Mixed Emotions, Mountaineering Writings of Greg Child by Greg Child

Author:Greg Child [Child, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780898863635
Amazon: 0898863635
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books
Published: 1993-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE TROUBLE WITH HUNZA

Karachi. Dawn. As the sun rises over the slums and fills the velvet sky, the city comes to life for the day. Sounds and visions of Islam form amid the cloying heat.

And smells.

To one side of the truck-rental agency lies an open sewer. Behind it, an acre of fish, drying in ranks. On the other side of the street a car-size mound of offal entombs a bloated beast of burden, lying on its back, its hooves pointing rudely skyward. Bicycles with wobbly wheels zip through the gauntlet of squalor, displacing clouds of flies. The initiates to the Third World in our expedition stand open-mouthed, the cameras around their necks agog, the emulsion shocked off their film.

And the truck: a huge, bed-of-iron Bedford, with six-foot-high steel walls decorated in day-glo dreamscapes, a hookah, a vase of plastic flowers and sundry colorful decorations spread across the dashboard. This “Junga Bus,” piloted by two alternating Pakistani drivers, will take us 900 miles to Islamabad and the mountains of the Karakoram, shaking and baking us atop our bags and boxes, buns in the oven of the barren Sind Desert.

Hyderabad, Sukkur, Khanpur and Shujabad slip by in a sunstruck haze. One hundred fifteen degrees. We stop at every Coca-Cola stand and tea house on the way, guzzling and eating chapati and dhalbat curries floating in yellow oil. Mark Miller, a British climber built like a Sumo wrestler, stripped to his underpants, calls them OPEC specials.

Doug Scott, in search of “English-style tea,” instructs the waiter to bring us a pot of tea with milk and sugar separate, rather than in the Pakistani style of sugar-tea-sugar-milk-sugar stewed-brewed-boiled together for hours. “Yaar, the mad English,” the cook exclaims when he sees us add milk and sugar to the tea anyway. A fat desert toad hops onto the table and plops into a saucer of tea water, looking smug until swatted away.

Lahore. Midnight. The truck makes an unscheduled stop at a back road between nowhere and nothing. Highway robbery? We wake to see the driver disappearing with armfuls of soap, talc and hair oils into the home of his lover, whose father owns the brick factory where we are parked. Around us a Heironymus Bosch-scape of belching chimneys and coke ovens. Monitor lizards with flicking blue tongues and swishing tails police the alleyways between brick stacks. Wood-sandaled coolies lift steel lids on the ground, uncapping hellish holes of spitting fire, and shovel coke into them, while a foreman dumps a glowing ember into a hookah and begins to hubble-bubble the night away. As we roam about we smell burning rubber, then feel burning feet.

Finally, Islamabad. Casualties of the truck ride are admitted to the hospital, too many OPEC specials having wreaked havoc on their stomachs, their brains fried by the sun. Off the truck and onto a bus for a drive up the Karakoram Highway, etched into the banks of the Indus River Gorge.

The bus sways at the hands of our pie-eyed, heroin-smoking driver. Drivers are the renegades of Pakistani roads.

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