by Don George
On my first encounter with all the vastness of Australia, I realized, I had already found one such hub: hot, dusty Dubbo; sweet, silent Dubbo; Dubbo of sheep and shearer, wheat and wide-open space; Dubbo on the edge of the Outback, at the center of the map in my mind.
A Passage to Pakistan
In the spring of 1990, I was feeling restive, in need of some deeply personal-envelope-pushing adventure. The Bay Area was the center of the burgeoning adventure travel industry, and I contacted a local company called InnerAsia Expeditions (now known as Geographic Expeditions, and happily, still a part of my life a quarter-century later). I had long heard rumors of a fabled place in northern Pakistan called Hunza, and InnerAsia had a three-week adventure that went to Hunza and beyond, high into the Himalaya along the equally fabled Karakoram Highway. It sounded like the stuff of dreams and I signed up eagerly. The trip turned out to be even more of an adventure than I had hoped for, and the only way I could do it justice in my articles, I felt, was to break the trip into three segments and write three long pieces for the travel section. Taken together, this is the longest article I have ever written about a trip—but in many ways, this was the most epic trip of my lifetime, and when I reread this account, even a quarter-century later, all the fear, discomfort, wonder, and exhilaration of encountering that unfamiliar world come surging back to me.
Part One: Rawalpindi, Peshawar, and the Khyber Pass
We sat around the table in the dawn-lit dining room at the Shangri-La Hotel in Chilas, Pakistan, a decidedly unparadisiacal place where a policeman had been shot during a public protest two days before, and debated what to do: It had been raining hard for at least forty-eight hours, loosening the rocks above the Karakoram Highway and increasing the possibilities of avalanche and flood. We could risk the highway and reach Islamabad by midnight, which would give us a full day to recuperate in our luxury hotel before the thirty-two-hour journey back to the United States. Or we could wait in Chilas, hoping that the rain would let up so that we could make the trip more safely the following day and drive straight to the airport.
“I don’t think we should go,” said Tom Cole, the trip leader from the United States.
“I think it will be all right,” said Asad Esker, the leader from Pakistan.
The remaining four of us looked at each other, and the prospect of death—imminent death, actual death, death not as a benign abstraction but as a visceral reality—hung palpable in the air.
That dilemma was far in the unimaginable future, however, when I arrived in Islamabad on April 2 at 2:56 a.m.
I had left San Francisco at 11:00 a.m. on March 30 and flown a total of twenty-seven hours—via New York, Paris, and Frankfurt. Now, at last, I was in Pakistan: Hot white letters spelling “Islamabad International” blazed in the darkness, and all around them the same words danced in neon blue Arabic script.
Five of the nine total members of the tour, plus trip leader Tom Cole, had been on the same flight from New York, and we introduced ourselves, stretched sore muscles, and rubbed bleary eyes while waiting for our bags to appear. Soon they did, as did our smiling local guide, Asad Esker, and driver, Ali Muhammad, who whisked us through the dazed and humid night to our luxurious recovery rooms at the Pearl Continental Hotel in nearby Rawalpindi.
I slept fitfully for a few hours, then was awakened at 4:30 by the distant wail of a muezzin calling the Muslim faithful—who comprise 99 percent of the population of Pakistan—to prayer. Raucous crows’ caws filled the air, and the rising-falling song of another muezzin braided with the first. Then sirens blared.
What’s going on, I wondered. A fire somewhere? Or maybe just the impending sunrise—for we had arrived during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are not supposed to eat or drink between sunrise and sunset.
The dull cacophony continued, muezzins and sirens and crows wailing and blaring and cawing until it seemed as if the whole country was speaking with one voice, and the just-waking day soared and swelled and echoed with the sound of it.
Then a solitary soul, much closer, began his plaintive call. The voice rose, held, and fell. The words were clear and strong and imbued the air with a strange and powerful fervency and mystery. I thought it was a song of supplication and hope—but who was I to say?
I knew nothing, understood nothing; everything was unfamiliar. I was a blank map, onto which Pakistan had just begun its artful scrawl.
After an orientation session in the hotel lobby, our group set out to visit downtown Rawalpindi. This first excursion introduced urban emblems that would reappear throughout the trip: dusty streets loud with horns and crammed with buses, cars, carts, and bicycles. And people! Bearded, fierce-eyed men in turbans and shalwar kameez (the light and loose Pakistani suit that combines a knee-length shirt with drawstring pants); little children in dusty clothes, all big eyes and quick smiles; women wrapped in gorgeous veils and scarves and shalwar kameez, some covered completely from head to toe, others with only their faces exposed.
Children stood behind carts piled with pyramids of figs, oranges, or grapefruit; men sat in storefront shops selling electric fans, shoes, underwear, sewing machines. Alleyways twisted past stalls displaying jewelry, bright bolts of cloth, fantastic colored mounds of spices.
As we wandered, I quickly realized that my fundamental preconception of Pakistan was wrong: I had expected a miniature version of India, but unlike the Indian cities I had visited, here there were no beggars, and none of the vaguely menacing atmosphere of poverty, decay, and hopelessness I remembered from Calcutta and New Delhi. Wherever we went, we were either ignored or greeted with hearty smiles and hellos. And even in that chaos and cacophony, there was a sense of order and purposefulness; the shops seemed well maintained, and the adults seemed markedly attentive to the cleanliness of their clothes and the neatness of their appearance.
Early the next day we flew to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Peshawar has been in the international spotlight in recent years because it is the headquarters-in-exile for the Afghanistan guerrillas who have been fighting the Soviets and the Soviet-instituted government in Kabul. Unlike Rawalpindi, Westerners were in evidence throughout the city—most, Asad said, either journalists or workers with one or another international aid organization.
The Peshawar bazaar revealed the same wonderland of colors, smells, and sounds as Rawalpindi’s, but made even more complex with the addition of the people and products—the subtle but penetrating presence—of Afghanistan. In the bazaar, men occasionally tugged at our arms or pointed at themselves and said, “Afghanistan, Afghanistan,” and the shops were filled with Afghan-made rugs, jewelry, and metalware.
Especially riveting were the unexpected reminders of the Afghanistan war—soldiers’ caps with the red Soviet hammer and sickle, uniform buttons and insignias. When I turned one such hat in my hands, the thought came to me that a young man had once worn it, a young man probably not so different from me, with loving parents and siblings and perhaps a young wife who even now recalled with bitter tears his vow that he would return from the war alive.
Being here, near the figurative front lines, brought the news to life—or death—over and over again: Asad applied to the Tribal and Home Affairs Department for permission to go to the Khyber Pass, and was told that the day before, Afghan helicopters and planes had been flying low over the border area. They hadn’t done anything, but they had unsettled the authorities enough to deny our request.
So instead we set off for Darra Adam Khel, headquarters of Pakistan’s burgeoning gun-making and gun-smuggling industry.
The dusty road to Darra unfolds in memory as a series of snapshots: rough, mud-walled settlements that Asad said were Afghan refugee camps; women in flowing red and white robes balancing bright green packages on their heads; donkey carts bearing bricks; barefoot children in ragged clothes skittering through the dirt or hoisting slingshots, stopping to cry out and wave when they saw our foreign faces; eye-relievi
ng splashes of green fields—wheat, sugar cane, and sugar beets—and stands of trees; scraggly cows and burros and sheep by the side of the road.
At some point Asad explained that we were passing into tribal territory, where Pakistani law stopped and local law took over. The tribes elect their own councils and representatives, he said, and essentially police themselves. An invisible corridor that extends forty feet on either side of the road is considered Pakistani territory; venture beyond that, and your fate is in the hands of the local tribes. “The gun is the law of this area,” he added.
As we continued we passed long, dun-colored mud complexes with towering walls that looked like miniature fortresses. Asad explained that these were family dwellings. In the tribal territories, every house has its own watchtower, so that in times of tribal conflict, vigils can be kept around the clock.
And then we reached Darra. At first it looked like any other dusty town, one main street and a few side streets lined with small shops. But something heavy hung like a shroud in the air.
As we walked, we saw storefront after storefront glistening with pistols, rifles, bullets, knives. It was a little boy’s fantasy world, a gun nut’s dream come true—every variety of weapon you could want, right there in neat display. It was also the classic cottage industry, except that here the ultimate product was death.
“You want to try one?” A grizzled shopkeeper held out a rifle. “Shoot! Shoot!” he said, then stepped into the street outside his shop, pointed the barrel into the sky, and fired. Boom! I jumped.
“You want to try?”
After some prodding, I and a few other members of our group followed him to the “firing range,” an area well beyond the shops with a dusty flat field that ended in a hill.
He held out a Russian-made Kalashnikov automatic rifle. The shopkeeper steadied the butt against my shoulder, then stepped away and put his fingers in his ears. I squeezed the trigger. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! The butt slammed into my shoulder, and little pings of dust traced the bullets. Weird feeling.
Again I squeezed. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! I felt awful and giddy at the same time—amazed at the pure power, the deadly power, I could unleash with a little twitch of my finger.
While others in our group were firing, another group of men bearing three rifles approached. A hawk-nosed, fiery-eyed man in an elaborate tan turban and draped in a bright blanket, separated himself from the group, crouched, aimed carefully, and fired. He tried each gun, and each try was followed by a burst of excited discussion and dispute.
I didn’t know what tribe he was from, but I did know he wasn’t firing those rifles so that he could write about it back home.
Later, as I walked through dusty back alleys and watched old men and young boys patiently tapping and tinkering and polishing their creations like kindly Swiss toymakers, the unreality of it all overwhelmed me. They didn’t look like monsters; they were just brothers, husbands, and fathers making money to buy flour and fruit and shoes. And yet I felt that I had touched the heart of some immense evil, the vital nerve center of a sinuous and shadowy network of smuggling/oppression/conflict that operated all around the world and was vastly more powerful and pervasive—and perverse—than I had ever imagined.
On the following day we learned that we would have to alter our itinerary: We could not fly to Chitral, gateway to the pagan Kafir Kalash people of Kafiristan, because seasonal thermal updrafts—that would last about five days, Asad said—had made it impossible to land there. This was the first indication on the trip of the manifold uncertainties that come with the territory of adventure travel—obstacles that sometimes no amount of money or preparation can overcome.
After a group discussion, we decided to add one more day each to our stays in Gilgit and Hunza. I was deeply disappointed that we would not be able to see the tribes of the Kalash, who reportedly have managed to maintain their own pagan beliefs and distinct dress, speech, and other cultural practices through two millennia of passive Buddhist belief and, later, aggressive Islamic rule all around them.
Then we heard the good news: Asad had somehow secured permission for us to visit the Khyber Pass!
Martial music played and images from Gunga Din marched through my head as we wound due west toward the border. We passed two sprawling Afghan refugee settlements—temporary structures of mud, bamboo, and straw, stretching across the dusty flatlands—and Asad said that 35,000 people lived in one and 28,000 in another. He added that Pakistan supplies three-quarters of the cost of supporting all the camps.
Until this time, my sense of the Afghan war had been confined to television and newspaper reports viewed or read in the comfort of my living room. Now the picture had changed. “Try to imagine all the inhabitants of Burlingame, say, or Los Gatos,” I wrote in my journal, “living in these patched-together structures, laced by dirt lanes on a parched plain; then try to imagine providing for all their needs in a country that is already strapped meeting the needs of its own inhabitants, and then try to imagine the sufferings of the refugees themselves—from maimed limbs to splintered families to profound psychological displacement. Imagine all these, and you begin to get some sense of the scale and depth of the problems the Afghan war has created.”
As long-prowed, brightly painted trucks bearing lumber, bricks, tires, and cows honked their horns and ground their gears around us, Asad summarized the history of the region: “The road we are traveling now is a continuation of the Grand Trunk Road, which was originally built in the 14th century connecting Kabul to Delhi. It was improved on and expanded through the centuries, but most importantly by the British in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The route passes through Europe into Turkey, then Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.”
For a moment the “magic buses” I had seen crammed with long-haired hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts in Istanbul in the ’70s came to mind, and I remembered the exotic tales of Kabul and Kathmandu. How far away that whole world seemed—and yet how near.
“So many armies have passed this way,” Asad continued, “beginning with the Indo-Aryans in 1500-1200 b.c., then Alexander the Great and his troops in the 4th century b.c., and through the centuries the Tatars, Mughals, Afghans, and English. . . .
“The mountains we are traveling into are part of the Hindu Kush. The Khyber Pass itself is thirty-three kilometers (about twenty miles) long; 98,000 people live in the area, and three different tribes control different areas of the pass.
“The main industry here, to tell you the truth, is smuggling. The tribal chiefs have huge complexes that are well guarded, and the tribespeople pass back and forth over the border at will; there are many unsupervised points where they can cross at night.”
The road twisted and wound past rocky, barren bluffs with forts the same bleached color perched on their tops, etched against the cloudless blue sky. Naked children jumped and splashed in streams, and women led straggling strings of children, or balanced bulging bags, or talked in groups away from the road—their brilliant robes catching our eyes even as they hastily drew their veils around their faces to avoid our stares.
What kind of life do these people have out here? I wondered. And yet this is where they grew up, this is all they know of the world, an inner voice replied.
At one point we stopped and got out, and Asad pointed to the ribboning road we had just traveled. “If you look closely out there, you can see three roads: On the top is the road the Mughals used in the early 16th century; below that—see the dirt trail—is the path the Greeks used under Alexander; and then there is the Grand Trunk Road the British made.”
At another point he motioned out the window to a grassy, depressed plain. “This was the site of a bloody ambush during the third Afghan war in 1919. The British and the Pathans fought fiercely throughout this area for more than a century.”
At this Tom Cole said, “Of all the peoples the British encountered in their 300-odd years on the subcontinent, they admired the Pathans the most.” And then he quoted the words
the Pakistanis had chiseled in stone at the gateway to the pass, in commemoration of the end of British-Pathan conflict: “According to the British, it was here that they met their equals, who looked them straight in the face and fought against them up to the last day of their rule. But when the British quit, after a rule of 100 years, the two great peoples parted as friends.”
Later we passed a honeycomb of small shops, and Asad said, “This is Ali Mastid bazaar—from the earliest days of the Silk Route, this is where the camel caravans would stop for the night. In fact, nomad caravans still do stop here.”
We saw the remains of a Buddhist stupa, and tank barriers built by the British during WWII, and always the sere, steep, craggy rocks; the twisting road; the brown, baked tribal settlements set into the hills; the trucks laden with wood, metal drums of fuel, tires; pedestrians and goats and cows; buses bulging with passengers; pickup trucks bearing grizzled men with rifles slung over their shoulders; and the dust, in my mouth and on my clothes, coating everything.
As we bumped along, I realized that I had been given a great gift: In the accumulation of images and encounters, as my feet scuffed that parched ground, as I nodded at Pakistani soldiers, shook Afghan hands in the bazaar, and waved to children in the settlements, the war was becoming personalized—it was no longer their war, but my war, too. And as the sun glowered down and the earth baked as it had when Alexander’s soldiers walked this way, I thought of how all wars are just people fighting people—and of how just as sun and wind inevitably shape landscape, so too do climate and countryside shape human character and culture.
We reached the last checkpoint before the border, and there we had to stop. Ahead, clearly visible less than four miles in the distance, was Afghanistan. Through binoculars we could see the row of white markers strung out along the hills that represented the border, people moving at the border crossing, and trucks, and then the sere hills stretching into the distance.
