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Then and now
Nothing stays the same, and a bicycle ride across Pakistan in 1993 was a visit to a different country to the one I live in now
By Chris Cork
Working on a book about my life and times and travels in Pakistan over the last almost-16 years I went back to the original source material – my travel diaries. I have carried a notebook everywhere I have travelled in my adult life, and still have all of them. My writing, never very legible anyway, has deteriorated over the years and the entries got more terse, but the basic information is all there. Where I went, who with and what I/we did. The original Pakistan journals fill two legal notebooks that slipped into my bicycle panniers, one on each side. Opening them again after many years and reading some of the entries I realise just how little I knew about Pakistan then, how much I know now, and particularly how much has changed in the intervening years.
You never really get to ‘know’ anywhere as a tourist. Especially a foreign tourist in a country where the culture is completely alien, you speak none of the languages and have no ‘mental map’ to travel by. I had journeyed outside Europe before – Africa, the Middle East – but this was to have been my ‘furthest east’ up to that time. My troubles started at Karachi airport with the discovery that one of the pedals of my bike was missing – hardly the best start to a cycling holiday. Things perked up when, in a bazaar close to where I spent my first night in Pakistan in the Scouts Association hostel, I found a bicycle repair shop that was able to fix me up with a replacement pedal. I was in business.
Crossing Sindh and Punjab was almost completely drama free. Beyond near-misses with speeding trucks and a very gory accident which I witnessed but managed to avoid being a victim of, it was easy riding. People were surprised to see me, but friendly. The police virtually everywhere asked if I had whisky in my water bottles and looked distinctly suspicious when I asked them to smell – and they got a whiff of the iodine I used to sterilize my drinking water. Nobody tried to rob me, threatened me or in any way made life difficult for me. Unbeknownst, I passed within a few miles of where my future wife – who I met another thousand kilometres down the road – was born and spent her childhood.
Taking the same ride now would be unthinkable. Lower Sindh is now notoriously difficult for lone and independent travellers to cross; robberies are common and the roads clogged with traffic that is almost completely devoid of any sort of discipline. Reading back, I noted the nights I spent in truckstops, with the drivers fascinated by my bike. Often they asked me to join them for their evening meal. Could they help me with anything? Would you like to put your bike on my truck I am going to Gilgit? Be careful in Kohistan and if you get to Passu this is my phone number – pleasant memories. Today, the whole character of the roads and travel has changed – faster, busier, less friendly.
By the time I got to Pindi and the home of a contact who put me up for a couple of days I had decided I liked Pakistan. I was introduced to a very polite gangster who helped me out in later years, laid the foundations of a couple of friendships that endure today, and perhaps saw the last of what I now regard as ‘old’ Pakistan.
The road I rode out of Rawalpindi no longer exists; and it is sometimes hard to spot today where I turned off left for Taxila and the start of the Karakoram Highway. Nowadays, the motorway that links Peshawar with the Twin Cities hums day and night and I never see any foreign cyclists anymore. It was not until I got to Chattar Plain back in 1993 that I met another cyclist, an Australian coming south. He was full of useful tips and tales, and we sat by the road as travellers do. He told me about the ‘rumour books’ – books kept by the hotels that tourists made notes in, recording good and bad experiences; and I found my first one at the Green Hills hotel in Dassu-Komila. A couple of months ago on my way back down to Pindi from Gilgit I dropped into the Green Hills. No rumour book now. No tourists either. Just a lot of very edgy local people who looked at me with the ‘get out if you know what’s good for you’ type of look that I see more and more often in the places where there used to be travellers.
My trip to Pakistan in 1993 was at the end of what was something of a revival of the tourist trade here. It was also at the end of the time when this was a truly friendly place to visit. It can still be friendly, and there are places where I am comfortable, but they are fewer and further between. I made a decision to come back here as I flew out of Karachi at the end of November 1993. I did, and since 1995 have spent most of my time here. This is where I will probably spend the rest of my life. But I will be looking for somewhere else as a cycling holiday destination.
Re: Pakistan Then and Now
Good one :k: