+43 699 131 88 770
tour@travel-with-henry.com
+43 699 131 88 770
tour@travel-with-henry.com +43 699 131 88 770
tour@travel-with-henry.comI set out on this crossing of the Himalayas to experience positive things in beautiful landscapes, among friendly and relaxed people, cultures and religions of different mountain regions, to personally take on one or the other sporting challenge and also mountain adventures, in order to bring home good pictures and exciting stories at the end of this journey. What I definitely did not want was to deal with the current daily politics of Pakistan, with terrorism and violence. Unfortunately, the events during my (relatively short) stay in the north of the country took an unimaginably brutal and inhuman turn, so that I unfortunately had no choice but to return to Islamabad early and tell more about the daily madness in Pakistan than about the mountains at the western end of the Himalayas.
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It had taken 18 hours by bus to get from Rawalpindi, the neighbouring city directly bordering Islamabad, to Raikot Bridge – the starting point for the planned circumnavigation of Nanga Parbat – located in the northern territories of Pakistan between Chillas and Gilgit. Most of the distance along the Karakoram Highway (KKH) was covered overnight. But sleep was out of the question, because as a foreigner I had to get off the bus every hour to register at the checkpoints of the police or the army.
With the circumnavigation of the German-Austrian “Mountain of Destiny” I would have reached the westernmost of the 8000m peaks in the Himalayas and would have completed my crossing of this mountain range – if it had not been for the fact that in the next three to four months those parts of the Great Himalaya Trail in Nepal had to be completed which could not be walked due to the premature onset of the monsoon in spring.
At the bridge, several jeeps were already waiting to take tourists along a valley to Tato, a small village below the base camp from which Hermann Buhl from Kitzbühl had succeeded in 1953 in his first ascent of Nanga Parbat. This valley, with all its lodges and restaurants, the jeeps, porters and carrying donkeys, is under the influence of two families who, due to agreements, charge completely exorbitant prices for their services. As I was not willing to pay the same amount for a 10 km drive as a Pakistani primary school teacher earns per month, I had to walk to Fairy Meadows, a summer camp for shepherds and tourists with several stone and wooden huts and two lodges along a road. From this camp it was possible to reach the slightly higher situated shepherds’ settlement Bayal (Beel) within an hour – my actual starting point for the visit to the base camp situated on the north face and the subsequent circumnavigation of the entire mountain range.
On three different days I had to climb up to the base camp to really get to see the Nanga Parbat in good weather – twice I was on my own and could therefore cover the easy, but partly very steep route in 2 ½ hours up and down. On the second day I picked up some Pakistani tourists – a psychotherapist with his adult sons from the southern megacity Karachi, real lowland Pakistanis – and their guide, who left unprepared and totally overstrained, so we needed 11 hours for the same way.
It was from this base camp that the Kitzbühler Hermann Buhl started in July 1953,
to be the first to reach the summit of the “Killer Mountain” with an almost superhuman performance (he had been on the road for 41 hours in total) – more than ten German and Austrian mountaineers had lost their lives trying to make a first ascent up to that point. A grave and memorial in the base camp commemorates two mountaineers from Germany and South Tyrol – one had an accident in 1935, the other only recently in 2008.
Actually, I only wanted to spend one day in Bayal, but while gathering information about the exact route for the circumnavigation I unfortunately had to learn that at the moment it is by no means possible to manage this route on your own. By crossing the first pass, one gets into an area called Bazeri Indus Kohistan for three days before reaching the safe Diamir Base Camp on the west side of the mountain massif below the infamous Mazeno Pass. For months there had been ethical riots there with several deaths, criminal gangs would take advantage of this situation and attack or even kidnap anyone who is alone and not directly from the region, was explained to me by the only police officer in Bayal. Even the people from his village only went over the pass when absolutely necessary – and even then only in groups. I had waited two days to put together such a group with the help of the policeman. But although I was willing to pay almost double the usual market price for guides, nobody dared to tackle these three days with me. At first I was not sure if I was not only told another fairy tale on this trip to make some money with an ignorant tourist and to raise the price.
But the people here in the north in the Pakistani Himalayas behaved somehow different than in the Indian and Nepalese mountains further east. At that time, I had no idea whether it was just the region or also the time they lived in. Men looked dark and gloomy, acted with feelings of hostility, hiding behind their long beards, practiced the Muslim faith in a conspicuously orthodox way and when they were greeted, there was no response – although tourism was the only source of income in this region and they should be used to foreigners. There were no women to be seen, but if you wanted to take pictures in the villages, you were kept from doing so. But the most depressing thing was the disappearing laughter. Nobody showed a smile or had laughed during my stay in the mountains, not even the usually so happy children in the mountain villages. This behaviour was at least very strange and had caused an undefined, unpleasant feeling in me for the first time after 4 ½ months. In addition – since this far excessive amount of money was no incentive for possible companions – it was clear that I really could not and actually did not want to start my tour over the pass. The probability of losing the photo or mountain equipment was obviously higher than usual – the risk was not there because losing the equipment would have meant the end of my trip.
So once again there is a change of plan: Back to Raikot Bridge, from there by jeep to the back of Nanga Parbat to Astor, to get along the Rupal River to Herrligkoffer Base Camp and then further to Diamir Base Camp. The back side, i.e. the area around the southern flank of this 8000m high mountain was considered peaceful and quiet.
Since hiking along roads is not one of my favourite activities, I agreed to pick up my new Pakistani mountain mates on the way back to Raikot in Fairy Meadows to share a jeep to the bridge with them. Three Australian embassy staff members who were also in the camp had just received disturbing news from Islamabad via satellite phone when I arrived – they were ordered by the ambassador to return to the consulate immediately, but were not allowed to travel by land and were escorted along the KKH to Gilgit to be flown out by plane. A very bloody attack had taken place in our immediate vicinity, more detailed information was not available at that time – only rumors.
“Shangri-La” is the name of the only hotel at the Raikot Bridge directly opposite the local police station, our refuge until the next noon. Even by Pakistani standards, this hostel represented a perfect combination of inflated prices and below-average quality and had none of the myth and flair of the legendary place of the same name in the Tibetan Himalayas. In contrast to previous days in the higher camps, it was very hot here in this narrow, karstic valley on the banks of the Indus and, despite the extraordinarily dry mountain slopes, humid.
In this mountainous region between Hindu Kush, Karakorum and Himalaya with its distinctive Kalashnikov culture, such a restriction of the freedom of movement for the next seven to ten days is certainly a sensible measure – only unfortunately it was extremely unpleasant for me because it affected exactly those areas to which I wanted to continue on the same day. On the other hand, I was glad not to be in Astor already – my Pakistani friends spoke perfect English, could explain the situation and background to me in detail and I could react appropriately. Eleven of the victims came from Astor – I would inevitably have been stuck there without receiving any precise information about the current situation and would have had difficulty getting on due to the curfews and road blocks. In the Shiite extended families on the spot, everyone was forced to have a relative among the terror victims, which leads to collective rage, grief and hysterical mass protests in which weapons are carried in unison. It is easy to catch a stray bullet or stumble over a bomb even if you are not involved.
The actual background for this act lies in the different religious views of the two dominant Muslim denominations, the Sunnis and Shiites – roughly comparable to Christian Catholics and Protestants (see Wikipedia). As in the entire Islamic world, about 85% Sunnis and 15% Shiites live in Pakistan, with Chillas being a purely Sunni community, while further north in Gilgit, Astor and Naggar mainly Shiites live together with a Sunni minority.
One knows the people behind these bloody deeds. Regionally there are two Sunni clergymen, two mullahs – one in Gilgit and the other in Chillas – who in their hate sermons called for violence against Shiites until the first bomb exploded. But the real mastermind behind this recently escalated series of violence is located further south in the state of Punjab. Also a mullah, released only six months ago after ten years in prison to support the local government in regional elections – which, by the way, was successful. It is an open secret in Pakistan that he was given the condition that if he absolutely must practise terror, then he should do so outside his own province.
Although a democratically elected government represents the country to the outside world, the nuclear power Pakistan is a repressive police and military state, financed with the support of US military aid, in which the real rulers sit in barracks. The Taliban movement, founded in Pakistan and financed with billions of Arab oil, has been fighting the Afghan government in Kabul since 2002 with the participation of the Pakistani secret service ISI from the Afghan-Pakistan border area. While after 9/11 Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network Al-Quaida systematically came under fire all over the world in the war on terror, the core of this organization was able to withdraw without any pressure into its Pakistani headquarters and reorganize again and again. Human rights in this country end where the sphere of influence of the military and the intelligence network begins. It is a minor offense, for far less offences, to go for years without trial in a
military prison or even disappear forever into a sand pit. If one seriously wanted to stop the terror, the responsible people would have been out of circulation long ago. But as long as the military and ISI at home continue to systematically destabilize the civilian government in order to strengthen their own position of power and attack the neighboring countries Afghanistan and India with violence and terror, these fundamentalist terrorist groups are being used as an instrument for their own purposes and both civilian and military victims are being accepted from their own ranks.
Foreigners have so far been as little affected by these attacks as have members of other religions, which is why all four of us did not have to fear serving as immediate targets. My companions from Karachi had parked their own car with chauffeur at this hotel, so they were mobile, independent of public transport and fortunately had a free seat available. Just as we were discussing how we could proceed further, perhaps to get to the other side of Nanga Parbat or to the Hunza Valley, the television news reported that that same morning an air base in the town of Attoka, northwest of Islamabad, was attacked by Taliban terrorists, killing 15 people and destroying aircraft. Less than ten minutes later, there was another terrible piece of news. In Karachi, a bomb exploded in a local bus in the Shiite part of the city, also killing 22 people and injuring 70. Obviously there were a number of well-organized terrorist acts in Pakistan on that day, it was, so to speak, “big fight day”, for which the Taliban finally took responsibility via television ten minutes later and at the same time made it clear that this was only the beginning, further attacks would follow.
A message that suddenly changed our personal security situation. Apparently there was a terrorist “joint venture” here in the north, in which local Sunni terrorist cells acted together with the internationally positioned Taliban, at least tolerated by the military and ISI. And as has often been proven in the past, they did not stop at foreigners either. If a tourist had been in one of these buses, he would at least have been kidnapped. The threat scenario had changed for me as a result – if at first you “only” had to be careful not to get between the fronts by chance or carelessly, you had to walk around as a potential target.
Change of plan from the change of plan: The three Pakistanis were now scared shitless, they wanted to get home as fast as possible. They had already spent their whole lives in this violence-seeking and restrictive society of power politics, Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism, and knew from the regularly repeated reports how quickly it could happen to be harmed as a bystander in this country. For me, it was rather a diffuse, uncomfortable “aha-experience” – being surrounded by targeted violence for the first time in the middle of it all, and not just on television – meant a completely new experience that was difficult to classify. The otherwise so successful strategy on all my travels, first of all to lean back, slow down, watch how things develop and then react, no longer worked in this environment. All the locals and also the policemen advised us to go south immediately, the continuation of the journey or the longer stay in “wild wild north-east” would have been too dangerous at this time. The decision to return to Islamabad by car was made quickly and unanimously – for which we would need two full days.
I was very happy to be taken along. As there were no buses and no other possibilities to get to the airport because of the road and curfew in Gilgit, it was to be feared that we would be stuck indefinitely in a grim, filthy and dusty hotel in a village with five houses somewhere in the middle of the Pakistani nowhere.
These mugged buses had left the KKH prematurely and had chosen a remote, alternative route on badly trafficked mountain roads through the Kaghan Valley to avoid the very danger of an attack along the KKH, which is known to be far more dangerous. Unfortunately it had not been of any use to them. We also chose this route, because according to logic there should be so many policemen and military on this very road because of the attack, so it seemed to be the safest way.
Only 24 hours had passed since the attack and we were standing at that spot, directly above the blood dried in the sand. Remnants of tissue, scattered small belongings that had fallen out of the victims’ pockets and randomly arranged dark spots created an even more depressing atmosphere.
It was more by chance that we had to stop there, as a commotion between a group of younger men and several police officers prevented us from continuing our journey. The security forces checked every passing vehicle. Since the occupants of the car in front of us could not identify themselves, they were not allowed to pass and were sent back – which obviously did not suit the gentlemen. A short scuffle and a few minor fights led to the demonstrative loading and unlocking of the Kalashnikovs. The nerves were bare in this area. The police, themselves frequent targets of attacks, had all the rights. Tahir, the psychotherapist from our car, intervened, calmed the situation and finally made the hotheads turn back. When asked what would have happened if he hadn’t intervened, he said – in the original quote: “The police were about to take the guys and beat the shit out of them.
Only 24 hours had passed since the attack and we were standing at that spot, directly above the blood dried in the sand. Remnants of tissue, scattered small belongings that had fallen out of the victims’ pockets and randomly arranged dark spots created an even more depressing atmosphere.
It was more by chance that we had to stop there, as a commotion between a group of younger men and several police officers prevented us from continuing our journey. The security forces checked every passing vehicle. Since the occupants of the car in front of us could not identify themselves, they were not allowed to pass and were sent back – which obviously did not suit the gentlemen. A short scuffle and a few minor fights led to the demonstrative loading and unlocking of the Kalashnikovs. The nerves were bare in this area. The police, themselves frequent targets of attacks, had all the rights. Tahir, the psychotherapist from our car, intervened, calmed the situation and finally made the hotheads turn back. When asked what would have happened if he hadn’t intervened, he said – in the original quote: “The police were about to take the guys and beat the shit out of them.”
The line between necessary caution and paranoia is blurred, so doubts arose daily whether this restrictive self-limitation was necessary at all and not just an overreaction to what was experienced. People react hysterically to such events, tend to be overly cautious – perhaps I had only been infected by the constant reminders. During my first stay, before continuing on into the mountains, the security situation was not a bit better – only, I had not noticed anything of all this madness and therefore I could move freely and impartially among the people. The feeling of being endangered in any way had never arisen.
The regular look at the morning news, however, put things right again, dispelled the doubts about the meaning of one’s own actions relatively quickly and soberly. Not a day went by without a violent incident in Pakistan – whether it was American drone attacks on Taliban positions, attacks by Taliban terrorists on military and civilian facilities, or an angry crowd that almost lynched a family here in the city because the 11-year-old daughter of the house accidentally burned two pages of the Koran in the kitchen stove. The International Red Cross had ceased its activities in all parts of the country except Islamabad and dismissed hundreds of local employees because staff were repeatedly abducted, tortured and then killed. The pages of the English-language daily newspapers were filled with lists of all current acts of violence and reactions to them, interrupted only by photos of the lifeless faces of killed terrorists and their victims with the call to identify the men. The US State Department warned its compatriots through the local press of the currently escalating danger – one should avoid unnecessary stays in the open, but it would be better to leave the country. There was no room for information of Austrian format á la Baumeister Lugner and the psychosomatic digestive problems of Mausi and Katzi. However, the madness seemed to be the program and there seemed to be no end in the foreseeable future.