Road blog

Children on the way to Minapin blocking the road.









Hello!

First of all, thank you for the kind reactions to the last entry, super!

So it is possible to update now that I've reached Kashgar, it's just not possible to upload photos.. This is going to be a bit like watching a movie without sound - not very nice - bu

t in order not to forget too much of the road and its inhabitants, I'll write my story down anyway.

Road block. Blockades and rock sliding, that's what people talk about on the Karakoram dirt track. The humanitarian disaster that has hit the country to the south of Gilgit is no longer the topic of discussion, it's: how far is it to the next river, is there a cable across, what's it like on the Chinese side, will there be busses? I was in contact with the Dutch reporter who covered the story of the stolen bike back in May and he kept me up to date on what was going on Khyber-Pastunkhwa, the Punjab and Sindh, which put things into perspective. But the shortage of commodities after 3 weeks of blockades became noticeable. Especially when I could not cycle and was dependent on motorised transport.



First there was the Hunza Lake that formed itself earlier this year when a complete mountain side collapsed into the valley, stopping the glacier water that was coming down in ever greater amounts. By now there's 25 kilometre clear blue lake in between Karimabad and Passu. It definitely has a serene beauty to it, but that serenity gets sinister when you see bits of village sticking out of it. The federal government did a poor job evacuating the people that live there and when you assess the situation at the moment, you'd still think they are not really on the ball. A 25 kilometre lake that is kept in place by sand and rock; sand and rock that moves as it does everywhere in the mountains along with the constant stream of water and wind, it's a matter of time before it will come down. Ban Ki Moon has called the flooding a tsunami in slow motion, but when this 25 kilometre lake comes down it won't be in slow motion. It will be a wall bulldozing down, wiping out everything on its course. If it goes unmanaged. They've dug a canal that should release the stored water bit by bit, but as I wrote before, the rocks move constantly and when that crucial balancing point is reached it might go very sudden.



Like it did a couple of years ago, when another lake was unleashed upon the valleys downstream. Accounts speak of a Sikh regiment camping hundreds kilometres south being taken by surprise and not surviving it.

People cross by boat or helicopter, which used to be free of cost and a government service, but now that there's no diesel left, and the petrol supply is also growing thin, the government has stopped it's transport connection and a few private entrepreneurs remain, and they will charge you. The engine of the boat I used broke and we had to be pulled across by another boat called the 'Karakoram Express'. A 2,5 hour ride took us 4 in the end, but it was interesting to make it across this part of the mountains with the "express" boat.

The second engine that took me across a block was the bus from Sost to Tashkurgan, the blockade here being Chinese legislation that prohibits cyclists to cycle across, probably because they don't want you messing about in frontier territory, with turns to the left to Afghanistan - the Wakhan Corridor - and Tajikistan, and to the right to off-limit mountainous areas and perhaps Tibet if you are long-winded. Sost is 80 kilometre before 'point zero' (yes another reset) which consists of a big modern Chinese gate and a muddy stretch of road. This being the very heart of the 'Pakistan-China Friendship Road', I thought it was a bit lame that this bit is of such poor quality.

After the Babusar Pass I got a thing for passes and I did not want to miss this part of the road, so I cycled from Passu to Dhee, 50 kilometre from the top, where I could stay with the guys from the Khunjerab National Park (nice meal in the evening; wake up service (KNOCKNOCKNOCK) in the morning). Then I cycled up leaving most of my kit, only to return around two. I collected my stuff, was invited to another meal in the small kitchen/common room and got back to Sost where I took the bus to China the next morning. Standing at the top, 4700 metres high, with glaciers tumbling down around you, I renamed the place Koenjerab.



My idea for 'road blog' was to show you the people who are working very hard to transform the dirt track into a highway again, but for this you have to be patient. Now I'll just say that at hard to reach places Pakistani men and Chinese men and women work their fingers to the bones to cut and hammer rocks into shape so that walls can be built all along the landslide prone areas, which means almost everywhere.


(Picture: a Chinese girl preparing the chickens at 6:40 in the morning.)

Somebody told me that the initial Karakoram Highway was built by German engineers and that they did a fine job, but that the road wasn't very resistant to the constant stream of rubble and water. A road through the Karakoram, which means 'black crumbling rock' in Turkic, isn't the same as one through the Black Forest. So now that there's the need for a wall it's Chinese contractors doing the job.




The Chinese have a habbit to call everything they do in Pakistan, friendship. Friendship stands one on one with business here. The Pakistan-Sino Business Tunnel, the Pak-China Business Road. As soon as that road's done it will be a line of Chinese containers snaking down onto the plain. Pakistan is a country with natural resources aplenty, but it doesn't use them to produce much. If you'd take away all that comes from China and the West you'd have mud and stone houses, apricots and nuclear weapons. I'm exaggerating, but that's more or less what it feels like.

Saying this I realise that I was actually caught off guard by the advanced computer systems at the Pakistani check-out. I'd scribbled in a few extra days on my handwritten visa extention to make room for Khunjerab, and when I saw the computer registration I thought it would get ugly. Luckily they only use the system to create a new exit file.

When I got to Kashkurgan, the place where you log on to China that has at least a couple of hundred hotel rooms, I miraculously cycled straight into the one room with 3 other cyclists, doubling the total amount of cyclists I met in Pakistan during 5 months. When I got to Kashgar after two days cycling through the Pamirs I got to a hostel where there are more cyclists than I've seen during 13 months. A 60+ French couple, a British/Canadian family with trailers, a French journalist with solar panels on the back and an electromotor propelling him on (florianbailly.com), two Dutch, two Germans, a famous Israeli (3 years on the road, touching three continents; "Don't go to Ethiopia, the landscape is average and the people aren't worth it.."), a 19 year old French guy who got robbed at knife-point, a Polish guy who collects Uygur knives and hopes to cycle into Pakistan with three daggers in his luggage, another French guy (many French!), an Asian cyclist who came and went.. Many stories.

The pedal story got a last chapter at the Karakul Lake where for the fourth time I ended up with an iron pin instead of a smooth surface. 200 kilometre from Kashgar with nothing else but yurts around me and no feeling for the Chinese Yuan yet, I ended up paying 250 Yuan to a guy who happened to ride into me when I was setting up camp at one of the sister lakes. He helped me making the change, screwing his worn down plastic pedal onto my bike. I thought rupees. I thought 2,5 Euros to get me across is a bargain, and I felt bad for molesting his bike at a place as remote as this. I offered him to grease his chain and off he went, with 250 Yuan. 20 minutes later another guy passed by my tent asking if I wanted to change my pedal with him and I friendly declined. This is the point where I should have smelled the rat, but I didn't and dozed off into a long and pleasant sleep, dreaming of cycling comfortably into Kashgar the next day.



When I woke up it hit me at once. 250 Yuan is about 30 euros; is probably more than most people around here make in a month's time. Some Chinese farmers don't even make that much profit in a year. It has been like this time and time again, It takes one mistake to shock me into the new currency, and then I know.

I just arrived a couple of weeks too late in Kashgar to see the old city which is wiped from the face of the earth to be replaced by new buildings of which some are slightly reminiscent of the old ones. It's a pity and many tourists complain about the rapid pace at which the Chinese government modernises the place. "Everything looks the same", is what you get a lot. To me it still feels very sophisticated compared to the situation in Pakistan and I am enjoying the fascilities （a refrigerator with cold beers at the entrance of the hostel for instance）. Sinkiang to grease the unwinding, and then in a couple of days on to Sichuan where I will start cycling again.


(Picture: the Pamir range that I saw reflected on my way to Kashgar.)