DISPATCHES

Howkins

There was the delayed baggage mishap, for one. There were massive thunderstorms on the East Coast last Thursday, the night our team was converging in NYC from various parts of the country. Six of the team members were stranded in the Detroit and Denver airports overnight, and four of those members arrived without their personal baggage. And so, after several sleepless nights of packing, we found ourselves driving back and forth between JFK and LGA airports in NYC in a Ryder truck, trying to track down bags.

The Ryder truck, according to the rental agent, was 10'7" high. At least one of the stone-arch bridges we drove under on the New York parkways was marked 8'8".

After we zipped under the first of these 8'8" underpasses, it took me a few minutes in my brain-fogged sleep-deprived state of mind to register the miraculous fact that our truck was not 1'11" shorter. "Didn't we just violate the laws of physics?" I mumbled to Bill, the friend who drove us to the airport.

"I don't think so," he answered, "I accelerated to the speed of light and swerved out to the middle of the arch just before we went under it."

Fortunately, all of the bags arrived on Saturday, and our international carrier, Pakistani International Airlines (PIA), was able to re-book six of us on a flight that left yesterday.

And then there was the cigarette mishap. Two members of the team were carrying some 22 cartons of Camel non-filter cigarettes as "incentive pay" for the camel drivers. In the mass exodus off the plane in Islamabad, after a 16-hour flight, the cigarettes were somehow left in one of the overhead bins. Again, PIA to the rescue. Mr. Mamoon Shaikh, a PIA official in Islamabad, was able to track down the cigarettes on flight 716, seat 48, right side, and have them delivered to our hotel.

These little mishaps were nothing, though, compared to the current headache: our Inmarsat M4 satellite phone is missing.

Satellite phones are not the kind of thing you can pick up at the corner store in Islamabad, and this particular unit is not just any old sat phone. It is a NERA M4 World Communicator Modem Unit, a high data-rate phone that our technical trainer from Quokka.com told us is extremely expensive.

"There are only about 50 of these in the world," he explained, "and there's a waiting list to get one. The Queen of England wanted this one, but we managed to get it."

Aside from being a rare, expensive technological gem, the M4 phone is vital to our Mountain Zone dispatches. If we can't find it, we won't be able to send photos, email text, or videos after we leave Kashgar, six days from now.

When and where did we lose it, you ask? On an x-ray machine belt in JFK airport, NYC.

How the h*#! did that happen? Good question.

Of the six of us boarding the plane, three had slept less than 10 hours in the previous five days. There were teary good-byes with family and friends just outside the x-ray area. There were at least five communal carry-on bags, and all of us were functioning at about 20% brain capacity.

Even at the best of times, I am not known for my ability to keep track of things. As a grad student studying mathematical logic, I once spent seven fruitless hours looking for my favorite pen, and finally concluded that my absent-minded office mate must have picked it up. It turned up two weeks later, in the freezer in my apartment, next to the Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream.

And so it wasn't until a layover in Manchester, England, that I thought to check to make sure all of our carry-ons were with us. After a few minutes of agonized memory searching, we traced the missing sat phone back to the x-ray machine.

By that time, it was too late to get off the plane again, but we managed to find a security officer who agreed to send a fax to our relatives in the NYC area. "Here's the number. Just put the words 'urgent, sat phone, JFK, lost, dead meat, and x-ray machine' in the message," we begged.

We'll be calling those relatives as soon as we reach the hotel, of course.

Stay tuned.

— Heidi Howkins, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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