4 ways

Breakfast Peking time 9am…we luckily made it on time for a buffet of pine nuts and collards, and assorted weird items including the squeeze-the-charmin bread and sweet and sour marmalade..mmm… We sat at a table of Westerners, met Josephine and David, a couple traveling by road from Britain. (They’re interestingly enough heading back to Pakistan…) In China they are allowed to bring their own vehicle, but not allowed to drive anywhere without a Chinese guide. We went to the bank, and to the airline office, and all for me to wonder what in the world do I do with 4 equally unappealing options. Margret decided she had to go on to DunHuang, it was the place that was calling her. She had seen a book on the table of the tourist office in the hotel, a book of the Buddhist caves in DunHuang, and tears came to her eyes. However, it was very far by road, and she would fly there and then from there back to Pakistan. My options were #1) wait in a random, dull, expensive hotel (by expensive I mean $25 per day, not like the West), in a random city I don’t feel any desire to really stay in for 5 days and then catch a flight back to Islamabad, #2) stay in Kashgar 3 days and after crossing the Chinese border at Tashkurgand, ride in the cramped jeep with the British couple over the nauseating pass to Sost (and then pray Ahsan could be there and drive me on to my flight in Skardu a few days later), #3) fly with her to bustling Urumqi and stay there in that random city I know nothing about and have no connections in a few days until the next flight to Islamabad, #4) cough up 6 or 7 hundred dollars for the flights and continue to accompany Margret on her expedition which she had thus far paid everything for me to do so. {Speaking from the future, if I was going to choose again, I would have chose #2, because I still think there are Sufis for me to find in Kashgar, and I would’ve loved to return to the Hunza Valley – now both places I’ll have to go back to…but maybe that for a reason too.} #4 was chosen.

Mud House with Yak Dung Fire, Bathroom Beneath the Stars

Our first night in China, all in all, under the Full Moon, was quite a memorable treat. After our Hunza angel, Ahsan, helped us transition to a new driver and cross the Pakistani border...no easy thing...when we arrived to Sost one of the jeep's tires was a bit flat. The system of remedying this was to attach a hose from the engine exhaust pipe to the tire, with one person revving the engine, the exhaust would then flow through the plastic pipe into the tire; ingenious!! We had to have our names put on a manifest with the travel monopoly before going through immigration, the process of which I believe I already wrote about....okay, so moving along...we drove through khunjerab national park, to the tippy top of the pass with the awful sickening smell, and then arranged a new driver who spoke neither English nor Urdu, but fortunately a language quite similar to Turkish, called Ughyur, so at least I could count to ten with him! As we got onto the road the 100 word dictionary in the lonely planet travel guide our savior, still couldn't get us to an internet cafe. We drove about an hour and a half through a slow sunset on a deserted highway (the only highway in the province, I think)through chinese ghosttowns and dusty yellow plains with snow-topped mountains rising off in the distance.
Arriving at 'the lake' and the only restaurant thoroughly locked up and closed down for tourist season, we ventured to check out one of the yurts beside the lake. I stayed in the car and Margret went on the mission to see if it would be our home for the night. She came back dismayed, there was a strange man staying there and the owner wanted about $15 a person for us to also stay in there. The taxi driver made a swooping yelp to indicate he wanted to stay way across the other side of the lake, and off we went. We drove onto a rocky dirt path that shook his mini-van every which way, when mud houses started appearing the driver beeped his horn until finally someone appeared outside one of the houses. It wasn't a yurt, and there was no toilet, but it would do. The owners had run to the neighbors to borrow a stove which got assembled on our side of the house, meanwhile the very sweet girl (maybe 10 or 12 years old), Muneera, showed me across the lane to a pile of rocks where we could pee under the full moon. What a lovely bonding experience. (reminded me of other such bonding experiences, like in india as the ladies held up shawls for each other stopped at the side of the road so the truck drivers wouldn't stare us down, and then the 2am post-Happy Noodle Shop in Chungju, Korea with Becky and Rae, squat in the grass in front of the police station)
Inside, with yak dung burning and finally being able to take off my down jacket, we were offered some hard naan bread and lumpy yak yoghurt. The chai tasted like butter, and I couldn't bear to drink it. Margret brought out some treasures - a Swiss fruit cake which the locals didn't dare take two bites of, and Miso soup mix. Then it was time for bed, and the Khirgiz family brought down silk embroidered comforter after comforter to pile on top of us (the dung fire would inevitably die out). The driver was looking mighty uncomfortable about sleeping in the same room as us, but slipped his pants off nonetheless and pretended to snore after two seconds. I think I actually slept. We were woken for seheri, Ramadan breakfast before sunrise, but expecting them to bring food to us we missed the chance to eat. A couple hours later we were offered the same piece of stale bread from the night before. Before leaving, the lady of the house tried to pawn off her necklace and then her ring and earrings. We refused, but left some moisturizing creams and a pen for Muneera, who was still asleep. The sun was rising over the yellow plains and snow-capped peaks, the yaks' breaths misting in the full moon air...we were back on the Silk Road.

NYC go to Ikhlaq's Concert!! This FRIDAY - 28th - SITAR BLISS

This Friday night, virtuoso sitarist Ustad Ikhlaq Hussain will be performing at THE ARCH SPACE, 66 West 39th Street, 3rd Floor, at 8:00pm. He will be accompanied on tabla by Nitin Mitta...this is going to be a musical night to remember!
My mom wrote and said that Ikhlaq dedicated a song to me - how sweet, I was in tears reading that in DunHuang, China at Shirley's Cafe after experiencing the worst in sweet and sour eggplant and tofu - the french fries were good though. He also gave his bouquet of orchids to my mom - doubly sweet.
I haven't spoken to him yet to hear about the concert, but I'm sure it was amazing. I'm eager to reach Karachi and start lessons with his father, whose music is so amazing it's in his every breath, miraculously beautiful....

Over the Khunjerab Pass - into China

At the top of the mountains, with a dusting of snow in our midst, and turns that turned my stomach so sour I had to stop taking pictures, we arrived at the Chinese checkpost - the actual border. Though the air rightly should have been fresh and sweet, like Hunza, there was a sickening smell of old petrol and burning chemicals. It was the Chinese checkpost, perhaps some disinfectant; Margret said she recognized that kind of smell from eastern Germany.
We were on the other side, unlike when we left Sost and the Pakistan immigration officer had to run and turn on the generator to process our passport numbers, we were not in strict freezing cold chinese hands; no games, no pictures, no questions.
A young soldier hopped into our car to be driven to the next checkpost where our passports would actually be stamped. Me sick in the front with the window wide open, him without a proper coat shivering in the back (refusing to accept food or water or a coat from us), and the funny driver, quite a team we made!
An hour on we were at lower altitude and at the customs point where all of our bags were gone through, our precious hunza dried apricots confiscated, and all manner of being patted down had passed by the smiling female officer (unlike the pakistani side where we were separately taken into a room where the veiled woman reached for my privates and nowhere else, took me aback).
We then had to find a way to get to kashgar or out of the border town, tashkurgan, and to the karakol lake. We almost got whisked into a van with 10 pakistani guys, not my ideal sick as I was, finally were able to arrange a private driver for another $100 to take us to the lake, spend the evening there, and drive us on the next day to kashgar.

Apricot Soup on Karimabad Hill

Our first night in Karimabad we went to Hidden Paradise for dinner, and were served thick and sweetly delicious apricot soup, chapati with soft cheese stuffed inside, and smothered in apricot kernal oil. We drank tea called 'tumoro', an herbal blend with a punch and something familiar that I couldn't place, but which made me want more and more; perhaps it helped with the altitude. It was our finest meal of the entire journey and we both longed to stay..and after we left we longed to return...and now in fact I'm in China, backwriting the legs of the journey...and I still long to be in hunza enjoying the apricot splendors.
In the morning, the sunrose over mountains too high to see the top of from our hotel room window. We ate what margret calls 'squeeze the charmin' bread with omelet, and tumoro tea that seemed to be cooked in petrol - deeply disappointed we had to send it back, Ehsan wouldn't even drink it.
We were back on the winding road. I held my camera out to take pictures, though by the time the camera turned on we had turned a bend into a new scene of magnificence. It was a few more dizzying hours until we arrived at the border, Sost. We didn't stop to see any sights, pushing forth to get to china and margret's mission of finding a certain site she had to return to.
Ehsan woke up a cousin who had a special border passport and would drive us over the pass. We had to hire a car from the company with the pass monopoly, Ehsan got us a good price, about $150 for the 4-5 hour journey which also took us through a national park where we had to pay in US dollars $4 per person.
The new driver didn't speak English, but we communicated in Urdu a bit. He was a funny sort of man, he got out of the car at one point and let us take pictures. Getting back in the car he spit and then turned so fast that the spit landed on his coat; we all had to laugh over that.
The glaciers rose and the sites were amazing. The road was dizzying, and as we got to the pass, my face beet red - as I hadn't realized that I could get so sunburned when the climate was well near freezing.

Air of Mountain Sage - Hunza Valley

Margret and I arrived to Gilgit early in the morning, wandered out of the airport and into an unbelievable landscape of soaring gray mountains. No hotel bus waiting to greet us, we wandered around to find a taxi, and somewhere along the way, found a kind looking man (very hard to believe he was pakistani, his complexion snow white as mine, he looked more uzbeki) who offered to drive us to an internet cafe. We then hired him to drive us over two days to the Pakistan border.
After finding a cobbler to fix my beautiful new orange embroidered sandals which had already broken, we headed onto the Karakoram Highway...the Old Silk Road. The mountains rising around us were breathtaking, with the wind blowing through the blue WWII jeep with the japanese engine, and the air smelling of mountain sage, we drove on and on until we could see snow on the peaks. Luckily there had not been rain recently, so the chance of landslides and falling pieces of mountain were not as likely, though some stretches we drove quite fast to avoid. The highway was a dirt track with occassional stones laying at the side to prevent the car from going over the cliffs. I felt extremely safe, though, in the care of our driver, Ehsan. The bridges were all Chinese style, as they were built by chinese workers, every few tiny mountain towns we passed had cemetaries for the chinese laborers who had lost their lives while working on completing the highway.
Four or five winding hours later we arrived in Karimabad. Though Margret had been talking about the altitude since last january, I had no idea what it would mean to be at high altitude. But, when we arrived I finally got a hint of what it means to "be HIGH". Ehsan told us not to sleep for at least 2 hours, so we would start to adjust to the height. It was torture to stay awake, every cell of our bodies wanted to lie down. A piercing headache started in, and when I tried to walk my feet would cross and I would start laughing, not able to form a clear sentence. Altitude works like inertia, seems like nothing is happening, but something is naturally happening.

FLY TO THE MOON

I feel as though I've flown to the moon....gray mountains shooting up and down the skyline amazing, absolutely amazing....arrived safe in gilgit and heading north....
more soon