The road into Pakistan can be demarcated into checkpoints. Our papers were looked at by at least a dozen pairs of eyes over the next two days. The most intimidating was the last, just before the pass into Pakistan, by a cop drawn to the Unibomber look, wrap-around hood, dark shades, face-mask. While he'd been gruff with the rest of us, he actually scolded LYL for not opening her passport to her exit visa.
It did, a suppose, break up what was a series of long drives. The road out of Kashgar was down straight roads lined with poplar trees planted to help break the wind. Through them, we'd catch the odd glimpse of the snow-covered Pamirs. At a toilet stop in Ghez, LYL and I bought some of that fry bread that tastes mysteriously and delightfully like pizza. Another stop was beside the Kangxiwa River, its waters impossibly blue, reflecting each of every contour of the mountains of snow and sand in this high and rarified air. We had a picnic lunch beside Kara Kul, sadly hemmed in with barbed wire, the net result of too many selfies. It was pleasant to sit in the cool of 3700 meters, as waterfowl bobbed about, and dzo dozed beneath the high and jagged peaks. We wrapped around one of these, the 7500m Muztagh Ata, its face perfectly cleft by a glacier slowly and patiently working itself downward to the Subash Plateau from which the great mountain rose. There was one final stop, above a large bend in the Tashiku'er River, whose wriggling bank we'd follow down into Tashikurgan. Below us, Bactrian camels and goats grazed between rivulets of the Tagharma Basin, their Tajik shepherds walking slowly, biding a time untethered by the hands of any clock. One of our party said, "Oh for the days when we would have travelled through this at the pace of a horse." It was sentiment I believe we all shared.
Tashikurgan was a sleepy little town, populated by a large amount of soldiery. We ended our day atop its eponymous stone fortress, which has made guest appearances in the works of many Silk Road travelers, starting with Ptolemy in the first century, and most famously by Xuanzang at a time when this was the furthest outpost of the T'ang Dynasty. The fortress has held steadfast against invaders over the centuries but today was crawling with modern tourists. As attrition can often prove a successful strategy during a siege, I waited them out and they eventually descended, allowing me a little quiet perspective on my own connection with history, and the tales hinted at by the empty alcoves for the Buddhas that had once decorated these now crumbling walls. (Their mysteries were long ago plundered, nor could answers be found in the local relics museum, which is itself a relic)
And the patient waiting went on, as our bus driver was off refilling the bus with petrol, stuck in one of the long queues I'd noticed on the drive in. Our group waited awhile with a pair of women selling traditional medicine, buying their teas with help of LYL's translation. I wandered off along the decks that covered the marshland below, part of the Tashikurgan nature preserve, described with a quaint elegance in an English that was grammatically correct yet charmingly archaic.
Food in Tashikurgan took on a surprisingly large role in my memory: in our last dinner in China, where our host both spilled and slugged beer with us between delivering lamb on kababs the size of sabres; and in our Singaporean-owned guest house, which served kaya as one of its breakfast condiments. Thus fueled, we squandered this energy during a long wait to clear immigration before heading south. A group of Pakistani men was waiting beside us, their colorful clothes, long beards, and old school bus as transport went a long way to remind me of Ken Kesey's Pranksters.
We finally moved out of town through high flat desert, the Pamirs still defining the edges of the horizon. The road's climb was a constant, and at over 4000 meters, snow came down to touch the road, not in great blankets of white, but in the small patchwork of puddles where it had flowed down as refrozen glacial melt. Clusters of yaks grazed here and there, and the peaks above drew nearer as we rose. The Khunjerab Pass served as the border, and our stop here was not to check documents but to take photos. The usual Chinese tourists mobbed their side, and young Pakistani men quietly wandered the other, asking many of our group to pose for photos. The world curled away down toward Pakistan.
The Karakorum Highway paralleled a river, the paved surface washed away here and there. Most things man-made here were in ruin, except for a lone police checkpoint with a few pieces of exercise equipment out back. The cops waved up to us as we rolled by. We were stopped at the bottom of the valley but merely for some park rangers to check that we weren't smuggling snow leopards or Marco Polo sheep. Our documents finally were checked in the town of Sust. As we waited, a lone Japanese man joined the queue, and inadvisably took photos of the process. One of the books I read to prepare for this trip mentioned how if you meet a lone traveler in the most remote part of the world, they'll inevitably be Australian. I'd include Japanese in this, as they pop up in the most unlikely of places. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to talk with him, but later, as we drove out of Sust, I saw him walking from bus to bus, trying to arrange a ride onward.
Then we once again became part of the landscape...
On the turntable: "Bottle Rocket (sdtk)"
On the nighttable: William Dalrymple, " In Xanadu"
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