Wish I was there
11 December 2014
We eventually did leave Karghalik but rather late in the day and were benighted at a place called Mazar. It was midnight when we arrived and the village was asleep. In the light of the full moon I could see about two dozen lorries parked in an open lot and my guide told me they were all heading for Tibet. The road forked at Mazar; ours went straight down southward and the Tibet road veered off to the east. My guide also said that his company ran tours from Karghalik to Lhasa.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, China, Moola Valley, Trekking
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Journey’s End
24 February 2014
For the first time in our days in the mountains, the morning dawned clear and bright without a speck of cloud in the sky. However, shortly after sunrise, a blue skein was perceptible all around. There was no breeze but it was bitterly cold despite the fact that our height, since descending into the Shaksgam, had remained uniform at about 3900 metres. Without the usual gusting wind, taking down and packing the tents was still an ordeal because their surfaces were crinkly with rime.
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| Chhogho Ri, the Great Mountain of the Baltis and the Chogor of the Uighur and Kirghiz people of Xinjiang. At a little before eleven in the morning when I became the first Pakistani to see its north face, the mountain was blue-clad. This image was only for the record |
Immediately after striking camp, we rode the camels thrice in quick succession to cross narrow channels each nearly a metre and a half deep. About us shingle slopes altered with river terraces their verges sliced as if by the surgeon’s knife or grey-brown slopes of stark rock. In front, Kindik Tash seemed to recede as we approached it. Telling us to keep to the rocky slope along the left bank, Seet now rode his lead camel and was continually crossing and re-crossing clear blue channels.
Read more »Labels: Books, China, Muztagh Pass Expedition, The Apricot Road to Yarkand
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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To the Navel of the Earth
17 February 2014
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| River terraces sliced as if by the surgeon’s
knife was a description first given by Eric Shipton during his 1937 Shaksgam
Expedition. It is still true. Because of negligible precipitation, there is
little erosion and the verges of the Shaksgam Gorge keep their shape |
The height was beginning to tell, and the pass seemed to recede the nearer I approached it. One rise after another I surmounted, thinking it would prove the summit, but there was always another beyond. The valley was wide and open, and the going perfectly easy, leading sometimes over rounded boulders, but more often loose soil.
With Wahab and Seet slowly bringing up the camels, I hurried on across the stony ground of Chonkor Utik to the chevron of converging ridges just below the great slanting wall of snow to the left. The pass itself was three false crests and two and a quarter hours from our camp. The Surukwat, never a mighty river in its short life to its junction with the Yarkand near Ilica, was but a piddling spill here. It got ever sparser as I neared the pass.
Read more »Labels: Books, China, Muztagh Pass Expedition, The Apricot Road to Yarkand
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Into the Mountains
10 February 2014
Leaving Karghalik after four in the afternoon we entered a boring landscape shrouded in a pall of dust that settled thick on one’s person. So pervasive it was that its heaviness choked the nose. An hour out, we passed Kokyar – Blue Earth. But for the two remarkable circular sand dunes that looked like huge mounds of grey pudding sitting to the east side of the road, it was scarcely a noteworthy village. Nothing was even vaguely blue about Kokyar, not even the sky.
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| The jalebi bends in the Kuday Dawan. This area is utterly desiccated because of little rain |
One hundred and fourteen kilometres from Karghalik we were in the heart of a pass that Wahab said was the Kuday Dawan after a village of the same name on its south side.* In the failing light, we saw below us a series of hairpin bends that may have looked pretty were they not muffled by the thick haze of dust. But here in the dusty landscape utterly without tree cover, they could best be described as bleak. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of the Jalebi Bends of Zanskar in Indian Kashmir – only; the latter place was somewhat the greener.
Read more »Labels: Books, China, Muztagh Pass Expedition, The Apricot Road to Yarkand
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The long wait in Xinjiang
03 February 2014
Ever since I first heard the name back in the mid 1980s, I was mystified by it: why should Kashgar, a few thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean, have a hotel called Seamen’s? It was actually Seman (with a nasal ending) which ended up wrongly spelled in some shoddy guide book and thus passed into tourists’ usage. There are actually two of the same name, both multi-storeyed, facing each other across a wide street. Taking a room in the older one which has the old Russian Consulate in its backyard, I called Keyoum Mohammad of Kashgar Mountaineering Adventures with whom I had corresponded from Lahore.
Completely bald, round-faced and chubby Keyoum brought along a young man with a jutting jaw and eyes that crinkled into slits when he smiled. My trekking permit, said Keyoum, was expected any day now. But I had telephoned him from Skardu three weeks earlier to tell him when I would reach Kashgar. Wasn’t that time enough for the permit to be organised? Permits normally took only a couple of days to be processed, he said, and though delays were not unknown, there was no reason to worry if mine had still not come through. Keyoum said he had brought along young Wahab, my interpreter and guide, so that we could get to know each other. Beginning the next morning, Wahab was to gainfully employ the waiting time showing me the sights of Kashgar.
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| The old quarter of Kashgar as seen from the
north. Strangely, pictures dating back to the 1880s do not show a town on a
high mound, but one flush with the flat ground. The Chinese government is
encouraging Uighur people who live in this part of town to abandon it and move
to modern apartment blocks in the newer areas of Kashgar. Sooner than later,
the old town will be abandoned and razed to the ground |
Labels: Books, China, Muztagh Pass Expedition, The Apricot Road to Yarkand
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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