Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus (A GeoEx eBook)

Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

A Passage to Pakistan: My First Adventure with GeoEx

April 11, Silk Route Lodge, Gulmit: The adventures intensified today as we headed for Gulmit and the hot showers and hearty food other travelers said we would find at the Silk Route Lodge. The journey north was uneventful—waterfalls dousing the highway, rivers flooding the road, skitterish rocks, and precipitous drops have all become expected by now—until we reached an avalanche about 10 minutes from Gulmit. The avalanche had buried the road long enough ago that a plow had already cut a corridor through its twenty-foot-deep drifts, but our steel-nerved driver, Ali Muhammad, feared the van would lose traction on the icy path and sit there, sandwiched in the snow, a fat target for a second avalanche. So Asad set out on foot for Gulmit to get a tractor that could pull the van through, or some transport that could take us from the other side of the avalanche to the lodge, and Ali backed the van up to a point on the road that looked reasonably secure. And we sat and waited. Waiting for an avalanche or rockslide to sweep us into oblivion quickly lost its appeal, so after a while, I decided to set out on foot for Gulmit, too. There wasn’t much chance of making a wrong turn—the nearest intersection was about four hours away. Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch went my feet, quickly along the snow-plowed path, then slowly when I reached the other side. There, beyond sight of the van, the notion of solitude took on a whole new, almost otherworldly dimension. It was just me and the mountains, and I tried to imagine what the traders and missionaries and adventurers who had wandered this way before me had felt. Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch. If I walk long enough, I thought, I’ll reach the Chinese border. And if I keep walking after that, eventually this same road will take me to Kashgar, where right now wild-eyed mountain

men are sizing up camels and crockery, bartering for boots and broadcloth. Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch. This is one of the most remote and desolate places I’ve ever been, I thought. If I were traveling alone, I would probably think I had come to the end of the Earth. Then I took out my tape recorder and said: “It’s not just that it’s an inhospitable environment—which it certainly is—but also that you sense the forces of nature and time grinding on all around you, and you feel like a grain of sand on the slopes of one of the mountains.” My voice seemed like an intruder, and I stopped—and listened. The silence was so overpowering, so absolute, that it was almost like a vacuum of sound. Instead of sound, enormous waves of energy emanated from the mountains all around, so strong that I had to sit down. Perhaps Marco Polo felt these same waves, I thought. Perhaps he called his fellow adventurers to a halt in this very spot, and sat on this very rock, and pondered—just like me— what an insignificant piece he was in the world’s vast puzzle, how easily he could be bent, or lost, or simply worn away. April 12, Serena Lodge, Gilgit: After a revitalizing night at the Silk Route Lodge—where the meals were indeed excellent, although the hot water ran out before I could run into the shower—we returned by jeep to the avalanche and walked through it to our van. Then we rode south for about an hour—until we were stopped by another avalanche. This one had smothered the road like an overturned sack of sugar—a sack of sugar in which each granule was the size of a bowling ball. This avalanche was so recent that it had not yet been plowed, but somehow the wizardly Asad had heard about it before we left the Silk Route Lodge, and had called his office in Gilgit to

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