Travels (34 page)

Five years after hearing my friend Peter Kann talk about his visit to the fabled place, I, too, was going to Hunza. The tiny mountain state, known as the original Shangri-La and traditionally closed to foreigners, had been opened the year before. It was the place where the people were beautiful, intelligent, and immune to disease; where they lived to be 140 years old on a diet of apricots; where they existed in harmony in a spectacular mountain setting, cut off from everything that was bad and corrupting in the civilized world.

That was Hunza. I was excited to go.

In Islamabad, our group waited two days for a plane to Gilgit, the staging area for trips to Hunza. Two days was nothing to wait; Peter had waited much longer than that, and mountaineering parties had sometimes waited a month for a flight. But we were on a schedule; besides, there was now another way to get from Islamabad, north to Gilgit—the Karakorum Highway.

This extraordinary feat of engineering was a road two hundred miles long, traversing the most rugged mountain range in the world. For most of its length it followed the gorge of the Indus River, one of the great canyons of the world. In fact, the road had been built by the Chinese, and hundreds of workers had died during its construction.

We hired a bus, loaded it with our stuff, and set out. The trip was thought to take fifteen hours, perhaps longer; nobody seemed quite sure.
The bus was a typical brightly decorated Pakistani bus, which looked, to the casual glance, like a 1960s psychedelic fantasy. Every exposed surface, inside and out, was covered with signs, woven fabric, bits of mirror, hammered tin, and the whole thing was painted a swirling design in garish Day-Glo colors. It was horrible in a way, but it had the virtues of exoticism—and there was certainly plenty to look at if you tired of the passing view.

Our Pakistani driver had been hired specifically because he knew the road. He brought with him a teenage boy, who sat at his feet, on the steps leading down to the exit door. Every bus driver brought a boy, who received a small wage and did odd jobs for the driver, bringing him his meals and looking after the baggage for the passengers.

For the first few hours, we passed flat wheat fields; neat villages; camels on the road. We stopped for lunch in Abbottabad, a town with many old British colonial buildings, which had once been the farthest outpost of the British Empire in this part of the world. From Abbottabad, the British in the nineteenth century had twice tried to conquer Afghanistan, and twice had failed. This area of West Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan, is populated by Pathan and other tribes. Like the Afghans, they are fiercely war-like fighters; their lives are structured around militance in a way that Westerners do not readily understand.

From Abbottabad, the land became more desolate and more rugged, and we entered the gorge of the Indus River. For the next several hours, we twisted and turned along the river, seeing spectacular views of the plunging river, and the twenty-five-thousand-foot peak of Nanga Parbat on the east.

All morning the driver had smoked cigarettes with the unmistakable odor of hashish, and now, in the warmth of midday, he began to fall asleep. The boy at his side would nudge him awake when his head drooped, but often the bus took the hairpin turns too widely for comfort.

Finally we confronted the driver, who denied anything was wrong. We asked him what would make him feel more alert. He said music. Soon we were listening to Pakistani music blasting through this psychedelic bus as we careened along the Karakorum Highway, along the Indus River Gorge, on our way to fabled Hunza.

After ten hours of driving, we stopped at a little roadside spot for
chapatties
and a chance to stretch our legs. There we met a British hippie, who told us that the highway to the north was closed because of a landslide. Passage to Hunza was impossible; we would have to turn back. After ten hours,
we received this news with disbelief, and many comments on what a dirty little bugger he was, obviously on drugs, obviously wrong.

At the next stop, we asked again. Yes, it was true, a landslide blocked the road. Vehicles were not able to cross to Hunza.

I looked at Major Shan. He didn’t seem concerned: “Perhaps it will be cleared,” he said, shrugging.

I could imagine it would be cleared, for we had been passing landslides all day. They were usually small piles of stone, bulldozed out of the roadway; they did not seem to have presented any great problem. The rock of the river gorge was friable, and it seemed that the Karakorum Highway was destined to suffer these small landslides as long as the road existed.

Anyway, after a dozen hours bouncing on the bus, nobody seriously considered turning back. We pressed on, north toward the landslide.

I said, “When did this landslide happen?”

“Two days ago,” Major Shan said. “Perhaps three days ago.”

One of the others on the bus shook his head. “Imagine. The road’s blocked two days ago, and they still haven’t got it cleared. What a country!”

The landscape became flatter, a desert plain. It was extremely desolate, with low hills in the distance. On the maps it was marked “Tribal Territory.”

The light turned softer as the sun descended in the sky. We stopped for gas at a roadside station: a small shack, some pumps, and, for miles in every direction, desert. It was beautiful and desolate.

Major Shan took me aside, and we went to the back of the bus. He kicked the tire with his foot, and seemed reluctant to speak. Behind his dark aviator sunglasses, I could not read his eyes.

Finally he said, “I did not bring a gun.”

“Oh yes?” I said.

“I could have brought one. I thought of it. But I did not wish to alarm any of the tourists, so I did not bring a gun.”

“Is it a problem?”

“Well, now I have no way to get a gun.”

“Why would we need a gun?”

“Soon it will be dark,” he said, looking around. “The landslide is still one hour ahead on the road. It will be too dark to cross when we get there. We will have to camp for the night.”

We all suspected that this might be so, but we were carrying full camping equipment on the bus: food, tents, sleeping bags, the works. It wouldn’t be a problem. Would it?

Major Shan looked around. “This area,” he said, “is not reliable at night.”

The words shot into my brain:
This area is not reliable at night
.

I tried to control my growing sense of disbelief at what he was telling me. It felt like a scene from a bad movie, the busload of tourists suddenly in trouble. I had a hard time working my jaw, making words come out properly. When I spoke, my voice seemed too thin. “What do you mean?”

“This area is not reliable at night,” he repeated.

“But what does that mean? Are there bandits or what?”

“I cannot say what might happen. This area is not reliable. We cannot camp out. I am sorry I did not bring a gun.”

“What should we do?” I was looking around at the landscape, trying to see it as menacing. It still looked exactly the same to me. I was having a conversation behind our bus with a military man, and it bore no relation to any reality that I could see. He was telling me we were at risk, and I couldn’t see why.

“Well,” I said, “don’t you think, if we pulled way off the road somewhere, pulled a few miles off the road, we could camp out and it would be all right?”

“We cannot camp out.” His voice was flat. He pointed to the cars rushing by on the highway. “None of these cars will camp out. By the time the road is dark, they will all be in safety.”

“What can we do?”

“I do not want to alarm your friends. There is a military base about fifteen kilometers back, at Chilas,” he said. “We can try there.”

Now I was beginning to understand. He needed someone to inform the others of this plan. “We can
try
there?”

He shrugged. “It will be very full tonight. Perhaps they will turn us away, but I don’t think so, because you are foreigners.”

“Okay,” I said. I went and told the others that Major Shan suggested that we would be more comfortable spending the night at the army base, fifteen kilometers back, than we would be camping out.

No one argued. It turned out the army base at Chilas was a hundred kilometers back, and by the time we got there the night was inky dark. As the major had predicted, the base was packed, barracks and dormitories filled to overflowing; in our bus headlights we saw travelers sleeping on porches, in their cars, everywhere. By the time we found the headquarters and roused someone, and by the time they sent us to an unused visiting-commandant’s cottage, it was nearly 11:00 p.m. Exhausted, we pulled our sleeping bags off the bus and slept on the floor. Later on another busload of foreigners showed up. They slept upstairs; I didn’t wake to see them.

* * *

We departed at six the next morning. The landscape now seemed cheerfully sunny and empty; we were certain to reach Hunza today, landslide or not. Retracing our steps, we passed the gas station, and once more rejoined the Indus River Gorge. We felt, if anything, disappointed in the adventure just concluded. We had imagined ourselves at risk from bandits or robbers, and saved at the last moment; there was excitement in the fantasy, and obviously there would be no further excitement on the trip.

Then we arrived at the landslide.

I was completely unprepared for its scale. It was a half-mile wide and three-quarters of a mile long, a single sheer, sloping incline of loose sand that ran from the top of the mountains, far above the road, down to the river far below. Millions of tons of loose sand.

“No wonder they didn’t clear this in two days,” somebody said.

“They are usually very good,” Major Shan said, “but this, I think, will be a week. You see how the people deal with it: the trucks and buses from Hunza come as far as the other side, and the trucks from Islamabad come this far, and the people walk across and take another truck or bus on the other side.”

I could hardly see to the other side, it was so far away.

We were going to have to walk across.

I saw people walking, tiny dwarfed figures on the great sandy incline. They were walking in both directions, on little footpaths hacked into the incline. It was proper terrain for a mountain goat.

I watched this and had a sudden sinking feeling. It was going to be immensely dangerous to cross this landslide, as treacherous as crossing an ice field. I had not signed up for danger on this trip and had just survived what I considered a pleasurable fantasy—bandits, in an area not reliable at night. I was not ready for a real danger, particularly such a mundane one.

Died in a landslide in Pakistan
. What a dreary, embarrassing end to my life. And it wouldn’t even be understandable to people back home.

You mean he was buried under a landslide?

Oh no, nothing like that. This landslide had already occurred a few days before, and he was walking over it, and he fell down into the river and drowned
.

Drowned?

Well, he was swept away. Never found the body
.

He was tall. Didn’t have good balance, if I recall
.

No. I guess not
.

I didn’t like the sound of any of this.

Meanwhile, on the landslide itself, there was a great deal of activity on the slopes. A couple of hundred yards above the walkers, bulldozers, which looked like little yellow toys, worked to clear the slide. Then, too, every few minutes the army would detonate an explosion, and the ground would shake, and a plume of rock and dust would puff into the air. Through all this chaos, the people agilely stepped across the great steep, shifting, sandy pile. Every so often a big boulder or a small landslide would rush down the incline at the people, but they moved aside and let it crash on down to the river.

I watched, and I knew I could not make it across.

Cut his trip short, I hear
.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he got way the hell out in Pakistan and there was some sort of little mudslide, or I don’t know what, and he panicked. Freaked out. Had to go home
.

I was watching the landslide with Major Shan. I offered him a cigarette. I said, “Will we be able to get across?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “You see how all the people cross.”

“I know,” I said, “but we have some older people in our party.…”

“I will help the old ones.”

“And there may be some who are afraid.”

“I will help them, too.”

“Yes, good … Uh …”

He looked at me expectantly. There wasn’t much I could do but tell the truth.

“I don’t know if I can make it.”

The words seemed to hang in the air, an awkward confession.

Major Shan stared at me for a long time.

He finished the cigarette in silence, then ground it out on the road.

“You can make it,” he said.

He was right. There was nothing to do but get across, and I did. It was hair-raising, my heart was pounding, I was terrified, but I managed it.

While I was crossing, one of the others in our party took pictures. But the pictures didn’t really show anything. In the pictures it doesn’t look dangerous, or even very interesting. But it was the most dangerous thing I had ever done.

Two days later I was approaching Baltit, the capital city of Hunza. Even though I did not believe the stories about Hunzakuts, as the local people
are called, now that I was here, it was impossible not to wonder: the claims for the place were so extravagant.

In fable, the mountain kingdom of Hunza had been populated by the descendants of Persian soldiers in the army of Alexander the Great, who conquered India in 327
B.C
. This was cited to explain the beauty of the tall, fair-skinned Hunzakuts, as well as their excellent physiques and military prowess. The Hunzakuts were far more intelligent than the neighboring bandit tribes; they enjoyed extraordinarily robust health, whether from life at high altitude, from their simple healthy diet of apricots and wheat, from their unhurried life, or for some other reason. Their social life is healthy as well; the Mir settled the rare disputes that arose in his kingdom.