The road out of Gilgit at dawn. Passing the town's three military camps, housing soldiers who undergo high altitude training prior to being posted in what the maps call "Indian-occupied Kashmir." The soldiers look smart with their tidy moustaches and feathered-berets. They certainly have time to perfect the look: enlisted men serve for eighteen years, officers for twenty five.
An hour or so south, the Karakorum brings us alongside the Indus, which flows wild and fast, like a rebellious teen that betrays no hint that it will eventually calm down to give birth to some of mankind's earliest civilizations. The land around is devoid of such, all wild and dusty and empty, looking unfinished in a way. A sign here tells us that this spot is also the junction of three of Asia's great mountain ranges, two being the Karakorum and the Himalayas. During the obligatory photo stop, I wander off into the third, and enjoy a short wee in the Hindu Kush.
We pull off the road at Raikot Bridge and climb aboard small jeeps, open but for the canvas snapped to the chassis. We bump out over the desert floor, then move along a long switchback that cuts diagonally across the face of a large earthen mount. The KKH drops away quickly on the other side of the Indus. We round a bend and weave slowly, ever climbing. A narrow ribbon of river is far below, at the bottom of a drop of hundreds of meters that begins less than a meter from my left elbow. The bottom, when I can see it, is littered with immense stones, brought down in hundreds of landslides. I am not good with heights, and almost wish that I'd earlier taken advantage of the prayer rooms that were a feature of all the petrol stations we'd passed on the way here. We had been coached not to talk to the driver, so as not to distract him, so I am not terribly happy to see him glance at his mobile a few times, and even less so when he sneezes. I try to distract myself with the question: "What do you say to a Muslim when he sneezes." But I am pulled back to the terror of my situation with every sudden lurch to the abyss just to my left. To make matters worse, this narrow jeep track allows for two-way traffic. We stop for awhile to allow one to pass, and as it inches past us, its tires are mere centimeters away from open space. There is another stop later on, as we wait for one of our jeeps to catch up. Then the river gradually rises to meet the road, and we reach Tato. Each of our group looks grateful to have arrived alive, our joking at lunch betraying the knowledge that we will have to do it all again in order to get down.
From here, we'll need to walk. It is an easy path, but one that climbs steadily. LYL walks about a third of the way, but she is particularly susceptible to heat, so accepts a horse when one is offered. This act allows me to lose my own hobbles, and I begin to stride out. It feels good to walk after all that time in the bus, and somehow I'm not at all bothered by the altitude, which is rapidly approaching 3500 meters. I keep good pace with the horses, and rest with them at a tea house that marks the halfway point. Beyond this, the trail enters a forest that could be right out of northern New Mexico, but for the mules and the clothing of the men along the way.
We reach Fairy Meadows, and LYL and I go clown around with a couple of soldiers who have come up during the night. (I can't imagine that drive in the dark, but maybe not seeing the drop is better for the spirit.) Our little cabin has a narrow porch with great views of Nanga Parbat, the ninth highest mountain on Earth. I'll pass the next two days again alternating between a book and the view, watching the mood of the mountain change with the clouds. Goats and donkeys ever graze the grass, and one of the former wanders up along the interconnected porches, leaving little piles of pellets before each of our doors.
Most of the time though is spent trying to deal with the cold. We awake the next morning to find the inside temp at minus 0.3 degrees C. We all collectively huddle through meals, wearing everything we have. Not nearly as hardy as the men in the photographs hanging around us, a who's who of those who challenged, and even died on, what has been nicknamed the "Killer Mountain." I wonder at weeks spent in conditions we were currently experiencing, the cold only fended off by the very temperamental hot water, which appears for only minutes at a time, and then to be scooped from a bucket to offer a few seconds of relief. Strangely, only LYL and I seem to have the timing right, and none of the other guests got even this. And outside, it rains and squalls and blusters, bringing fresh snow to the ridgetops. I try not to think of what's happening on the road out.
In the morning, I triple-wrap up and sit with the mountain. Somehow it is warmer here on the porch than inside. A wizened old guard passes below, with his AK-47 slung over his shoulder and his woolly cap written with "Police." Camp staff walk around in the usual thin salwar kameez, bare feet in sandals, as if oblivious to the cold. Morning brings the first true clear views of the mountain, a pure white behemoth of solid ice. Snow has dusted the hills on either side.
Warmth does return when the sun spreads against the meadow. A number of us go for a walk up toward base camp, though we compromise by stopping at the next camp higher up. Besides our guide, a guard is with us, who instills some confidence with his strong build and casually slung Kashnikov, though I don't delude myself in thinking he wouldn't toss it away and run off in the event of real trouble. And real trouble has a history here. In 2013, a group of eleven foreign climbers was killed by the Taliban in a kidnapping attempt gone awry. The initial plan was to exchange the lone American in the group for a Taliban commander in Afghanistan, but after he was shot to death when trying to fight his way out, the others were lined up and executed. The real tragedy lay in this last point, as the others were from countries that had no part in the background conflict, coming from the Ukraine, Slovakia, Lithuania, Nepal, and China.
The hike was a lovely one, moving along the ridge high above the Raikot glacier, then across alpine meadows through which mule trains brought down supplies and the odd Thai tourist. We sat happily in the waning sunshine, the view dominated by the peak. But in time the cold began to overtake us, and the hour-long wait for a simple meal began to fray nerves. I at one point decided to walk back to Fairy Meadows on my own, but then the meal suddenly arrived. We wolfed it down in mere minutes, then turned our backs on the mountain. I again moved quickly, seeking a warmth that wouldn't appear again until descending to the jeep tracks the following day. Still, LYL and I took advantage of being anointed with a brief window of sunlight, moving past a small nomadic village of cricket-playing boys and matted-haired girls to explore an adjacent meadow and its small pond that supposedly reflected the mountain, though not for us.
Our hike out began with the first rays of sun, the layers peeled off slowly with each few hundred meters of descent. Our group spread itself along the trail, so LYL and I had a pleasant morning hiking as if alone. The jeeps were again a worry, with gravity-aided rates of speed, the additional and unknown variability of brakes, and a driver whose obvious short attention span had obviously spared him any deep thinking about the notion of mortality. Not to mention the blare of bangra which does little to soothe acrophobia.
On the turntable: "Crazy Rich Asians (Sdtk)"
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