Freelance Journalist

Its strange in Pakistan, it’s the first country i have visited where i havn’t seen a single national flag flying. Here its the flag of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party which is all the rage. Every last car and building is adorned with her picture, the colours of the party and proporganda posters surrounding her martyrdom. The colourful trucks, a symbol and image of Pakistan, immortalize her, her sunglass toting son and party associates in vivid murals on the back of their wagons. There are seldom few truck drivers who havn’t stumped up the cash to have their General Musharraf murals re-done, it would seem that in Pakistan it’s your best bet to back the leading horse and then sing when you’re winning.

The Karakoram highway is a road of legend and mystery. Its a road which took over 5000, mostly Chinese lives in its construction, one for every 1.5km of its length linking the lowlands of the Punjab with the Chinese Border. It took twenty years of hard slog and labour to complete, the Chinese workers mainly using pick axes and shovels to fight their way through the mountains, which flatly refused to be beaten. Large signs have been whitewashed on the side of the road proclaiming ‘Karakorum HIghway; the eighth wonder of the world!’ and arguably the claim is true. The KKH has been one of my leading desires and desperations for the trip and I am determined to leave no pothole unridden in its entirety.

I leave Islamabad, past the old colonial British hill station of Muree, I wish I had a pith helmet and prehaps a good moustache, I have to settle for my Shoei motorcycle helmet and a decidedly patchy attempt at a beard, but i feel decidedly superior to the locals. Joining the KKH proper the mighty Indus river, cascades through the valley as the road passes through multiple landslides which have removed the roads surface, the mountain range desparately trying to claim back the roadside.

With kids selling Apricots from the side of the road and also throwing a few large rocks at me for good measure, more and more majestic white peaks come into view, towering over the green and forested, lush lower valleys. Soon I find myself at the crossroads of the Hindu Kush, The Karakorum and Himalayan ranges. I stand on the exact spot by the memorial for a few minutes expecting something mystical to happen; I just get rather cold and begin to realise how knackering the twisty, truck ridden road has been. Riding through a sand storm, across the mountain plains, I decide to rest in Gilgit, home of wild games of Polo and the way to China. Its taken around 17 hours of solid riding to get this far across two long days covering only around 400km. The people are blond and fair here, some with stunning green eyes and have nothing cultually in common with the Punjabi’s, and Sindhi’s who sometimes share some traits with their Indian brothers in the personal space department. It seems my only Urdu is no longer useful; ‘Please don’t touch’

 With the signs now in both English, Chinese and Russian i see the first marker for Beijing. It’s marked as only 5000km by road from my exact point, around ten days easy ride across the good fast Chinese highways, it feels a little crushing and cheating that I don’t have a Chinese visa. It’s so close yet so far, i am a (big) stone’s throw away from Beijing and far far closer to my home, to Europe. Beijing felt so foreign, so distant on my last visit there, yet the atmostphere, the food, the signposts make it feel down the road. The Himalaya is only just beginning and already i am blown away.

It’s two am in the morning, and i am walking through an empty university with four heavily armed men, a sleepy man who seems rather annoyed at being woken up and a moustachio’ed police chief of  the town of Semirom in Central Iran. It’s probably obvious already that its been a long day and lying on a scrap of carpet between tables, chairs and a blackboard covered with poorly constructed English sentences, i throw my sleeping bag down and fall instantly asleep.

Leaving Esfahan that morning was fantastic. As the green scrub and swamp land of the North-West gave way to the golden mountain, deserts and tundra of the central and southern regions the scenary finally starts to rival that of Central Europe and the Middle-East. Stopping in the small town of Semirom, this seems to be just what i’ve been looking for. A town with an almost Turkish joie-de-vivre, with a small few shops, a few small characters and a large waterfall at its centre point. Snapping off the helmet, and grabbing out the camera, i begin shooting away as usual in my pursuit of photographic nirvana. A couple of boys filter past, an old lady sweeps a path, my helmet, gloves and boots are stolen, the mosque’s call to prayer goes out. Wait a minute.

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The customs office at the Sero border crossing, looks like it could well have been built and furnished by the late Shah’s grandma. There is a colonial grandeur about the building, the rows of ripped leather seats, heavy wooden furniture and a good number of partitioned areas, gates, offices for the necessary pomp and beurocracy. A few skew pictures of various ayatollahs sit liberally plastered over the remaining wall space.

A large poster reads ‘Down with USA, Down with Israel’ and I sit contemplating the obvious grammatical error, while papers are shuffled and my bike’s papers are scribbled hastily into Farsi. After a quick poke around my boxes, an english lesson and an Ipod testing session, it is announced that i am free to go. It is getting dark and i am starting to get desperate to escape the border post, to find somewhere to camp. Stopping at a black marketeer money changer, i can see the fields of the North of Iran beckoning to me in the sunset.

Its pitch black and now ten at night. I am back in the customs office, counting hundreds of tatty bits of papers with a one master Khomeini plastered over them. I am trying to avoid getting screwed (too badly), and the argument over exchange rates has now lasted over an hour and the whole customs office if now involved. Everyone is shouting, throwing bits of money around, bashing at calculators and counting bills. Eventually i manage to pass through the border gate, with around a kilo of extra ballast. I have changed not more than one hundred and fifty pounds worth of Turkish lira, but while i have a pile of bills feel like i should be prehaps a kilo heavier. Nobody seemed to actually know the exchange rate for the country less than 100 metres away; or no-one would admit to it.

The nearest town is over fifty kilometres away, and with no street lights every thing is completely black. The local hotels in Orumiyeh all profess to be full (for smelly bikers, with smelly dirty things) or $30. Stopping to ask a policeman directions outside a small fairy-lit teahouse, all hell breaks loose. A large crowd forms and  starts shouting, pointing in all directions, smiling, cheering, singing and generally being a nuisance. Its now nearly twelve at night and i start shouting ‘Tabriz’ and banging my map. I don’t care about driving in the dark, i’m not staying at the funfare. Again the throngs begin pointing, squabbling, laughing and cheering and eventually i start the bike, rev the engine to disperse the crowd and fire off on a compass reference. Pulling into a farmer’s olive grove, i pull out my sleeping bag and climb in. I hear dogs barking all around me, but am too tired to care. Using my money as a pillow i try to settle down to sleep; it begins to rain. I don’t even have a kebab.