From Karakoram to the Iran Border. Some unhappy moments
16th July 2006

By-passing the Khyber
Trying to do it right for once
Sometimes you wish you hadn't got out of bed
Better than hoped for once
You can stereotype a people
Fascinating folk in a desert town
Final leg of Pakistan. We leave wanting to come back ..... but only to parts of it.

Lawlessness does not appeal

Peshawar, has a magnetic wildness about it. Just up the road is the Khyber Pass, and a border point with Afghanistan. Unfortunately for me Khyber Pass, conjures up indelible images of Sid James and men lifting their kilts, for me to take the place seriously. This history underlying the naff 60’s comedy is that the British struggled to control these tribal areas, to such an extent that they gave away a chunk of then India to Afghanistan to create a buffer zone of lawlessness between the advancing Russians and colonial India. It’s lawlessness and tribalness is now what attracts tourists. There is a smugglers bazar just north of town which sells everything from Chinese made washing machines and hooky ipods to kilos of opium and AK47s in the more clandestine quarters. 60 km to the south in Darra a town whose sole purpose is to copy and manufacture armaments. The possession of guns is technically illegal in Pakistan, put the authorities are out of their jurisdiction here, the tribal leaders are in control.

Hippy and I share a lack of interest in firearms, although, I confess I would have been interested in seeing the cottage industry in progress. Other folk at the hotel had been coerced into the illegal entry to the ‘hard core’ bazar areas by a local character known as Prince. The reports surprised me; rather than the truely handcrafting that I’d imagined there are machine shops performing all the requisite functions. I would have been truly impressed to see a Kalashnikov being filed out of solid chunks of metal but it sounded like this was simply a small scale armament factory spread around a few workshops rather than all being collected under a single roof. As for the more mundane smuggled items in the bazar, you might as well as be looking in the back of a Transit van coming off the Calais ferry. We chose instead to spend our time in the equally diverse and more legal bazars of Peshawar itself. Strangely, all the most comunicative folk we came across were all from Afghanistan. It seems that the need to comunicate with the NGOs that have been in Afghanistan since the year dot has encouraged the people to learn English.

We got invited along for tea by a young Afghani (I presume the word Afghan is reserved for carpets and hounds) and as we’ve not really taken up a tea invitation before we accepted and joined him in what seemed to be the prayer room for the bazar. As we chatted over our tea, various faces poked in and looked on rather dissaprovingly. For once there were a wide range of reasons as to why they may be miffed, an Afghani entertaining foreigners, the use of the prayer room for the consumption of tea, the female form of Helen being present. We couldn’t possibly feel hard done by with all the staring when we were possibly breaking so many rules.

Our host had been raised for a long time in Pakistan but now crosses back and forth over the border for trading purposes the specific nature of which we opted not to ask about. His current mission was to buy some gun holsters - enough said. The main topic of conversation was the behaviour of the American occupying/peace keeping force which lead to an interesting point. By his own admission, this guy and his brothers own 4 Kalashnikovs between then which is not permitted. Apparently children used to roam around with guns with less guilt or concern than an English child with a catapult. The American forces now act on tip-offs to go and round up dodgy folk and their weaponry. In such circumstances, one does not go round, knock on the door, politely explain that you have come to search the house and wait around for 15 minutes while the women folk are grouped together in a private corner before commencing to search the house. This usually results in the cupboard being bare. No, if required to perform the same task, I’m sure I would kick the door down and point my gun around menacingly at anyone seemingly capable of bringing a gun to bear on me. This is called self-preservation. From the Afghani perspective this could be seen as provocative behaviour and rather insulting to their women folk. That, I’m afraid, is life. Maybe the Us and Brit forces need to enlist more women who can go in and check out the womens’ quarters without breaking any taboos. You kind of have to remember that Afghanis really have not really known peace in their lifetimes, so there is a hell of a lot weaponry littering the country. With such a history, it is almost to be expected that every household will be armed. Decommisioning Afghani arms is about as likely trying to get the Yanks to give up driving gas-guzzling motors. An interesting point was that there are many women in the Afghan forces quite capable of squeezing off a few rounds when it is needed but withing the home it is generally considered that they should be hidden away in order for their virtue to remain unsullied. Funny old world. On a final note, our mate reckonned that it would be a piece of cake for the Americans to pin down and arrest Osama if they really wanted to. I say again, funny old world. Unfortunately he didn’t divulge, if he knew, where he is. We could have netted a few quid.

The bazar was a friendly place, with smiley people and regular offers of tea. Shops were of course run by men but there was a fair number of ‘pacmen’ The ‘pacmen’ as Pat had termed them were nothing to do with a sudden invasion by the 1980s video game characters, but the shapeless, disguised women in full burka. For these women a single piece of material covered them to the ground and gives them a cartoon ghost-like morph. The only concession for these women to be able to see where they were going was finer material across their eyes. For me this is Islamic interpretation of modesty gone a step too far. With no facial expression to make social contact with others, it makes a woman a non-person. too often we saw women walking a few steps behind their male escort, not spoken to or related to in any way. I have no problem with headscarf wearing, if people feel more ‘dressed’ that way, because this does not make the person face-less and non, they can still smile, show their disappointment, express their feelings to others. But to cover the face from view entirely, removes them in society. Maybe it is just my Western interpretation of this, and I am missing subtle ways in which these women communicate. There is of course the half way house of not covering the whole face but leaving a slit for the eyes. When the rest of the features of the women are hidden behind a black robe, this makes the eyes incredibly powerful. Catching the gaze of a few women, their eyes gave away their strength of character, with many the silent communication was disturbingly intense. I wished more than anything to have a conversation with some of these women, in a shared language, to know how they really feel about their lot.

In the bazar I had had the disconcerting experience of being ‘eyed up’ by a lady in full burka. At least that is what I assumed as her head moved in a motion apparently surveying me. But I could see nothing of her expression, was she amused, disgusted, intrigued or angered my presence I could not tell. In a way it gave her immense power over me in that she could keep her thoughts private, and it was extremely unnerving for. Not knowing what was going through her head, I smiled and nodded in recognition.

One thing I fail to understand in a country where most women are covered up is the amount of seriously expensive jewelry shops, fancy material shops and make-up stalls. It all seems a bit weird that underneath that burka they have gone to the expense of tarting themselves up to the nines. The only possible bonus I could see of the burka thing is that you couls not bother doing your hair or changing out of your scruffs and go shopping. But glints of heavy bracelets, flashes of nail polish from beneath the forbidden zone suggest the contrary. I seems that rather than fostering modesty, covering women up is making them obsessed by their appearance. It’s all a little bit twisted.

There are quite a few VSOs placed in Peshawar but we only managed to hook up briefly with Aimee, another teacher trainer. Their experience after the daft Danish doodle debacle was of virtual house arrest as advised by the VSO office. They spent a couple of weeks confined to their houses with a runner available to go and fetch fags and other necessities as and when. Were it not for the annoying loss of liberty this would be quite fun for a couple of weeks. I think I’d be inclined to make sure I had a few unread books kicking about the place for just such emergencies.

Although she admits to start with she took a while to feel comfortable with the conservative culture of Pakistan, she not feels a fondness for the place. As with every VSO finishing a placement she was full of mixed feelings. Volunteers naturally assess their effectiveness and wonder whether all her efforts have come to very little. Teacher training the world over, tends to be hard to measure in terms of meeting the objectives. But even if only a tenth of the people in her workshops actually improve their teaching methods that is still a sizeable number and they will in turn set examples for others to follow. We look back on our own placements and know that because of the headmaster’s wishes for us to teach his exam classes rather than put efforts into some teacher training, we left feeling that things would probably not move on. But looking back, many of the pupils we taught have gone into teaching themselves or onto professional degrees of law and medicine and the like, which if they choose to stay in Guyana cannot be a bad thing.

You meet some of the most interesting people traveling. I sometimes wish that Pat and I were not such inherently square people that we could tell people that we were entymologists, embalmers, escapologists or even bouncy castle salespeople. Instead we are a maths teacher and a civil engineer, and it is no coincidence that if you look up civil engineering in the yellow pages it says ‘see Boring’. The only possible advantage in being potentially the squarest 2 people to be going around the world on a motorbike, is that proves that any boring b......d can do it. Anyway, in Peshawar we met Adam. Adam had the privileged job of being the specialist harness man in the stage production of ‘Little Britian’. ‘Little Britian’ is a wonderful satire of characters that inhabit, our homeland. I am not sure if it began as a stage production or a TV series but now merits both relevant gestures in a charades game. It is hilariously funny, and it is funnier because every Briton knows someone like each of the characters. One thing I think of with fondness is how no-one can take the ‘piss out of a Brit better than a Brit’ and we happily parade our worst features for the world to see. It, of course, does us no favours for our world profile, where most countries emphasise their achievements, but maybe they also need to get a sense of humour. Adam roves Britania with the actors as a backstage hand and with responsibility for making sure that in flying stunts on stage the harness is set up right. and the actors don’t add impromptu injuries to the script. Anyway we was wonderfully entertaining company. Although he has been what used to be known as a roadie for many years and has worked with all sorts of famous folk, he was really quite reserved and simply confirmed people that he has worked with when asked; he didn’t launch into any wild anecdotes about rockstars which was both a little dissapointing and a testament to his professionalism in not becoming a gossip monger.

Along with the selection of lovable truck creations Peshawar had a healthy fleet of Bedford buses decorated with no less love and attention the world definitely could do with more flamboyant outlets for creativity. Again, it is highly unlikely that they would even be allowed onto a ministry facility for an inspection, let alone pass one, in the clinical western world. Bit of a shame.

Permit merry-go-round

For the next legs to the border with Iran we were looking at some seriously long legs. The direct route to Quetta, is through a town called Zhob which is in the middle of no-go tribal area. There were 2 alternatives to go South 500km then NE500km, the second half being on rougher road or South 500km, past Darra the gun manufacturing town, West 400km and North 500km. Information from travelers coming the other way, suggest that you were not allowed to travel either way without a military escort, and would be held waiting at the first check point till a vehicle could do that. The first place they suggest is safest for tourists to stay at is 600km from Peshawar on the shorter of the two routes. We knew this would mean a long day in the heat ,so we wanted to leave early in the morning, and not be held up waiting at a check point for the escort. So we thought it prudent to tell the police of our intentions so that least if they insisted on the armed guard there would be one waiting for us. There then proceded a day of a wild goose chase.

- The police said to travel that way we needed to go the Kyber pass tribal area permits (KPTAP) office.
- the KPTAP said it was nought to do with them ‘cos we were going south not north to the Kyber Pass, and they had a point.
- they sent us to the ..........office opposite the museum.
- they said we needed a permit, to write a letter starting direction and a tribal permit would be given.
- letter complete, back to permit office.
‘This is not authorized’
‘But you didn’t say it needed authorization. ...... OK, so were do I authorize it?’
‘Back downstairs at the first office you went to’
We trudge downstairs resigned to the fact hat this was going to take all day.
‘Can’t authorize this we can only authorize the Peshawar section the tribal office for the other towns have their own permit offices. And to go to Quetta you need permission first from the Quetta office.’
‘But we are in Peshawar we cannot get to Quetta, without a permit to get a permit!’
‘We can ring up and fax your details and they can give us permission to give you permission to get a permit.’
‘Brilliant,’ Progress was being made wonderful.
‘How long will that take?’
‘At least a week’
‘But we leave tomorrow’ ‘Can you not do it today?’
‘It takes a week’
‘What will happen if we go without a permit’
‘Nothing, you don’t really need one for that route’
‘Then what the f..k have we been sent here for?’ I thought, but declined to say. We took our itinerary letter upstairs to the permit issuer, ripped it up and put it in his bin and thanked him for wasting our time. How tough is that?

Esssentially none of this did what we were hoping to do to; forwarn the military to have an escort ready and waiting. So with a day wasted traipsing from office to office to get nowhere, we would still be leaving tomorrow without a pointless permit and could still be held waiting ‘for our protection’. Now writing this I recalled the VSO directors comments that no-one in authority asks for an expediency fee but if you don’t cough up the unadvertised appropriate sweetner, more and more spurious barriers to your request are invented and it simply never happens. Maybe this was not the case, but I wonder.

We heard again in the evening of the wonderful time other travellers had had in Lahore because they had been taken along to Sufi ritual worship on a Thursday and Friday night. Sufis are the mystical branch of Islam and are into a lot of dancing, music, singing and hashish smoking. Kind of, as Rastafarianism is to Christianity, Sufists are to Islam. At any rate they sounded intriguing. We had missed out on this experience, due to staying at a business rather than backpackers’ hotel. The following night was a Friday, so maybe we could just put off the dodginess of going South and go SW to Lahore instead and bypass some of the military complications. This would of course add over another 500km to our route out of Pakistan.

I had gently suggested the route via Lahore, but Patrick had intimated no real enthusiasm and I knew he was still concerned about the amount of distance he had to cover, the adding in the odd 500km here and there is maybe not pragmatic. So I didn’t push it.

Diem horribilis

As we climbed on the bike in the morning the odometer impinged on my consciousness. Had is really gone up to 84,000. We left as early as our bodies would allow us, and drove through the empty streets of Peshawar at 6 a.m. As we drove I noticed that the 10,000 dial on the odmeter was going backwards while all the other dials went forwards we were down to 35,000 odd. A shame I had hoped some day to watch all the wee dials go to 0 as we cloked it. Actually, its a real pain not being able to log the total distance as knowing when to change oil and the like is rather important.

We drove past Darra, and it looked surprisingly ordinary for a town of such infamy. In the early morning it was just a cluster of adobe single storey homes, which belied it’s illicit living. Not sure what I really expected to see, maybe an avenue of AK47s at the entrance to the hamlet. But in any case I was thankful that the main road by-passed it and you saw it from a distance.

Shortly beyond Darra was a road tunnel. The sign said no motorcycles, but we rode on hoping that the patrol guys were way too dozy at this time in the morning to notice or in fact to care. Wrong!

They radioed ahead to the tunnel entrance and had our progress blocked. The tunnel was 2 km the alternative 25km over an unsignposted windy pass. There then ensued a 20 minute debate between Patrick and an increasing number of patrol officers. They did nothing to endear themselves to Patrick by trying to claim that motorcycles are internationally banned from using tunnels. This evoked a list of at least 50 countries to our knowledge that allow motorcycles to use tunnels. The tunnel police abdicated responsibility for the decision and claimed that it was a government directive that they would get into trouble for breaking. Their logic was that there was a no overtaking rule in the tunnel for safety, but motorcyclists travel so slowly that vehicles do not have the patience to stay behind them so they inadvertantly cause a hazard. You could tell that they could see that this reason didn’t really apply to our motorcycle, but they were not for bending.

I asked how much longer it would take by the old road; “Oh, just the same time.” I asked why, then, had the tunnel been built. That stumped them. There were offers of lifting the bike onto the patrol truck and taking it through, but this was sheer lunacy, as they clearly did not understand that a bigger, heavily loaded motorcycle weighs a tad more than your average 150 CC pop-pop. We tried to no avail to get them to escort us through. In the end after 20 minutes of argument we were guided to the alternative route. (Later I pondered if the patrol officer was holding out for a facilitation fee). Tsch, Hippy, surely not.

It had to happen today when we have the longest distance to do and in theory no where to stay in between. Patrick was furious and frustrated, and knew that going over the pass would eat into our precious time for the day even more. On the back I was unhappy, I generally trust Patrick implicitly when riding, but when he is angered or feels that he is in a rush he rides a little faster and with a little less caution. As we wound through hairpins, I was torn between the desire to not to exacerbate Patrick’s tension by being a back seat driver and a nag, and the fact that I really wanted to not have an accident. I went through options of what to say, that would not aggravate and yet get the point across. In the end I tapped him gently on the thigh (my code for communication coming) and said softly “An accident will not save us time.” As soon as a I said it, I realised that it was a nag but thankfully I said it so softly that I don’t think he heard. As we rode over the pass, I felt that a repeat of Abancay (the site of our one true accident in Peru) was imminent. All the same conditions were present we had really too far to go in day, we had left early with little recuperative sleep and thing and the road conditions required a lot of attention.

There were, as we had guessed, no signs to indicate the way nor any to guide us back onto the main highway on the other side of the pass. Thankfully there was plenty of time on the road over and the road wasn’t so terrible that I was in reasonable spirits when we go back on the highway. I was aware though that we had a long way to go and now we were a little delayed. We made it over the pass and rejoined the main road, thankfully without incident and quicker than either of us expected. I palpably felt Pat’s relief that we back on route, and the tension and with the sped eased a little. But we were over 2 hours into the day’s riding time and had covered less that 100km, with more than 500 to go and knowing that the last 100 was on bad twisty roads and would take 2 hours at least, there was still very much a sense of urgency.

The day was brightening up and the villages that we passed through were coming to life with people and traffic. A group of guys were milling about at the side of the road. As we passed, a guy stepped out towards the road, Patrick peeped his horn in the customary warning fashion...... the guy glanced in our direction .............No! he lurched forward into our path.............we hit him...............he spun and fell. That was without doubt the worst moment of the trip, it was surreal, it was devasting. The vision of the guy looking at us stepping forward and pirouetting as we hit him will be forever ingrained on my memory. People tell us that if you hit someone in such circumstances that best thing to do is drive on because whether it is your fault or not, you are the wealthier party so take responsibility. But this didn’t even enter into my consciousness. We stopped the bike and Pat immediately went to see if he was OK. A crowd had gathered around the guy, our bike stood 20m from him, speedo lying in the road with fragments of plastic headlight casing littering the road. People were telling me to move the bike out of the road, but it is too heavy for me to shift, an unknown man came to my aid and wheeled it from the road. At that moment my mind was a cacaphony of voices all shouting to be overheard, ......was the guy OK...... what if he wasn’t.......all these people probably have guns, we were not far from Darra.... will the guy be OK?...... this is Balochistan where insurance becomes invalid even if you have it and are we still in tribal areas, where even the Pakistan law won’t save us. I have no idea what my facial expression was. But it must have exuded devastation and concern, because an old guy with a huge Taliban type beard touched me gently in the shoulder and said ‘He’ll be OK, it wasn’t your fault’. This was all the more poignant in land where normally a man would not talk to a strange women let alone touch her shoulder. It was then I began to look rationally around me. There was a crowd helping the guy we hit, but no-one shouting at us, or apparently blaming us. In fact people were helping us by moving the bike and picking up pieces of plastic mounting for us; we had not stopped far from the accident so we could not have been going very fast. Somehow this did nothing to make me feel any better, a guy had unknown injuries because we hit him.

He was taken to the hospital......
We then asked around to find the hospital .......
We paid his taxi fare and watched from afar while the doctor tended his wound to his head......
Intermittantly people told us to leave.....he was OK....... Allah had spared him and the like...
But conscience told us to bare this one out.... to check for the doctor’s verdict..... to pay his bills.....to ensure that his poverty did not mean that did not get the treatment he needed.
Patrick and I sat in silence, with both our minds running through the ....what if’s... if we had not argued with the tunnel people, if they had allow us through, if we had been going 5km slower, if we had chosen to go to Lahore instead ....would they call the police......we had no insurance.... . Yet in truth none of this really mattered. What mattered was the guy being OK. Normally I am almost neurotic about security, but none of it seemed important anymore, I left our camera unattended on the tank bag; my jacket with my wallet in rested carelessly on a chair. In fact our mission to travel round the world by motorcycle seemed so pathetically unimportant. The urge to complete 600km that day was ridiculously irrelvant now. We sat and waited, we were ushered into the pharmacy where a guy insisted he get us cold drinks. Pat went to talk with the doctor while I sat with my thoughts rampaging around my mind. The pharmacist was sweet and kind. It felt all wrong to me somehow, here we were a man being tended to because of our vehicle and people were being so kind it made me feel more guilty. He informed me that this was not tribal area but Pashtuns, who are known for their hospitality.

Guys helped us strap the bits of head light casing to hold the speedo in place. Again it seemed all wrong that people were being so nice. I couldn’t decide whether people genuining thought we were blameless or were caught in a quandry of their cultural upbring to help outsiders ciuld not stop themselves being kind despite thinking we were as guilty as hell.

In the end we were there for over 2 hours, while we waited to see if any other problems came to light and the chap’s son was conveyed to the hospital. It seemed he was going to have a bad head and leg for a while, but was essentially OK. As the fees were being agreed between the doctor and the guy’s son, I became aware of silent tears uncontrollably poring down my face. I tried to wipe them away to stem the flow, but could not, the pahramacist looked on with sympathy and passed me tissues. The worst was that I couldn’t tell you was I was crying over, was it relief that he was OK, was it relief that we were not about to go to prison, was it loneliness that I had no-one to share my anxieties with (Patrick away with the patient) was it just the sheeer overload of emotions. And now on top of everything I was embarrassed that I was crying.

I had been encouraged to sit with the patient and I was quite happy to do so. The only trouble was that neither he nor any of his family (many of whom had gathered) spoke any English and so we spent a couple of hours shrugging, smiling weakly and lighting each others cigarettes. I knew Hippy would be devastated on her own and I kept making little excuses to see how she was bearing up. Eventually the doctor decided that the man was stable enough. I’d been really concerned that the guy’s foot kept up a rythmic twitch but he assured me that the family knew that he always did this and it was just a function of his age. The family was happy for us to leave if we paid for the hospital fees and a bit towards transport. I was quite happy with that but suddenly they wanted more. I guess the doctor had said to them that there really was no way of saying for sure that there was no other concussion issues looming unless a CAT scan was carried out and so they started asking for money for that. I was sure there was a bit of scamming going on but it all came to £60 and I couldn’t really grumble. I wondered if the old guy would really get the scan and the point of it - if there was a problem found, then this poor family wouldn’t have the money for brain surgery or any further care for that matter. I think this was considered an appropriate amount of ‘blood money’ and a friend of the doctor had the family sign a statement that the accident was blameless and that they accepted my goodwill in paying for all the treatment and that for them the matter was at an end. It was embarrassing for the eldest son to have to sign using his thumb print and clearly there is a long way to go with the education programme here.

I rode away fretting that there was more to the man’s case and that serious complications may set in. Clearly the a large number of people in the crowd in town had witnessed the accident and hadn’t lynched us. Either they perceived that we were not the guilty party in any way or that the accident was ordained. I found it astonishing and humbling that this could be true belief in God’s will. Whatever the outcome; their letting the matter drop, I couldn’t help feeling guilty - all those “What ifs?” kept running around in my brain. In accidents I’ve had before I’ve always been able to pin the blame easily on one party or the other. In this case, it may well have been 50/50 but as the guy with the money and the lethal weapon I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I should cop the blame. Is there ever any thought for the uninjured party of an accident? Is counselling available for the driver who may kill or maim someone through no fault of his own? We had the telephone number of the pharmacist at the hospital so we were anticipating at least to get closure out of this unfortunate episode.

We rode on at a moderate pace. I honestly believe that without a speedometer I ride more slowly, thinking more about what is the safe speed than what is the allowable speed. Other vehicles hooned past us, particularly in built up areas. Each time I imagined a pedestrian stepping in front of them. Judging by their driving, it must be accepted that vehicles here have right of way and that vehicle-less people come next to the bottom of the road hierarchy, just above animals. This doesn’t make it right to drive so recklessly though. I thought I’d been pretty sensible and look what happened to us.

We had no option but to keep going for Fort Munro, all other possible places to stay in between Peshawar and there were apparently off-limits to us. Fortunately there were hardly any more built up areas on the way other than the two major centres of DI Khan and DG Khan and so we made reasonable time. We were in luck, the road up to Fort Munro had been improved. No, it hadn’t. Yes, it had. It was frustrating and cheering alternately. There was a new hazard waiting for us - the weekend motorcyclist. Clearly taking a trip up to the hill station is something of a favourite activity and as we were arriving at the end of the afternoon, scores of bikes were screaming their way back down the hill. These bufoons were using the In’shallah effect to the maximum; cutting all the corners through piles of gravel without any concern for oncoming traffic (which was often us) and shouting cheery greetings as if we’d be amused as we dived out of their way. Obviously, we were not. It seemed as if they were all drunk but this is unlikely in Pakistan, high on pot possibly.

Fort Munro was initially unwelcoming. The Pakistan Tourist Development Corporation hotel first wanted to overcharge us to camp and then refused to allow us to stay in a room. Apparently rooms are reserved for government workers. “And are there any government workers staying tonight?” “No”. The manager asked if we had registered at the police station and insisted that we could not stay anywhere in town until we had. We went to the police station and tried to register but they clearly didn’t know how to register a foreigner and clearly weren’t interested in finding out. We asked if we could camp in their compound and they insisted that we had a cell. They assured us that would not lock us in and that we would be free to leave in the morning. Somehow still feeling awful about the events of the day a night in the cells did not seem inappropriate. We wondered whether the police would comment on the fact that our speedo was not functioning with the dial swivelled round and the pointer lying detached in the casing. If they noticed they did not seem to care.

Hippy was understandably exhausted by the day and collapsed on our sleeping mats on the floor of the cell. I headed off to find some food. Fortunately, the market square consisted mainly of food and tea stalls. There were women around with no headscarves on. Hippy could not miss this. I got waylaid by some reasonably communicative youths who insisted on buying me tea and then turned a little noisome. A nice chap bailed me out; he was a lawyer from DI Khan spending a couple of days in the coolth and I had to turn down his invitation to dinner not knowing when Hippy would be out and about. Back in the gaol, I persuaded her that nourishment was in order and so enticed her back to the square. After the requisite tea from the bores (who on top of the stress that day said that I looked too old for him to marry, maybe the day had taken it’s toll), we were just considering eating when our friendly advocate returned. He suggested we use the restaurant at a nearby hotel rather than the fast food places in the market. Whatever. This meant going back to get the bike out of the ‘nick’ and following him down the hill a bit. We sampled some odd snacks with his family and then dined simply in his suggested diner before heading back to our piece of floor in the jug. Sleeping was hard to achieve because of the mosquitoes but profound when accomplished.

For me the nights sleep was fitfull. Visual flashbacks to the guy, twirling to the ground refused to leave my mind. It had been a day that had given us wonderful hospitality, drinks from the pharmacy guy, a welcome from the police, tea and snacks from a stranger from DG Khan, soul searching and we had even had a charming young man with gun and bullet filled holster offer to show us the way out of town for the following day. I instinctively felt that we did not deserve to have such hospitality showered on us. Others may have taken this to mean that ‘God’ was blessing us for doing the right thing and showing us that we were not to blame. But it had been a day of extreme of emotion, and my head was busying itself trying to make sense of it all. As I began to doze something unknown scurried over my face, the mosquitoes whined and bit.

Things can only get better

We awoke to the distant chatter of the police radio set. They were probably talking up a relay of escorts for us to progress through the tribal areas. We totally failed to communicate with our obliging station sergeant but got a cup of tea to start the day which was just the ticket. There was another big day ahead of us and we were now trundling rather more cautiously so it would take a long time, no time to hang around for fancy breakfasts so we consumed biscuits and blew out of Fort Munro unimpressed by anything except the vastly better climate compared to the plains below. Personally I rather liked it, it felt relaxed, friendly and compact, and above all more women friendly than I had come to expect. As we left in the morning the policeman’s sons insisted on having their photos taken, and true to form their smiling faces turned to stone immediately we turned the camera towards them. I will never comprehend why people the world over who ask for their photo to be taken want it look as serious and miserable as possible.

The road west had been improved too and we knocked off the first 150 km in no time at all. Thereafter we were on compacted road base material which was tiring but consistent. It was dry and dusty and there were large numbers of the usual stunning trucks doing their best to pass 60 kmph. Going the other way a lead vehicle kitted out with a battery of armoury escorting a couple of buses came bouncing over the rough terrain towards us. Now we are confused, we had kind of assumed that the necessity for a military escort was no longer needed, as we had been through countless check points already and no-one had thought to stop us. There is something I find very unnerving about guys with very large loaded guns stood, bouncy down an uneven road. I worry that all kinds of accidents could happen if they lost their balance or as a relax clasped their fingers. Shortly after that I saw a couple of guys with large weapons slung over their shoulder walking over an embankment. Maybe they were off for a day shooting rabbits, whatever they were up to they showed not an slightest interest in a couple of foreign motorcyclists.

On the way I was distracted by colourful glimpses of women fetching water and working in the fields. First of all they were out and about but secondly in stead of the dour conservation burkas, bright shawls covered their heads and full gathered ankle length skirts made flashes of colour on the bland landscape. Jewelery glinted on their wrists and ankles, in the bright sunshine. It was all very reminiscent of women’s dress in Rajastan. Then I rethought, geographically it is all connected, Baluchistan and Rajastan in India, and no doubt the same traditional dress applies.

We were making marginally more speed than the trucks and so got caught up behind them not being able to see through their dust trail to overtake sensibly. For the most part, the route stayed high and so at least we weren’t baking for once. In case we were likely to overheat, a couple of water crossings were thrown in just to add a bit of excitement to the procedings. The first was more of a mud bath. In anticipation of a structure being completed to convey the new road over the muddy section, a temporary route had been graded out. Whatever decent rock they had thrown into the mud to create a causeway had clearly recently fragmented and been pushed under leaving an axle-deep route of sludge to contend with. In their haste to by-pass their mired mates, trucks were now going solo down parallel routes and then ending up face to face with other doing the same in the other direction. We hadn’t seen such pointless obstinacy since Indian railway crossings. So, the whole lot had come to a grinding halt until an intelligent driver started organising them. He only gave enough of his time up to get himself clear of the melee and had the others maintained a bit of common sense, the whole backlog could have cleared in no time so long as the mud held up. We weren’t passed later by a convoy of trucks trying to make up time and so it is possible that the jam recreated itself in no time at all.

I’d walked over a virginal bit of mud that looked reasonably firm and returned to Berthette with no signinficant depth of extra sole on my boots. It seemed do-able
but I’m no great fan of mud and probably tend to be overcautious. Just as all soft surfaces you have to keep a bit of speed up or get bogged. Mud is rather unforgiving at speed, though. We soldiered through and I managed to make it without pushing although lots of folk were rushing over should I need it. I was so pleased. If they’d had to push, they would certainly have caught a blast of slime off the spinning back wheel.

Further down the road was a tidly bit of stream. Hippy go off, I rode through, she got on, we rode off. No problem.

Then we came to a river. For some completely unknown reason, all the 4 wheel vehicles were heading off round a big loop and through a two foot deep section when there seemed to be a nice shallow crossing right in front of me. What did they know that I didn’t? Darling Hippy walked the route for me and reported that it was not deep and the bottom was solid. The river was clear and there didn’t seem to be any large boulders in it. What ho! This was too easy, it was bound to end in tears. But no. I really cannot fathom what the detour was all about unless everyone was simply taking the opportunity to clear of accumulated dirt.

Tiresome top-up and friendly folk, too

At the exotic sounding but extremely dull town of Loralai we were back on tar. Filling up brought us into contact with a bit of a nutter. His petrol pump seemed to rob us; the reels span with the randomness of a well balanced one-armed bandit. Had we hit the jackpot I wouldn’t have minded but we were on a bit of a losing streak. He claimed that the pressure was irregular but fuel seemed to emanate from the nozzle at a consistent rate. Very suspicious. We got a free pop, though, complete with the usual grilling about how dare we not have a dozen children given our 14 years of marriage, and stated with machismo that if he had been married that long he would have 17 boys. (obviously siring girls We tried a new tack “England is a very small country and there are already too many people for the economy to support”. Pointless. If we had a goodly bunch of children Allah would provide. I guess our problem with these kinds of argument is that we were brought up with the belief that tempting fate is bad and that falling back on God’s help is a serious last resort. He’s got enough on his plate as it is without us causing more work. The Lord helps those who helps themselves. Think before you act. Do as you would be done by. Surely all of these sayings make sense. I suppose here are a host of sayings I choose to ignore; look after number one ...... There was something that wound me up about the guy. Most Pakistanis are very polite and dignified, but his arrogance and pushiness was unpleasant. He, like many, wanted to get a visa to come to England. He wanted us to sponsor him, personally I wouldn’t have sponsored him to watch our bike for five minutes. He was demanding our address and phone number, to use us as a recommendation to the visa agency. Trying to explain that we didn’t have either really was not enough, and he became more pushy. To be honest of all the people we have met in Pakistan he was the one that put Pakistan in the worst light, he was slightly too familiar with me, his macho arrogance fulfilled all the worst stereotypes of swarthy Muslim men. I did wonder how much a male chauvinist guy like himself would actually like England if he went there. To amuse myself, I pictured him working under a rather domineering female boss. I was glad to leave him and his dodgy garage behind.

We’d considered stopping in Loralai but the town didn’t merit more than a filling of the tank. Whatever the tedious predictability of the ‘child’ conversation, the petrol man did at least give us some excellent advice on progressing to Quetta. There are three routes; short but rough, middlin but middlin, and long but perfect. We took the middle path (the Dalai Lama would have been proud of us) and found it to be a perfect road for a motorcycle so we saved ourselves a good bit of time and got to Quetta in two driving days from Peshawar when we’d thought it may take us four.

At a biscuit stop under a shady tree, a lovely toothless old guy, came up and guestured that we should come and eat with him. He had no English and we no Urdu but we understood each other. His offer was genuine and heartfelt a far cry from the obnoxious youth in Loralai. Later at a second biscuit break a softly spoke gent approached us, we made polite conversation and there was some gentle probing in the visa department, but nothing pushy. Was really Britain the place that males really wanted to go? Did they not realise with the liberation of women came their emancipation. How would they feel if the forward women they married did not want children, or that they weren’t very good in the bed department or wanted to continue working. I could easily see why females may want to go, but was not sure what the men saw in it, were they just blinded by the prospect of money. This guy worked for the Ministry of Agriculture and so could fill us in on the orchards that we’d been seeing. Apparently and bizarrely they grow apples here in the Baluchistan desert, at high altitude, granted. He bemoaned the fact that there have been 7 drought years in succession - the same that we heard up in the north of Pakistan. I expressed my sympathy and understood a little of maybe why he would want to move to Blighty. I remember only one serious drought year - was it 1975?

Cosmopolitan Quetta

Entering town, the road is fringed with canvas. Tent encampments spill out onto the desert and only the odd tractor or Toyota pick-up give you any clue that you are in the 21st century. The rather handsome and incredibly fearsome looking Afghanis wearing their black cloaks and turbans are incredibly menacing until a small smile breaks through here and there. Little groups of them were seen standing around their Toyotas and it must be the easiest job on earth to shoot footage of these guys and turn it into a frightening documentary. I didn’t dare ask to take a photo. Mad, really, because I’m sure they’re all children and puppy loving softies. Personally, I thought they looked quite stunning if a little unapproachable.

Quetta is brilliant; a desert town at 1700 metres, close to the Afghan border, separated by desert from Iran which means that the frontier is not too rigidly enforced. This is the perfect setting for a trading zone and we were told that pretty much anything contraband is available here just as it is in Peshawar. I’m sure it’s not on the tourist trail so much as Peshawar and the north because it is rather out on a limb. The bazar is sprawling and the people were lovely, smily and friendly to a man, with wonderful photogenic characters who delighted in having their snapshot taken. OK half the women were still in pacman outfits and the rest were head covered. Now female travelers going through Pakistan have said that they get touched up in the markets, with of without menfolk. I did not in the month we spent in Pakistan, not whether this was to do with my efforts to be headscarfed and dress conservatively, I was lucky, I looked too old or simply Pakistanis don’t feel arses of girls who were glasses. I did notice it was in fact the middle-aged to senior women who were in fact more liberal in their dress. I wasn’t sure whether this was because the stricter interruptions of the Islamic code are relatively recent (only the last 20 years), and they were not about to be bullied into something they were not brought up with or simply they were old and considered past it so there was no need any longer to be as covered up.

Of course there were the customary invitations to drink tea, we accepted from a set of guys in the material section of the market. The tea-boy on this quarter of the market was clearly destined for better things. With a cheery, cheeky smile and glinting mischieviously intelligent eyes he served our tea, and good tea it was too. How is it that eyes never conceal the intelligence behind them. I hope it was just a summer job and he would harness his potential.

Any overlanders coming from or going to Europe on the Iran route have to pass through Quetta. The numbers had dropped to a trickle for a number of reasons, Iran has made it more difficult to get visas (especially if you apply outside your home country) so people are taking other routes, and Baluchistan is being painted by the world media as a hot bed of terrorist training camps, and pretty much every Western embassy does not recommend that you go there, on top of that the Danish cartoon thing made things a little dicey for Westerners for a short while. This means that hotels that had built their reptuation on taking overlanders, are now struggling to keep going. The hotelier was lovely, and was on a one man mission to guarantee that tourists left the country with a positive image. There was no need for him to do this, notwithstanding the cold conservatism of Kohistan, we had found people warm and helpful.

We were however joined by another overlanding couple, an Ozzy lass and her Italian partner who were driving a Volvo estate. Apparently the British have a reputation for just setting off to travel in any old vehicle they have sitting around but here was a bit of travelling madness. I’m not sure we’d seen a Volvo in Nepal, India or Pakistan and so servicing or repair would be a nightmare. As a prime example, Stephano had run into the back of a truck in India; it was parked without lights on a corner of a major highway - par for the course. Amongst other things the windscreen was cracked and proceeded to craze over. At huge expense he had a windscreen shipped from Italy in a custom made and hugely expensive packing case. The Indian shipping agents dallied about whether the crate had arrived and took forever to send it on to him. When it arrived it did so on the top of a bus, stripped of its protective case. It was broken. He’d recently had a problem with his shock absorbers (a trip up and down the KKH with a car stuffed to the gills and squatting its way along doesn’t seem that wise) and had them attended to in Peshawar where they substituted solid lumps of metal for the hard rubber of his bump stops. Hmm. OK, so there are no BMW motorbike dealers between Turkey and Thailand but at least parts are rather more convenient to post.

The Bloom Star Hotel, for all its strange naming, has become the overlanders hangout in Quetta. For years the Lords Hotel held sway but now that they are charging £4 per person for camping, everyone has switched to save themselves £2 per night - I know it seems petty but most people are pinching every penny they can and want to pay the going rate for a country rather than get stiffed just because they are considered easy prey having just crossed the border. The staff at Bloom Star are incredibly helpful and demonstrate the wonderful trait of Pakistani hospitality - if you have a problem, they’ll trail you around all likely options until a solution is found. In this instance, the first place we went to could fix up the broken plastic bits from around the headlight. He took a while over it, though, seeming happy to down tools during power cuts and eat his dinner when power was available.

Most of the towns in India and Pakistan seem to have a little man with a range of hot tools and glues that can fix up all sorts of car trims and the like. Given the complete stitch up for new plastic parts for cars in Britain, I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on there yet. I know it is just about possible to write-off a car now without doing any structural damage to it. Maybe this is the niche I’ve been looking for, though I’mnot sure I could stand the smell of cooking plastic all day long.

Fully rested and looking slightly better for the ministrations of the plastics wallah we left bright and early on the last leg to the border. Just as we’d faced for the leg from DG Khan to Quetta, we had to stop every 100 km or so to sign in with police but it at least meant that our backsides got a rest now and again. The further we went the less frequent were the entries in the dusty exercise books became. At some barriers the guard struggled even to find the registration book. By the time we were passing the halfway point of Dalbandin I’d transformed Hippy and myself into Michael and Minnie Mouse from Disneyland, occupation cheese samplers etc etc. I really wouldn’t mind filling in these books if I had any belief at all that they may be correlated every day or so to make sure that people have made it all the way through the route.

Exeunt stage west

There was good news though. We knew that petrol in Iran is as cheap as chips (actually cheaper than any chips you care to mention) but we didn’t know that all the fuel from Quetta to the border has been smuggled from Iran and so half the price we’d been paying in Pakistan and steadily decreasing the further we went. The road was pretty good mostly but sand had started to form dunes that encroached in places. There was one particular corner after which the dunes were no longer present and I can imagine that it was just here that Jan, who was coming the other way, came to grief. He’d told us that he rounded a corner and caught a soft patch of sand causing him to ditch at medium speed. I guess if the sand hadn’t got him, the trucks probably would. There were long sections of single track road that were just wide enough for a truck and a motorbike to pass should the truck driver be decent enough and capable of judging his position on the road well enough. I insisted on standing my ground much to Hippy’s annoyance as I didn’t fancy the idea of pulling off the side into the soft sand, allowing the truck to carry on at full speed, only for us to lose control and end up back on the road and under the wheels. At one point we came to a stop and so did the truck coming towards and the truck driver then discovered that there was in fact room if he pulled over. The truck that had pulled up behind him was equally useless. A third truck came past too without having to slow down while we were standing there and he raised his palms skywards as if to ask what the problem was. We made eye contact and there was a moment of understanding.

The only settlement of any significance on this stretch of hot, flat, dull Baluchistan Desert is Dalbandin. We stopped for a cold drink and the shop owner offered for us to sit inside under his fan while we drank but there was a nice breeze blowing outside so we were happy to stay where we were. When a short burst of automatic fire rent the tranquility, the shop owner became more adamant that we came inside. We were just shifting on our botties and about to get up when he returned from a short recce to tell us that there was no need to worry, it was just someone dispatching a dog. Seemed an excessive amount of lead to waste on a dog.

Taftan came as a blast of hot air. It was a relief to have made it to the Iran border and amazing that we’d done it without a police escort. On reflection, had we had an escort we may not have been involved in the accident, we may have been able to pass through the tunnel, we may not have had to stop for all the paperwork processing. Who can say what it would have been like?

Accomodation is very limited in Taftan and we had another go at a PTDC hotel. When it was built it must have been quite a swanky place. Regrettably, maintenance must be a dirty word at the PTDC whereas, ironically, dirty must be a totally acceptable word. We were alloted VIP suite 2 and probably we were the most I Ps to have ever used it. I can’t imagine any former prime ministers of any country or anyone else of any percieved importance for that matter having stayed there. It was really rather expensive but our room was equipped with the largest room cooler unit I’ve ever seen and so it might just make a dent in the oppressive heat. We could only hope.