DISPATCHES

Howkins

Now all we have to worry about is how to get it through customs. This is usually a three to four day process, and the team feels we can't afford any delays. There is also the issue of how to get a sat phone into Pakistan. It is slightly more complex than importing diapers and toothpaste. Advanced technology is viewed with suspicion in Pakistan, particularly for travel in the Karakoram region, where there are active military zones.

Of course, there has been so much to do that it's hard to find time to worry too much.

The vast majority of the past 72 hours has been spent in Room 310 of the Shalimar Hotel, where we are packing and re-packing all of our duffles and barrels. Wayne and Ginger have catalogued and cross-referenced the contents of every single load. We had 130 loads coming into Islamabad. By the time we leave for Kashgar with all of the food purchased in the markets of Rawalpindi, that number should be up around 170.

And then there have been the interviews with a Pakistani newspaper called "The Nation" and a local TV station, plus the meetings with various diplomats, including U.S. Ambassador Bill Milam and the Cabinet Minister of the Pakistani Northwest Area Territories, Mr. Abbas Khan, both of whom offered help and safe passage.

In between packing and shopping and politicking, most of the team has found some time to roam the streets around our hotel in Rawalpindi, in the outskirts of Islamabad. Several of us have purchased a shalwar kameez, the local garb that allows you to wander without being openly identified as a Westerner. Although the U.S. State Department has issued a travel warning for Pakistan, I think how you travel is more important than where you travel.

Understanding the dress code in Islamic countries is particularly important. If a French woman tried to go topless on an American beach, she would be arrested, or at least gawked at. Baring legs, arms, and hair is an analogous indecency for women of Pakistan, so Ginger, Jen, and I have been wearing the traditional shalwar kameez with a dopatta (headshawl) in the markets. Knowing a few simple Urdu phrases helps, too. The most common greeting, for example, is "asalaam alaikum." Goodbye is "khuda hafiz."

The smells and sounds of the "Pindi" streets are overwhelming: horns blaring, Muslim calls to prayer, fresh cloves and cumin, bicycle bells jingling, open-pit sewers, mass halitosis and rotting fruit. The sights are equally unforgettable: women draped in brightly colored cotton cloths; a cemetery lot overgrown with wild marijuana weeds; a block of ice on a bicycle rack melting in the sultry midday heat; a baker fishing roti bread from a tandoor oven with a long metal hook; men holding hands; a truck collecting lepers for the night. (In general, the treatment of disabled and diseased persons in Islamic countries is markedly better than the treatment of the same population in countries such as India and Nepal, where the remnants of the Hindu/Buddhist caste system are still in place, and the disabled or diseased are still part of the "sutras," or "untouchables.")

And everywhere, everywhere, people sweeping and washing the streets. These heroic drones are the Pakistani version of Sisyphus. There is uncontained trash covering every public square meter of Pindi, and the diligent efforts of the sweepers are erased at a rate that keeps pace with the work.

— Heidi Howkins, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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