Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus (A GeoEx eBook)

Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

A Passage to Pakistan: My First Adventure with GeoEx

our van, and Asad pointed to the ribboning road we had just traveled. “If you look closely out there, you can see three roads: On the top is the road the Mughals used in the early 16th century; below that—see the dirt trail—is the path the Greeks used under Alexander in the 3rd century BCE; and then there is the Grand Trunk Road the British made in the 19th century.” Later we passed a honeycomb of small shops, and Asad said, “This is Ali Mastid bazaar—from the earliest days of the Silk Route, this is where the camel caravans would stop for the night. In fact, nomad caravans still do stop here.” As we bumped along, I realized that I was being given a great gift: In the accumulation of images and encounters, as my feet scuffed that parched ground, as I nodded at Pakistani soldiers, shook Afghan hands in the bazaar, and waved to children in the settlements, the war was becoming personalized—it was no longer their war, but my war, too. And as the sun glowered down and the earth baked as it had when Alexander’s soldiers walked this way, I thought of how all wars are just people fighting people—and of how just as sun and wind inevitably shape landscape, so too do climate and countryside shape human character and culture. April 6, Swat Serena Lodge, Saidu Sharif: Yesterday dawned dark and drizzly, and we splashed through the muddy, puddling streets of Peshawar bound for the Swat Valley and the city of Saidu Sharif, ancient capital of the Kingdom of Swat. As we wound north, roadside images revealed the presence of the past in this slowly developing land: cultivated fields crisscrossed by rough-dug irrigation trenches, occasionally punctuated by walled compounds of mud and straw; children gathering branches and twigs in the rain; yoked oxen snorting through the mud; carcasses hanging in a market; men huddled around a makeshift fire in a shop. The weather was not propitious for touring the Buddhist

itinerary: Asad said that we could not fly to Chitral, gateway to the pagan Kafir Kalash people of Kafiristan, because seasonal thermal updrafts were making it impossible to land there. This kind of uncertainty is part of the adventure travel package— obstacles that sometimes no amount of money or preparation can overcome. I was disappointed that we weren’t going to see the tribes of the Kalash, who reportedly have managed to maintain their own pagan beliefs and distinct dress, speech, and other cultural practices through two millennia of passive Buddhist belief and, later, aggressive Islamic rule all around them. But then Asad announced some good news: He had secured permission for us to visit the storied Khyber Pass, near the border with Afghanistan! Martial music played and images from Gunga Din marched through my head as we wound due west toward the border. We passed two sprawling Afghan refugee settlements— temporary structures of mud, bamboo, and straw, stretching across the dusty flatlands—and Asad said that 35,000 people lived in one and 28,000 in another. Until now, my sense of the Afghan war has been confined to television and newspaper reports viewed or read in the comfort of my living room. Now the picture has changed. Try to imagine all the inhabitants of Burlingame, say, or Los Gatos, living in these patched-together structures, laced by dirt lanes on a parched plain; then try to imagine providing for all their needs in a country that is already strapped meeting the needs of its own inhabitants, and then try to imagine the sufferings of the refugees themselves—from maimed limbs to splintered families to profound psychological displacement. Imagine all these, and you begin to get some sense of the scale and depth of the problems the Afghan war has created. Along with the present, the region’s historic past came to vivid life as well. At one point we stopped and got out of

100

101