Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus (A GeoEx eBook)

Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

A Passage to Pakistan: My First Adventure with GeoEx

we were at one of the most significant points of passage on our trip. From here on, we will be traveling along the legendary Karakoram Highway, or KKH, “one of man’s most magnificent and stupefying feats of engineering and endurance.” Undertaken jointly by Pakistan and China, the two-lane, 730- mile highway had taken twenty years to complete, with 15,000 Pakistanis and from 9,000 to 20,000 Chinese working on the project at any one time. The KKH was dynamited and dug out of the mountains, Tom said, connecting Islamabad all the way to the Chinese border and beyond to Kashgar in the wastes of Chinese Turkestan. In some places the builders followed ancient trade routes that predated even the Silk Route; in other places, because of unresolvable property disputes, they simply blasted a way through virgin territory. Soon after that stop, we wound into landscape as wild and uncompromising as any I have ever seen. The peaks rose steep and sheer—ragged in some places, sandpapered by colossal landslides in others—from the side of the road into the clouds. In all this immensity, the highway was a filament, a puny patch of pavement that nature could reclaim at any moment through any of the elements at its command: snow or mud, rock or flood. When we saw nomads with sheep and cows walking by the side of the Indus River far below, they looked about as big as the period at the end of this sentence. I spoke into my tape recorder: “This is a landscape for gods, not men.” April 10, Mir’s Palace Bungalows, Hunza: We are in Hunza! We reached Karimabad, the “capital” of the Hunza Valley, the day before yesterday, just before sunset. Of all the exotic stops on our itinerary, it is Hunza, famed for its apricot orchards, the longevity of its inhabitants, and its fairy tale setting of a verdant valley encircled by snowcapped peaks,

ruins and Alexander the Great-related sites of Swat yesterday, or again today, so instead we spent our time shopping. I am not a great shopper, and I dutifully but dispiritedly hefted melons, admired earrings and necklaces, and trailed fine rainbow- colored scarves through my hands—until this afternoon, when we stopped at the village of Khwazakhela. There, in a dark, dingy closet of a shop, maybe eight feet deep by five feet wide, we discovered a wooden and leather arrow quiver, with the arrows still inside, that both the shop owner and Asad said was at least 100 years old. Then in a grimy corner, among lanterns and coins and cooking utensils, I found a 100-year-old drum and a 350-year-old leather shield. I twirled an arrow and felt the prick of its cool metal tip. Then I turned the drum in my hands, studying how the leather had been stretched over the beautifully worked brass, running my fingers over the creases where the leather had been stretched, smelling the dust and sweat and age of it. I beat it—dust dancing into the air—and imagined tribal palms beating that same worn spot a century ago; the dull thonk, thonk and tum, tum echoed in my ears just as—I imagined—they had echoed in tribal ears through the years. Then I took the rough shield and imagined a Pathan warrior 300 years ago gripping those same thongs, that musty, pocked, leathery disc—about as big as a woman’s floppy Sunday hat—the only thing between him and death. The shop owner picked an old, rusted, curving sword off the wall and playfully swung it at me. I parried his thrust with my shield. His eyes were suddenly electric with mirth and interaction—understanding that spanned cultures, connections that spanned time. April 7, Shangri-La Hotel, Chilas: About two hours into our drive today, at a fraying, frontier- feeling truck stop called Besham, Tom Cole announced that

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