by Don George
These are for your family, he said, pointing to my pictures. I thanked him as profusely as I could, and handed him two of the San Francisco postcards I had brought. Please hang these on your wall, I said. He said thank you, then asked to have one of the pictures of my family as well. I hesitated—I didn’t know what situation might arise where I would need those precious pictures—but he was so kind and friendly and I was so moved, I relented and gave him his choice.
He chose a Christmas picture of us standing in front of a brightly decorated tree and told me that he would hang it proudly on his wall between the two postcards of San Francisco. He then clasped my hand warmly and said two words that I later found out meant “family” and “brothers.”
Now, half a world away, I think of that singular encounter and a whole gallery of images comes to life within me: the sword-wielding shopkeeper in Swat, the immortal mountains, the shaman’s frenzied dance.
I wonder if someday my daughter will journey to Hunza and find that same carpenter’s house, and our photograph still on that rough wall. And I think that time flows backward and forward, and that once in a rare while—if you are lucky and it is cloudy enough to make you see beyond your preconceptions—you stumble onto a connection that transcends it all.
Part Three: The Epic of the KKH
The adventures intensified after our Contac-quaffing, Maalox-munching, cloud-weary group left Hunza for Gulmit and the hot showers and hearty food other travelers said we would find at the Silk Route Lodge. The journey north was uneventful—skitterish rocks and precipitous drops had become commonplace by now—until we reached an avalanche about ten minutes from Gulmit.
The avalanche had buried the road long enough ago that a plow had already cut a corridor through its twenty-foot-deep drifts, but our steel-nerved driver, Ali Muhammad, feared the van would lose traction on the icy path and sit there, sandwiched in the snow, a fat target for a second avalanche.
So Asad Esker, our Pakistani guide, set out on foot for Gulmit to get a tractor that could pull the van through, and Ali backed the van up to a point on the road that looked reasonably secure. And we sat and waited.
Waiting for an avalanche or rockslide to sweep us into oblivion quickly lost its appeal, so after a while I decided to set out on foot for Gulmit, too. There wasn’t much chance of making a wrong turn—the nearest intersection was about four hours away.
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch went my feet, quickly along the snow-plowed path, then slowly when I reached the other side. There, beyond sight of the van, the notion of solitude took on a whole new, almost otherworldly dimension. It was just me and the mountains, and I tried to imagine what the traders and missionaries and adventurers who had wandered this way before me had felt.
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.
If I walk long enough, I thought, I’ll reach the Chinese border. And if I keep walking after that, eventually this same road will take me to Kashgar, where right now wild-eyed mountain men are sizing up camels and crockery, bartering for boots and broadcloth.
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.
This is one of the most remote and desolate places I’ve ever been, I thought. If I were traveling alone, I would probably think I had come to the end of the Earth.
Then I took out my tape recorder and said: “It’s not just that it’s an inhospitable environment—which it certainly is—but also that you sense the forces of nature and time grinding on all around you, and you feel like a grain of sand on the slopes of one of the mountains.”
My voice seemed like an intruder, and I stopped—and listened. The silence was so overpowering, so absolute, that it was almost like a vacuum of sound. Instead of sound, enormous waves of energy emanated from the mountains all around, so strong that I had to sit down.
Perhaps Marco Polo felt these same waves, I thought. Perhaps he called his fellow adventurers to a halt in this very spot, and sat on this very rock, and pondered—just like me—what an insignificant piece he was in the world’s vast puzzle, how easily he could be bent, or lost, or simply worn away.
I walked all the way to the Silk Route Lodge, and the others eventually arrived by jeep and pickup truck. Gulmit’s only tractor had been dispatched that morning to a town near the Chinese border, however, and wasn’t expected back until the following day, so the van remained marooned on the road.
After a revitalizing night at the Silk Route Lodge—where the meals were indeed excellent, although the hot water ran out before I could run into the shower—we returned by jeep to the avalanche and walked through it to our van. Then we rode south for about an hour—until we were stopped by another avalanche. This one had smothered the road like an overturned sack of sugar—a sack of sugar in which each granule was the size of a bowling ball.
This avalanche was so recent that it had not yet been plowed, but somehow the wizardly Asad had heard about it before we left the Silk Route Lodge, and had called his office in Gilgit to request that vans be sent to meet us on the other side of the snow.
We disembarked and hiked up, up, and over the avalanche—and lo and behold, two vans white as angels awaited us. Cries erupted from them at the sight of our group, and porters scurried forward to transport our bags over the avalanche’s hump. We chucked snowballs at each other in celebration.
On the rest of the long and winding road to Gilgit, we passed palaces, poplars, and petroglyphs, waterfalls and meeting halls, stupas and sheep, but for many the most exciting discovery was packets of British biscuits and chocolate cookies at a roadside stall.
After a heartening night at the Serena Lodge in Gilgit—heated rooms, delicious fried chicken, and custard desserts!—we journeyed on to Skardu. As it turned out, the weather began to clear during this all-day drive, and we were treated to spectacular vistas of brilliant snowcapped peaks and deep blue skies, puffy clouds and lush green terraced fields—the Pakistan of the guidebook pictures and tour brochure prose—before the end of the day.
This ride and the following few day trips to nearby villages and lakes afforded me ample opportunity to reflect on the trip, and on some of the complexities and contradictions of northern Pakistan and of adventure travel in general.
On the night before we were to leave Skardu, I tried to sort them out in my notebook:
The most troubling issue on this trip has been the role and presence of women in Pakistan. From the beginning, I have been surprised by how few women were to be seen in public places. Those we do see consciously avoid our gaze, and it is clear that we are not to speak with them or photograph them. By now this has grown into a subtle psychological oppression, a kind of spiritual heaviness; I feel worn down by the rough and rigid masculine energy that seems to pervade Pakistan, unleavened by any feminine softness or flexibility.
This creates special obstacles for women traveling in Pakistan, especially women traveling alone. The complaints I have heard range from the covert—the sense of constantly being on display—to the overt: being jostled or fondled in crowds, glared at in markets, and ignored in offices. “I can’t wait to get out of this country,” one Englishwoman told me in Peshawar.
Certainly women can lessen these problems by dressing like Pakistani women—wearing clothes that cover their arms and legs and scarves on their heads—and by adopting a certain aura of unaggressiveness. But the differences in attitude—and so the potential for problems—still remain.
Another fact that has become apparent is that despite the cost of the trip—more than $4,000 when you include airfare—rough conditions and travel unpredictabilities come with this territory, and so flexibility, tolerance, and good humor are absolutely essential.
Money does not buy certainty or guarantee comfort here. What it does buy is access, and that’s why people are willing to spend a hefty portion of their salaries—to go places they would have great difficulty going on their own.
The situation becomes especially irritating if you get sick—and so end up paying thousands of dollars to shiver in bla
nkets or shuttle between bed and bathroom in some remote hotel room. Yet the lower standards of hygiene and foreign foods and germs you inevitably encounter on such a trip make sickness an inherent possibility.
And finally there’s the issue of mortality: I risk death every time I cross a San Francisco street or drive on a California freeway, I know, but the possibility of death by accident on Interstate 80, say, is familiar and so easier to ignore than the possibility of death by avalanche on the KKH.
Rugged, remote trips such as this one put the gift of life in a new perspective, and I guess that’s what it all comes down to: Every day in our lives presents dangers of one kind or another; some we challenge because they are expedient, others because we judge that the rewards merit the risks.
This last notation took on new meaning two days later, when we sat around a table in the troubled town of Chilas debating what to do.
We had driven to Chilas the day before from Skardu, after learning that the Skardu-to-Islamabad flight would not operate that morning. Heavy rains had been falling for at least forty-eight hours, loosening the rocks above the highway and increasing the possibilities of avalanche or flood.
If we risked the road, we could reach Islamabad by midnight, giving us a full day to recuperate before the thirty-two-hour journey back to the United States. If we waited in Chilas, the rain might let up, allowing us to drive more safely straight to the airport the following day.
Tom Cole said he thought we should stay in Chilas. Asad said he thought it would be all right to go.
Rain pattered on the roof, and the grimy light of a cloud-covered dawn smudged the windows. If we didn’t risk the road and the rains continued, we faced the distinct possibility of missing our plane in Islamabad and being stuck there for three days until the next scheduled flight—if we could get seats on that flight.
We thought of appointments and commitments, dangers and delusions, imponderables and percentages—and, most of all, loved ones anxiously awaiting our return. We looked at each other long moments and then, as if with one voice, said, “Let’s go.”
I have felt fear at various times in my life, but almost never as palpably and deeply as I did that morning. It sat round and heavy, a lead ball, in my stomach.
The van was silent as we drove slowly down the rain-slicked road out of Chilas. A coppery dryness parched my mouth, and for a while I had to grip the van seat to keep my hands from trembling. I wondered if there would be even a second of realization before the avalanche came, or if it would arrive in a cloud of instantaneous obliteration. I wondered if a search party would be able to identify our remains. I wondered why I had ever put myself in this stupid situation in the first place.
After some time, to take my mind off the slippery slopes, I took out my notebook and wrote:
We left at 5:30 so that we could get into Rawalpindi before nightfall or shortly thereafter. Now we have been bumping along through the morning mists for about a half-hour. We have not seen one other car or truck, and that is spooky.
The possibility of death by landslide is in the air, and the reality of the KKH hits home—it is not something to be trifled with. We are in an elongated life-or-death situation with no way of pinpointing if or when the life-or-death moment will strike. If we get through without incident, this will seem like so much groundless worry. If not, well. . . . Let us hope that at some point in the future I will look back at these notes and smile at the memory.
After about two hours the mists began to lift, and our spirits with them. A kind of exhilaration began to take hold, a feeling of exploring a world no one had seen before us. We were trailblazing, opening up the KKH. Adventuring!
Once again we began to exclaim at the vistas and peaks, at the trim stone houses and rock-bordered emerald terraces. The crescendo came at 8:07 a.m., when a red bus with “Rawalpindi” written on the front passed us going in the opposite direction. Cheers broke out in the van—the road was open!
From this point on, it was all downhill, so to speak. The sun shone, the peaks glistened, the clouds puffed, the road dried—occasionally waterfalls coursed across the pavement or we bumped over great gaping stretches where the road had been washed away, but these were trifles, good photo opportunities, footnotes to the epic of the KKH.
Morning slid giddily into afternoon, and at some point I took out my notebook and wrote:
Three weeks ago Pakistan meant nothing to you. And now it is all around you. Pakistan is burros burdened with fodder and wood; it is lush green fields dotted with big blossoms of color that, as you get closer, turn out to be women in red, green, purple, or blue robes. It is children with dark hair and big shining eyes who smile and wave and cry out, “Bye-bye, bye-bye,” and weathered men in white caps and dun-colored blankets, their stares like skewers until you smile and wave—and their wrinkles crease into smiles and they raise their hands in stately salute.
Pakistan is a string of camels plodding down the highway; young men in spattered shalwar kameez playing cricket in the rain. It is women washing their clothes in a river, and naked children playing jacks in the mud nearby. It is tiny, musty shops crammed with old artifacts and new handicrafts; open-air stalls selling oranges and dates, carpets and cloth, jewelry, spices, guns. It is painted trucks, horse-drawn carriages, battered bicycles, mountain palaces, and muddy refugee camps. It is white clouds and gray clouds; green fields and snowy meadows; dusty plains and snowcapped peaks; pearly mist and blue sky. It is all Pakistan. Pakistan!
I put down my pen and thought: Little did I know, three weeks ago, that I was beginning a journey that would have no end.
Insights into Nice at the Musee Matisse
I turned forty when I was at the Examiner, and to soften the blow of aging a full decade in one night, I sent myself on a hedonistic adventure to the South of France. I stayed at celebrated hotels and ate Michelin meals, but the most memorable experience of all occurred at the newly opened Musée Matisse. I love Matisse’s work, so I was excited to see the museum, but what ended up impressing me even more was a vivacious trio of local women. My entire encounter with them happened so quickly that it felt almost like a dream afterwards, and when I considered writing about it, there seemed no other choice but to present our meeting as a scene from a play starring one haplessly enchanted American and three fabulous—and oh-so-ineffably French—citizens of Nice.
I WAS SITTING IN A SECOND-FLOOR SALON at the newly opened Musée Matisse in Nice, France, scribbling in my notebook, when an attractive, middle-aged woman in an impeccably tailored peach-colored suit approached me and said in flawless French, “Excuse me, but do you speak French?”
I said I did, and she continued, “Well, forgive me for bothering you, but I’m wondering just what a foreign visitor thinks about this museum. You see, I’m from Nice, and I can’t find anything worthwhile here, and I’m afraid that visitors who come all the way to Nice from far away to see this museum will be terribly disappointed.
“Whatever have you found to write about?” she said, gesturing at my notebook.
“Well,” I began, hoping my trusty, rusty French was up to this adventure in art criticism, “there are certain valuable illuminations to be found—”
“Illuminations!” she exploded, her pearl necklace trembling. “Have you been to the Matisse show in Paris?”
“Well, no,” I said, “but I did see the Matisse exhibition in New York last year.”
“New York!” she pouted, as if she had been one-upped by a neighbor. “And how does this compare to that?”
“Well, you really can’t compare,” I began, but then another well-dressed woman who had been hovering near us burst into speech.
“But you can’t compare the two!” she exclaimed, fire in her voice and eyes. “I too am a native of Nice, and I think this is a very interesting museum, an extraordinary achievement given all the obstacles that had to be overcome, all the planning and work that went into it.
“You know,” she continued
, turning to me, “this museum was six years in the making. As you can see”—and her fiery gaze directed my eyes to the ancient rocky walls on the museum’s grounds—“this villa is set on an area of Roman ruins. There were all manner of political problems and personality problems, permissions to be obtained, regulations to be followed—the plan had to be meticulous, absolutely perfect! It is a miracle this museum was ever finished!”
I almost expected the room to burst into applause.
“Well, yes,” my original questioner countered, “but now that it is finished, I ask you, What is there to see? Some half-finished drawings, studies; a scattering of canvases. Where are the masterpieces? Where is the genius of Matisse?” and she thrust one diamond-bedecked hand toward the sky.
“Well,” I said, “that canvas over there—Fenêtre à Tahiti—is a powerful composition, with those great blocks of color one associates with Matisse’s masterpieces.”
“Bravo!” said the second woman.
“Oh, that,” said the first woman, flinging a finger at the painting as if it were the bones of yesterday’s fish dinner. “Yes, there are a few canvases of note here—but so few! Why cannot Nice, Matisse’s home, produce a more distinguished tribute to an artist of such distinction?”
“But don’t you know”—the second woman’s friend now entered the fray—“how expensive it is to mount exhibitions these days? All the permissions that have to be obtained, and the shipping fees—and the insurance!” she exclaimed, her eyes rolling heavenward in horror.
“The insurance,” muttered woman number one. “We are talking about art and genius and a suitable tribute—and you are talking about insurance!”
