Passage Through Gilgit
A friend pointed out Chinese men surveying the line for widening the Karakoram Highway that provides access to China through Pakistan’s Northern Areas across the Khunjerab Pass…
JOHN ELLIOTT
The crowd lining up to fly to Gilgit from Islamabad’s airport one morning a few weeks ago looked rather large for the small Fokker F-128 I’d expected to board. I’d read in July that these ageing planes had been grounded after a crash near Multan that killed 45 people, but assumed that this was nothing more than a political subterfuge—how else could one get to places that can’t take PIA’s 737s and until the new French ATRs arrive? The answer, to my amazement, was a large camouflaged Pakistan Air Force C-130 Hercules transport—not exactly a good image for tourism! We all sat in long lines of red plastic webbing seats, stretching the length of the plane. As we took off, pipes and tubes in the roof hissed and gurgled with such noise and massive vibrations that it was impossible to tell when the wheels had left the ground. Large plastic bottles of soft drinks and trays of basic snacks were passed along the rows, vaguely supervised by two PIA hostesses. The good news was that the flight was on time; the bad news that I missed the brilliant views of snow-clad peaks, including Nanga Parbat, that made the old Fokker flights, weaving through the mountains, one of the most dramatic in the world.
In Gilgit, a friend pointed out Chinese men wearing bright orange-red trousers shopping in the bazaar. It turned out they’re surveying the line for widening the 800-km Karakoram Highway (KKH) that was built with Chinese help in the ’70s to provide access to China through Pakistan’s Northern Areas (when the road is not blocked by landslides) and across the Khunjerab Pass. It’s a spectacular journey I did 20 years ago, travelling through the pass almost alongside 26,000-ft peaks, to the Chinese military town of Tashkurgan (where martial music apparently still blares out from lamp posts) and the historic city of Kashgar. The highway was crumbling at the edges even in 1986, so it’s no surprise that it’s now in a serious state of disrepair. The plan is to widen and repair it and also to build a 150-km diversion near Chilas so that the existing road can be flooded by a new Indus dam.
Once one’s out of the main dusty and not very exciting town of Gilgit, the Northern Areas and adjacent valleys of the nwfp are poor but peaceful, far away in mood from the stresses of politics and terrorism. The people of the Hindu Kush despair of their nation’s leaders, whether they come from the army or partially democratic parties. I heard no one say that Benazir Bhutto (“She’s crazy,” said one hotel owner) or Nawaz Sharif (“bloody b.st..d”) should come back to rule. The most thoughtful scorn the world’s preoccupation with the US-led oil and gas wars that have brought turmoil, devastation and economic disaster to other countries and, since 9/11, ruined the area’s tourism due to vastly exaggerated security fears. Some groups of mostly East Asians follow a Buddhist trail up the KKH and there are a few backpackers, but other tourists have virtually vanished.
Scorn for the US is so great here (and in Islamabad, as I discovered later) that there is a widespread refusal to accept that Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. President Bush or some Jewish conspiracy is blamed instead. A widely-held, though not unanimous view, is that General Musharraf should stay in power, not only on the “devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” precept, but because some development has taken place along with a diluted form of democracy. “They are all corrupt and now the army has got its hands in the till for a second time—first Zia and now this lot” was a widely held view of a people who, in a sane world, would live in a largely autonomous region, with extensive powers devolved from their national capital.
The valleys are a sea of tall yellowing and green poplar trees, some in small organised forests, others scattered across the landscape and planted along mountainside irrigation channels (to save them from crumbling).They bring colour to the otherwise gaunt vistas of massive bare khaki-brown mountains, topped with 20,000-ft snow-capped peaks. The poplars have been encouraged by aid agencies such as the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme to provide a profitable and useful cash crop, on a cycle of about six years, as well as for giving protection against soil erosion.
In Chitral’s Gol National Park, foreign trophy hunters pay an unbelievable $50,000-plus to shoot one Markhor, a species of rare wild goat protected by CITES (a UN convention). Pakistan is allowed to license hunters to kill six of the goats a year, and two are allotted to the Chitral mountains. The hunting began a few years ago with local people, followed by foreign tourists, culling wild boar, and the sport then spread. The idea is that funds raised go to protecting the surviving few hundred Markhor and benefit villagers in the area, but inevitably a large proportion of the money is siphoned off by officials, and there is nothing to stop the hunters (and their guides) killing more than their single Markhor. I asked a local businessman whether the forest officials were as corrupt as in India. “Worse,” he replied.
Outlook India
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