1st August 2006 - Welcome to Asia

Having heard from other travellers that in practice many foreign women feel more comfortable wearing a headscarf in Pakistan (though, unlike Iran, Pakistan doesn't make it a legal requirement), Lizzy resisted (with difficulty) the urge to tear off her headscarf and burn it at the border.  But it was very pleasant to be able to take it off when we were offered a cup of tea in the Pakistani customs house!  Even the tea emphasised the fact that we were in another country - it was served with lots of (very creamy) milk (yuck!).  The border formalities were quickly over and we started our long drive across the Baluchistan desert.  The first night we reached Dalbandin, where we camped in the courtyard of the police station.  It was an experience unlike any we had had so far, putting up our tent under the interested stares of the prisoners from their cells around the courtyard!  The police were friendly, especially the deputy chief of police, who was lying on a bed in the centre of the courtyard in the throes of an attack of malaria!  We took extra care not to let any mosquitoes into the tent that night!  Next morning, we woke up to a chorus of prisoners and policemen alike hawking up phlegm into the gutter - welcome to Pakistan!

After another day's driving we arrived in Quetta, where we checked into the Bloom Star Hotel, a popular overlander haunt.  We discovered at reception that our friends Norbert and Ruth had been there the week before and the couple from Ivory Coast just two days before.  At each of the many police checkpoints across the desert, where foreign travellers have to enter their details in a special book, it was a nice feeling to see their names ahead of ours - there are very few overlanders travelling this route at the moment (either because of the hot weather or the political situation, or more probably a combination of both) so reminders that we are part of a community are always welcome!

From the time that we reached the outskirts of Quetta, our senses were constantly assaulted by evidence that we were now in a truly Asian country.  The dirt and dust, the pungent smells, the melee of people and animals all along the roadsides - at every turn, the contrast with the relative civilisation of Iran was perceptible.  One particularly unpleasant feature of a Pakistani city is the sight (and smell) of open drains (and sometimes sewers) along all the main streets.  The best that can be said of this obvious symbol of the lower standard of hygiene is that it makes it easy to remember not to drink the water!  In other ways, we found Quetta fascinating - the change from Iran was so enormous that every aspect of daily life was interesting to us.

After two nights in Quetta, we headed south and drove to Islamabad via Sukkur and Multan, spending a night in each.  Unfortunately, the increased humidity as we drove south only served to make being on the street in cities more unbearable and in each city we took refuge in an airconditioned hotel at the end of a hard day's driving.  This was a shame - Multan in particular definitely deserved more of our attention as the shrines there are famous throughout the country - but we just didn't feel able to explore when we were constantly soaked through with sweat.  Arriving in Islamabad, we went straight to the campsite, but when we got to the point of putting up our tent we looked at each other and each confessed that we couldn't imagine how we'd get any sleep in such high humidity.  Perhaps if there had been other overlanders there we would have given it a go, but we decided to check into a hotel for the night instead.  From the next night we were able to stay with our friend James's friend Cathy, who works for the British Council in Islamabad - a fantastic experience, especially as Cathy lives in a beautiful house with air-conditioning and enormous comfy beds!  So far we have enjoyed a week there, giving us the opportunity to give the Landy a service (nothing wrong except normal wear and tear - it really is doing a brilliant job) and enjoy our social life to the full - alternating between sampling the ex-pat lifestyle with Cathy and hanging out with fellow overlanders Norbert and Ruth, Dick and Nana (a Dutch couple with a Land Rover (www.overlandxlandrover.com)) and Alex and Juergen (a German couple with a Unimog (www.magic-worlds.net)).  We could get used to this... 

17th August 2006 - Landy meets (lots of) landslides...

After a fantastic week relaxing at Cathy's, we were ready to hit the road again.  We had arranged to travel north with Dick and Nana in their Land Rover (which they insist is a LaRo rather than a Landy - OK, guys, have it your way!), which would give us the chance to enjoy their company and to do some more challenging routes on the basis that one Land Rover could always pull the other one out if something went wrong...  As Dick and Nana had already driven all the way up the Karakoram Highway (the main route north, which goes to the Chinese border) when they were in Pakistan last year, our plan was to follow this only as far as Besham, then turn left across the Shangla pass to Swat valley, Kalash valley and Chitral before crossing the Shandur pass to rejoin the Karakoram Highway at Gilgit, where Dick and Nana would head south again and we would go north as far as the Chinese border.  However, things didn't exactly go to plan...

At the end of the first day's driving we arrived at the PTDC motel in Besham, where Dick smooth-talked the manager into letting us camp in the car park for free in return for eating a meal in the restaurant.  So far so good.  It was still very hot and humid when we went to bed, so we opened all the flaps on the tent for maximum coolness and lay very still hoping that we'd feel cooler soon.  Unfortunately, the weather deteriorated in the night and we woke up in the early hours to find that it was raining lightly though the mosquito net onto our feet!  Worse yet, when Roel opened the mosquito net to unroll the tent flap, a bucketful of water that had been accumulating in the rolled-up flap emptied itself on the end of our mattress!  So we spent the rest of the night with our feet in a cold soggy puddle...  By the time we had packed up the tent in the rain the next morning we were soaked through, but we set off as planned along the narrow potholed road towards the Shangla pass.

It had clearly been raining heavily further up the valley as the river we were driving beside looked like a raging torrent of chocolate milk.  After only a few miles, we came to a roadblock to be told that there had been a landslide round the next bend and the road was impassable.  Roel and Dick decided to walk round the bend and take a look for themselves.  The main obstacle turned out to be a large patch of extremely gloopy mud.  After Dick had waded through to check the depth, the men decided that it was worth a shot.  We passed the roadblock, our Landy in the lead, and headed towards the mudbath ahead.  As we went under an overhanging rock just before the muddy patch, a mini-landslide of mud and small stones landed on the roof of the Landy, which was pretty unnerving but Roel kept his foot down and headed for the mud.  A couple of metres into the muddy patch, the mud reached the Landy's axles and we came to a sudden halt.  In the short time since Dick had waded through the mud, more rain and mud had come down the mountain and the puddle had become much deeper.  We were well and truly stuck.  Luckily, Dick and Nana's LaRo was able to pull us out easily, so there was no harm done (except for both Land Rovers, Dick and Nana's tow rope and most of Dick and Roel's clothes being covered in mud...).  There was no point in having another go, as we hadn't been even close to crossing the patch and it was getting bigger and wetter by the minute, so we admitted defeat and drove back to Besham.  It was clear that it would be a day or two before the road was passable, so rather than waiting around in the rain we decided to head up the KKH to Gilgit and drive the planned route between Besham and Gilgit in reverse order.

The weather began to clear up as we headed north and it was a beautiful drive along the twists and turns of the KKH as it followed the course of the Indus river.  Passing through a village, we gave a lift to an Irish/Dutch couple who were hitchhiking up to Gilgit.  The six of us bush-camped for the night about 150km before Gilgit, stopping early as we needed to put our bedding and tent out in the hot afternoon sun to dry!

The next day's drive over the 3700m Shandur Pass (where the famous annual Gilgit-Chitral polo game is held every July - you may have seen it on Michael Palin's 'Himalaya' series) was really spectacular.  We reached Chitral in the middle of the afternoon and again managed to talk our way into free camping in exchange for buying a meal, this time at the Mountain Inn, Chitral.  In Chitral, we organised a temporary registration for each of us, which all foreigners need to visit the Chitral area (as it's so close to the Afghan border).  To get this, we had to go to the local police station to see the police superintendent, which was an interesting experience.  We filled in our forms in a tiny room filled with dog-eared pieces of paper in folders (no computers here!) and were shown into the superintendent's imposing wood-panelled office.  It's incredible to see how important people in Pakistan treat foreigners and Pakistanis completely differently.  The superintendent was charming to us and appeared well-educated and quite cosmopolitan in his outlook (well, compared to the average Pakistani we've met), but he spoke quite curtly to the local people who were ushered in, looking very anxious and subservient, to see him while we sat drinking tea and chatting.  Perhaps this 'them and us' attitude is a leftover from British colonial habits, along with the excessive bureaucracy that seems to be a distinguishing feature of getting anything done in Pakistan (although we hear India's a lot worse - we can't wait!).

The drive up to the Kalash valleys was pretty hair-raising in places, as the narrow, winding road is cut into the side of a cliff.  We decided to visit Bumboret valley - although this is nominally the most touristed of the three valleys, we had been told that tourism was at an all time low (pre-2001 there were 10,000 foreign tourists registering in Chitral every year, but now numbers were down to about 1000 a year - Dick was no. 666, but we tried not to read too much into this...).  As we drove up the valley, we started to see women wearing the traditional Kalash dress on the streets.  Although they wear traditional beaded headdress, they do not cover their heads completely like Muslim women.  Probably irrationally, the Kalash traditional dress, which all their girls and women wear (and presumably are required to wear, although we didn't have a chance to discuss this with any women so can't say for sure), does not seem to us to symbolize repression of women in the same way that the Islamic dress code does.   Perhaps it's just because we saw equal numbers of Kalash men and women on the streets and the women generally looked cheerful and confident - this made such a refreshing change from the majority of Pakistani villages where we have often struggled to spot one woman among the hundreds of men as we drove through (and even when we did succeed often the woman would be completely hidden by a burka or hide her face until we had passed).  We know that Islam isn't always like this, as there were more women than men on the streets in Iran (and, to be fair, in a few rural Pakistani villages, especially in the Ghizar valley near the Shandur pass, where many women smiled and waved at us), but it does seem to go hand in hand with this aspect of Pakistani culture.

We again arranged a bargain deal - camping in the grassy area in front of the Alexander Post Hotel with private use of a clean bathroom for the bargain price of 100 rupees (less than a pound) per couple!  Although it turned out that the hotel was owned by a Muslim man who lives in Chitral, the manager was Kalash and he took us to visit his parents and his wife and baby in their house, which was a wonderful experience.  He also took us to see some traditional Kalash dancing, which was a rehearsal for the harvest festival due to take place in a few weeks time.  Most of the dancers were women and girls (some of them looking no more than five or six years old) and it was amazing to watch their rhythmic steps as they revolved around the village square in long chains.  The dances took place in the dark, which was a bit eerie - it was lucky there was a full moon as otherwise we would hardly have seen anything at all!

We also spent a lot of time talking to the hotel manager about Kalash culture and the problems the Kalash people face as a minority in Pakistan.  Many Kalash have converted to Islam in response to increasing pressure from the Muslim majority.  It seems ridiculous that Pakistani Muslims can feel threatened by the tiny isolated Kalash community (currently around 7,000 people spread through the three remote Kalash valleys), but we were told that at the time when the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed were published in Europe huge numbers of Muslims came to the Kalash valleys demanding that the Kalash women wear headscarves.  Even while we were staying at the hotel, a group of policemen, including the chief of police in the Chitral area, whom we had met in the superintendent's office, came to pay a visit to the hotel manager.  Afterwards, the manager told us that the purpose of their visit had been to ask him to use his influence to get the local people to stop making the wine they use during their religious ceremonies.  The police had told him that if the Kalash didn't stop making wine the Muslim population would fulfil their threat to set fire to the houses of the Kalash.  Although the threat did not come from the police themselves, it was clear that they couldn't, or wouldn't, do anything to control the Muslims.  We were all saddened by the fact that these lovely people seem to be constantly persecuted - the only ray of hope for them in recent times has been the interest that many European NGOs have taken in preserving their way of life, but, as the Muslim world becomes increasingly isolated from the West, it's doubtful whether this can provide any real protection against the Muslim majority's determination to make them conform.

After two days relaxing in the pleasant atmosphere of the Kalash valleys (a real holiday from travelling in Pakistan!), we drove south, over the many hair-pin bends of the Lowari pass.  Luckily it had not been raining the night before, as we had heard from other travellers that when it rains the dirt road over the pass dissolves into a mud bath.  Even without this, there were still plenty of deep puddles for the Land Rovers to splash around in...

As we approached the town of Dir, we noticed that we were in a very conservative area as the (very)  few women who were on the streets were covered head to toe in burkas.  Our plan was to turn east towards Kalam, at the head of the Swat valley, but we were told at the police station that this (dirt) road was closed due to a landslide (surprise, surprise).  We decided to drive south on the main road instead and enter the Swat valley from the other end.  We struggled to find a suitable spot to bush camp for the night and finally stopped in a spot that was less than ideal, with lots of local people working in the fields nearby and staring at our every move.  Dick and Roel went to have a chat with two policemen who were stationed on the road nearby, to explain that we planned to sleep there for the night, but they said that this was a tribal area and it would be dangerous to sleep here.  We decided to take this advice and (after some lengthy negotiations with various police officers) were escorted to a resthouse next to a police station instead.  We later learned that, as we were near to the Afghan border, the Taliban were very active in this area.

That evening we talked about the options for the next day.  Our original plan had been to go east to the Swat valley and over the Shangla pass to Besham, but Dick and Nana had already driven this route last time they were in Pakistan.  Their plan after we separated had always been to drive back to the Netherlands as quickly as possible, as they are starting a business in Delhi and need to organise business visas in their home country and they need to take the LaRo back with them because of the complicated rules on how long you can keep a foreign vehicle in India (they have already broken the rules by accident - oops!).  Although it had been lots of fun travelling together and we were all sad to break up the party earlier than planned, it seemed a lot more sensible for them to go west to Peshawar and from there into the Baluchistan desert and home via Iran and Turkey.  The next day, after a fun morning together of washing the Land Rovers (ours was filthy again by the end of the day, but it was nice to see it shiny for once) and Dick and Roel experimenting with driving each other's Land Rovers (and chatting to each other's wife/girlfriend!), we said our farewells and went our separate ways.

Driving east, we decided not to spend the night in the Swat valley but to press on to Besham.  After getting bad directions from two different sets of police men (!) we ended up on the wrong side of a bridge that had washed away - in the middle of a town, which can't be very handy for the people who live there!  This cost us about an hour and a half in wasted driving, but luckily we had plenty of time in hand (and we got to see a bit more of the beautiful Swat valley).  Crossing the pass was pretty uneventful (more beautiful scenery of course, but we're getting a bit used to this in northern Pakistan!) until we got back to the area where we had been stuck in the mud when we tried to drive this route in the opposite direction.  Here we were stopped again, this time because a Chinese company were building a new road and they were blasting on the hillside above the existing road.  The valley was filled with a cloud of dust and huge boulders kept rolling down the steep hillside and plunging into the river below.  After half an hour, the blasting stopped and, with Chinese efficiency, a bulldozer cleared the road for us and we could drive through.

After a night back at the PTDC in Besham, we headed north for Gilgit, leaving early to ensure we got there the same evening.  Well, that was the plan, anyway.  About 120km before Gilgit, we encountered our first landslide - a pile of rocks all over the road which was easily passable by 4x4 but first we had to wait for a lorry that had got stuck to be pulled through!  The next challenge was a place where a 4m stretch of the road had been entirely washed away.  When we got there, some people who were waiting to drive past had already formed a chain to pile rocks into the hole, so we pitched in and helped as well.  We worked hard for a couple of hours to try to make the road passable by 4x4.  It was quite frustrating as there were hundreds of people there waiting but only about 30 were interested in helping to solve the problem - the rest just sat or stood around and watched!  If everyone had joined in the task would have taken very little time.  Another problem was that there was no organisation or leadership among those who were helping - at one point a few guys took it into their heads to knock some huge rocks from higher up the mountain down into the hole, which was totally counterproductive as they generally fell in the wrong place and then were too heavy to move (probably just as well as if they'd fallen in the right place they might well have demolished all the work we'd done so far) but worse still it was so dangerous that no-one else could go on working below while they were doing it for fear of getting crushed!  Despite all this, we finally got the road ready and Roel was one of the first to drive across.  Lizzy's heart was in her mouth as she watched Roel drive the Landy over the precarious structure (right on the edge of the ravine), keenly aware that if anything went wrong she would lose her husband and most of her possessions in one fell swoop.  Luckily Roel's superior driving skills came to the fore and he made it look very easy.  We headed on feeling triumphant that the landslides hadn't managed to defeat us.

Well, that was what we thought.  Unfortunately, we were wrong.  Just 85km south of Gilgit, we encountered another landslide, which was much more extensive.  A stretch of 10km of the KKH was completely impassable, with piles of mud and huge stones higher than a lorry.  The army (the KKH is an essential service route for the army, so they are responsible for its maintenance) had already been working all day with a digger and two bulldozers, but they had only managed to clear the first 500m.  When we arrived they were just clearing the mud and stones from around a lorry that had been buried by the landslide.  Amazingly, the driver had managed to get out unscathed, though the cab was full of mud.  We were told that the landslide would take two days to clear, but our experiences so far made us wary of trusting any estimates.  Our problem was that our Pakistani visas would expire in four days' time and we needed to extend them before that.  The plan was to do this in Gilgit, but if we couldn't get there in time we would have to drive back to Islamabad (at least a day and a half's drive) in time to extend them there.  We decided to wait up to two days and see what happened.

We had passed a police station a couple of km before the landslide, so we went back there and asked if we could camp outside.  This became our home for the next couple of days.  Every few hours we went to check how the army were getting on.  Progress was disappointingly slow, but people who had walked from the other end of the landslide (a three to four hour walk) told us that the landslide was much less severe at the other end.  On the second evening, Roel got chatting to the army captain, a young guy wearing a baseball cap, who told him that the road should be passable by 4x4 at 10am the next morning, as there were only two more large landslides.

The next day we drove up to the point where the army were working early in the morning, hoping that the captain would be able to fulfil his promise.  Unfortunately, one of the bulldozers had developed a diesel injection problem, so it was only able to work at half capacity.  The work went agonizingly slowly and the day dragged on.  The only plus point was that we had some interesting conversations with friendly and educated Pakistanis, some of whom we had met and worked alongside at the first landslide (although we also had a lot of tiring conversations of the 'Hello, where you from?  He your husband / She your wife?' variety).  The captain then started saying that we couldn't go through that day as the landslides further along the road were worse than he had thought.  Roel decided to walk to the other side (it was now said to be only an hour's walk through) to see for himself.  He returned and (explaining our visa situation) smooth-talked the captain into letting us go through after they had cleared the next couple of landslides.  After a few false starts, we (and around 20 other 4x4s) were allowed to pass at around 7pm.  There were a few tricky spots where the Landy just made it over (and between) the fallen rocks, but it wasn't too bad and as dusk fell we left the landslide area.  We drove the remaining 80km to Gilgit in the dark, following another 4x4 as they had promised to show us a detour we needed to take to get round another landslide just before Gilgit.  It was quite fun driving this off-road route, over two suspension bridges, with about 10 other 4x4s, though we'd be lying if we said we weren't thrilled to arrive to a warm 'welcome back' from the staff at Madina Guesthouse, a wonderful hot shower and a proper meal...  Madina Guesthouse, we love you!