive me part of the way on the KKH, but I intended to finish the last stretch on foot. The reason I wanted to walk to China, besides being able to say that I walked to China, was that taking a car or a bus across the border would mean an ascent from 3000 metres to 5000 metres within the day. This was precisely what I wanted to avoid lest I failed to acclimatise to the altitude. So Hasan the Chitrali drove me up to the Alpine town of Gulmit
From there, over the next several days, I walked the approximately 50km stretch of the KKH that passes through the Gojal Valley and the Khunjerab National Park, all the way to the town of Sost, the scene of Pak frontier controls and the beginning of the no-man's-land between Pakistan and China. The KKH does not simply offer spectacular landscapes, but also a spectacular variation of spectacular landscapes. There are valleys where a series of black granite hills tower into the sky like arrowhead spires; eerie mountain-top lochs peeking out of the quasi-Caledonian mist and fog; and one switchback after another winding around barren, dun-coloured mountains, where the path had often only recently been cleared of a rock avalanche. Other switchbacks wound around tributaries of the Indus, such as the one around the Hunza River.
The constant element in all this variation, the stubborn accompaniments to one's voyage on the KKH, were the glacial peaks of the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush or the Karakorums in the distance. You could never get away from them. By the way, on the KKH, the closer one gets to China, the more distant the road becomes from the Indo-Pak Line of Control. I could hear the mutual shelling much better from the verandah of the house at Abbottabad. Still, in Chilas, a town off the KKH with a striking view of Nanga Parbat, I could hear what I thought must be the booms of Pak and Hindooo artillery faintly resonating through the echo chambers of the Karakorum and the western Himalaya mountains. Earlier I had read in the IHT that the Pak and the Hindustan armies were banging each other only a couple of times a day, but I thought I could hear them doing the deed every five minutes. Some necessary background to the coming story. Until I left my great- uncle's house, I was dressed in pretty much what I normally wear -- button-down shirt and trousers. But whenever I wander outside civilisation, I like to put on the local garb as much as possible, though I would definitely balk at penis gourds in New Guinea. In northern Pakistan, I generally favour the Pathan suit, or toman penard in Pashto, a variation on the Indo-Pakistani shalwaar qamiis. The cotton outfit consists of very baggy trousers which allow maximum ventilation and a shirt with a long tail falling just past the knees. (The tail is usually cut to indicate tribal affiliation.) On top of this I wore the usual canvas vest (which the Pathans in Pakistan call "waistcoat" after the British fashion but is pronounced "vestcot") and the patou, basically a sheet large enough for a single bed, which is worn like a shawl over the shoulder. And, of course, the pakol, a woollen cap which looks like a beret nestling on a thick coil. If you've seen the Afghan mujahiddeen or the Taliban on the news, then you know what the outfit looks like -- vest and blanket over pyjamas. Moreover, by the time I was near the Chinese frontier, my face had been heavily tanned by a month of travelling in Iran and Pakistan plus nearly a week of exposure to the sun at elevations ranging from 3000 metres to 5000 metres above sea level. I was also more than a month without a shave (when in Rome, do as the Romans), and my reddish-blond facial hair contrasted surreally with the black head of hair. Finally, I hadn't bathed in about four days so my face was covered in dust and the grease in my hair could have fuelled a lantern. In short, to a T I looked like a bloody Pathan tribesman who rared to descend on India's Gangetic plains to loot their cities, snatch their women, burn their heathen temples and otherwise gleefully visit wanton destruction in the Hindooooo midst. The only things I was missing were an AK-47, a bandoleer and a praying carpet. On the third day of the walk to China, I saw in the distance a trio of overburdened hikers immediately perceptible as Japanese, prim in their pricey outfits, who were apparently having some problems communicating with a Pak policeman. Being reasonably sure that I was the only Anglo-Pak-Jap within the 5,000 mile radius, I rushed to their assistance. (For Hashke: I am an angel's pack job.) Sometimes the Japanese give the impression of believing that, no matter how you were formed as a child, competence in their language is a matter of genes. So the more provincial among them (i.e., 99.9% of Japan's population) are invariably shocked when a Westerner -- or in reality anyone other than a purebred racial Japanese -- speaks their language. Mongrelised as my Japanitas is by the three-quarters of me that are not Japanese, I have always managed to shock by launching into my mother's language. So imagine this backpacking Pathan tribesman walking up to a bunch of timid Japanese not far from the highest border post in the world and soft-spokenly offers to act as interpretor between them and the policeman. The Japanese hikers did not fail me: mouths wide open, they could not have been more shocked, had Mothra been fluttering above Tokyo. "May I help you? What is the problem?", I asked one of the Japanese designated to deal with the policeman. He at first hesitated to answer. Japanese:
Ehhhhhhhhhh? [a Japanese utterance denoting puzzlement.] It turned out that the area where they were pitching their tent was not a designated campsite. But this was Pakistan, so naturally I had seen no such designations anywhere in the reserve. The policeman pointed to another spot, perhaps 100 metres away, which looked exactly like the spot the Japanese had chosen. With not so delicate a euphemism, he casually mentioned in Urdu, "I want to take some tea". The Japanese had chosen a truly striking spot: a hilly pasture carpeted by low-lying alpine bloomlets of yellow, purple and pink, extending for miles & miles. The scene was watched over by peaks which were not glaciated but sprinkled with a thin coating of snow like powdered sugar. I could imagine Julie Andrews whirling about in the meadow, although in her oblivious musical delirium she would certainly have been rudely knocked over by grazing yaks. Or fallen off the cliff, for this Arcadian wonderland was abruptly and ominously gashed by a huge black chasm revealing a gentle rivulet.
Within five minutes, the Japanese threw themselves to pitching a tent so huge and impractical that they could have headquartered NATO's Kosovo operations within its confines. In gratitude for my minor assistance, they invited me to stay a night in the tent and share their reconstituted Japanese "astronaut food". I was simply amazed at their packing. They had brought with them rice and a thermos-sized, chemically heated rice cooker, along with dehydrated foodstuffs including umeboshi (pickled plums) and shiozhake (flakes of salted salmon). After boiling some water, they made green tea and poured it into the dehydrated food packages. And voilˆ: the next thing you know, I and my companions were dining in the Japanese slop style, with the little plastic rice bowl held in the left hand close to the face, chopsticks on the right, slurping up our meal. As we sat on the grass, this spectacle in the mountainous pasture land was eagerly observed by Tajik children and their livestock. (The area straddling the frontier between Pakistan and China is inhabited by the so-called Wakhi Tajiks, a people speaking a country bumpkin dialect of Persian. I was curious about these Wakhis, but I was in a rush to leave Pakistan and I knew there were more specimens to be seen on the Chinese side of the border. At Lake Karakul, outside Kashgar, I stayed overnight in a Wahki Tajik yurt.) In the morning I parted company with the Japanese after an exchange of the obligatory mutual exaggerated declarations of gratitude. Their parting words to me, as we shall see, were almost prophetic: "The Chinese guards at the border are really nasty". Later that day at the town of Sost, I stayed at the Khunjerab Hotel -- little more than a field of grass enclosed by a metal mesh, where stood a number of plasticated "yurts" which looked like they must have been made by those famous Tajiks of Taiwan. On the far western side of the "hotel" was a another rivulet, one of the hundreds of offshoots of the Indus River. There, I found one of the fellow guests, a Swiss tourist, performing some kind of yoga-like exercise. Apparently he could not bear the thought of refraining from the display of spirituality when he learnt these waters were part of the Indus. He was, therefore, the very kind of tourist I hate: the earnest shithead. "You do realise that this is the Indus, not the Ganges? Please take your reincarnations and purifications and transmigrations to that other river", I wanted to say, but, this not being the Mote, I didn't. In the morning, I asked the hotel keeper, a jolly Pathan by the name of Rafiq, "Ror [brother], can you walk all the way to China?" The reply came: "Ror, no, you cannot. You must take a bus. You leave Sost on foot and you will be turned back at the checkpoint at Deh". An hour later I passed the Pakistani frontier controls at Sost without a hitch and proceeded to China on foot. Hours later, I arrived at the checkpoint at Deh, where I tried to talk past the guards into letting me walk to China. These useless Punjabis wouldn't let me go, so I had to flag down a car returning toward Sost. The next morning, I boarded a NATCO bus, a brand new Hyundai contraption looking like it had just rolled off the assembly line and then gotten immediately coated in a fine film of dust. Within a few miles outside Sost, the verdant landscape that I had become so used to during the last few days reverted to the rocky brown of the lower valleys. The KKH was now passing through one narrow gorge after another, with cliffs whose minatory heights appeared eager to waylay passers-by with avalanche.
For all along the road our bus had to negotiate boulders and rough monoliths strewn about like giant leggo pieces abandoned by bored children in search of the next diversion. As we were approaching the entrance to yet another gorge, out of the window I could hear sheep baying from within the rock passage. One couldn't see them because the view was obstructed by the winding passage formed by the cliffsides. The driver, instinctively I suppose, brought the bus to a stop right at the mouth of the gorge. The baying grew ever louder and resonant, and, within minutes, several hundred sheep and goats exploded out of the gorge like confetti. I think our bus was surrounded and immobilised by these animals for a good half an hour. And the Pak government apparently considers this road a "strategic route". The actual physical border between Pakistan and China -- the Khunjerab Top, at about 5000 metres supposed to be the highest international border post in the world -- was something of an anti-climax after all I had already seen on the KKH. In my nausea I would not have even taken notice of it had the bus not stopped, switched the side of the road to drive on, and paused to allow the passengers to get out and "see" the border. There were only two interesting things about the scenery: clouds were almost within distance of a sprightly human jump, which few could manage at that altitude; and a sign read IN CHINA DRIVE RIGHT, IN PAKISTAN DRIVE LEFT. A similar sign had been posted on the Iran/Pakistan border. How many land borders in the world required such reminders, I wondered. Our bus also got boarded by two Chinese soldiers who conducted a cursory inspection of the passports to make sure everyone had visas to China and then rode with us to the actual frontier control. One of the pair sat in the empty seat next to me, with the long nose of his rifle slightly tilted in my direction. I looked at it warily, aware despite my nausea of the many bumps on the road. As the bus proceeded, I felt like asking the soldier to correct the tilt, but he looked really mean. When we arrived at the Chinese frontier controls just outside Tashkurgan, which was many miles already inside China, I could tell from the way I felt that the elevation was lower but my head still demanded to be detonated, my gut lobbied for some strenuous retching, and my innards ached to explode out of every orifice. So naturally I was eager to pass through the controls and begin my 18-hour sleep in Tashkurgan as quickly as possible. At the shack that passed for the frontier controls of the Middle Kingdom just outside Tashkurgan, I approached the two smartly uniformed representatives of what I took to be the People's Liberation Army, who were doing a very passable imitation of loitering. Now, I was filled with trepidation because they were both smoking. Before I quit smoking in 1996, I had previously had the dubious experience of smoking a cigarette at a relatively high altitude (10,000 ft) in Peru: believe me, it feels like your lungs are collapsing. In the current environment -- somewhere between 4000 and 5000 metres, thin dry air, maybe 5 degrees centigrade, dust everywhere -- I was not expecting pleasant things to happen while in contact with clouds of secondary smoke. Despite these conditions the two Chinese border guards smoked with a sangfroid which intimated that their tiny chests must have harboured lungs of oxen. The cigarette smoke emanating from these Chinese chimneys was lit up by the late afternoon sun piercing its rays through the Pamir (or Hindu Kush?) mountains. I couldn't decide whether the scene was ominous or picturesque. I handed my UK passport to one of the guards. The Chinese border guard took a look at the clean-shaven, callow-looking pale fellow in the passport photo. He then raised his head in an abrupt jerky motion, furrowed his brows and stared up at the face of this dark dirty dusty stinking bearded backpacking barbarian tribesman in pyjamas. He said, "No". "No? No what?" I asked with an irritation thankfully diluted by my physical enfeeblement. "No you", replied the guard, pointing to the passport photo. PE:
Of course it's me. This licence may very well have convinced the Chinese guard that I must have been a bandit who had ambushed some poor naive tourist and stolen his passport, wallet and belongings. I was expecting any minute to be asked what I had done with the body. "No you", he repeated without change in tone. Then he exhaled the largest waft of cigarette smoke I had ever seen, prompting me to cough violently. In seeming response to the hack, he and the other border guard emitted that callous snicker so uniquely the province of Chinese petty officialdom. Then they began jabbering to each other in Mandarin, a language, with its mousey mewling, I can never hear without developing a splitting headache. I imagined them saying, what a wimp this bandit was, bothered by a little smoke. I wished I could retch at that very moment, in cascade formation onto their boots. So the only way to convince these two, I thought, was to shave, wash off the accumulated dust off my face, and get out of these Pathan clothes. But where? I thought of getting back on the bus, but the entrance was blocked: I could not reboard without first completing the passport control formalities. There were no trees or shrubbery nearby behind which I could change clothes. In both directions, the road was empty of such structures as far as the eye could see. Then I noticed what looked like a resthouse a couple of hundred feet past this border checkpoint. "Is there a lavatory or a resthouse in the area?", I asked the Chinese guard naively. He didn't understand. PE:
Toilet? Fuck, I said to myself, I will shave and change clothes before their eyes, despite the cold. I retreated a few yards from the guards, ransacked my bag and, somewhat to the surprise of the Chinese guards, pulled out my razor, shaving cream and a hand-held mirror. When a gawker whom I took to be a Tajik saw me struggling to juggle razor, cream, and mirror, he kindly offered to hold the mirror for me. "Motashakkerram, baradar, Tajikiha va Pakhtuniha hamoon hastand!" ["Thanks, brother, Tajiks and Pathans are one!" in Farsi, which is close enough to the Wakhi dialect.] The Tajik beamed at my slight Persian, but the Chinese guard signalled through a squinting sceptical look on his face that he was redoubling his suspicion that I was some bandit impostor. In the picturesque limbo zone between Pakistan and China, located on a paved road sandwiched on the one side by rocky mouse-grey hills and on the other by a luxurious verdure dotted with yaks, Bactrian camels and Tajiks; and hedged in by the monumental glaciers of the distant Pamirs; there stood your humble narrator with his temporary Tajik mirror wallah at his service, shaving precipitately and bloodying his face in front of an $3 mirror. Other Tajiks came to watch. Soon, the two Chinese guards, a dozen or so of the local Tajiks and several of the bus passengers (foreigners and Paks) formed a wide, loose circle around me, spectators to my indignity. The shaving finished, I splashed some of my bottled water on my face. Then I cast off my Pathan clothing and stripped to my boxers. Before any of the hirsute Tajiks, Pathans and Pakistanis could generate cruel laughter at my sorry scrawny hairless chest, I quickly put on a pair of jeans and a turtleneck and presented myself once again before the Chinese guards. (Jeans, an item of clothing impossible to wear in Iran and Pakistan.) A facetious bus-borne voice in English with an unrecognisable accent called out: "A body search? What are they looking for?" I wish they had found some coca leaves. "It's bloody me", pointing to the passport photo. The Chinese guards examined my face closely and sceptically, and without even a grudging acknowledgement of my transformation, the second of the guards began to flip blithely through the pages of my passport. He asked, "Where is Pakistan visa? Where is exit stamp?" My UK passport contained no visa for Pakistan quite simply because I had entered Pakistan with my Pak passport, which also played host to my exit stamp. I was hoping to avoid this, but I produced the Pak passport. The Chinese guards were perplexed. Utterly perplexed. I didn't mean to do this, but I had no choice. I had only a short period of time to get my visas for Iran and China. So I submitted different passports for Iranian and Chinese visas. "Which one you?", asked guard #1. I replied, "Both". Guard #2 took the Pak passport, guard #1 kept the UK passport, each guard scrutinising each passport with a care reserved for detailing ivory figurines. "Why two passport?", asked guard #1. "I am a citizen of more than one country". They seemed to grow more baffled. The bafflement was compounded by the fact that in the Pak passport my full name reads a bit different from the one in my UK passport. One guard disappeared into his little shack-office with both my docments, and I could see through the window that he was lifting the telephone. Perhaps in their minds I was transformed from a mere bandit to a spy with a talent for disguises. There wasn't much suspense. The guard got off the telephone and made me wait another hour (delaying everybody on the bus in the process), but soon enough he told me I could pass. So, after an unusually thorough and tedious search of my belongings, I arrived in Tashkurgan. I checked into a seedy hotel and, both in resentment of the Chinese guards and out of a jejune romanticism, I crashed into the bed vowing to champion the cause of Turkestan, to be the Richard Gere of the Uighurs...
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