Escape from Skardu
By Salman Rashid
At the mercy of weather and various transporters, getting in and out of Skardu is no easy task. What an experience this one is…
This was the last time I was ever going to Deosai Plateau. It’s a great place, but you can only have so much of it and no more. And in six trips I have had so much of it. Indeed when I returned home and per chance met Mansoor ul Haq, the psychiatrist who also goes mountain walking, I complained of ennui that I experienced both on Deosai and immediately after I came out and was in Skardu. He said six trips were more than enough to kill whatever sense of discovery I may have had. Consequently, there being no adrenalin to power me, I was spiritually flagging from an excess of Deosai.
But that is simply a preamble. I arrived on the plateau in teeming rain. This was the kind that never falls in the mountains and its persistent intensity took the locals completely by surprise. Two days it rained, confining the party to the tents at the Himalayan Wildlife Foundation base camp on Bara Pani. When the weather cleared, we had freezing nights with a hard frost covering the ground in the morning.
Finishing in Deosai I went to Skardu to round off some work there. But it turned out to be a complete waste of time because not one person I wanted to see was available. Consequently, with fine weather permitting the daily flight coming in, I thought it wise to get out as soon as possible and booked myself for the fifth day since flights had been resumed after the spell of bad weather.
At the PIA office, having purchased my ticket, I joked with the people about my luck permitting me to fly out of Skardu only one time in my life. And that was back in 1989. Thereafter I either never could get a seat or the weather fouled. Inshallah, they said, the plane would take me out. On the morning of the flight, rising well before daybreak I looked out at the western sky – the way the plane comes into Skardu. It was badly clouded up. And so was the sky over the town. A curse escaped my lips. I knew no flight was coming in, nonetheless I went to the airport at the appointed time.
Even before I could get off the taxi, the ASF man smiled and said, “Don’t even bother, sir, the flight has been cancelled.” God in Heaven! I was stuck with the minimum twenty eight hour bus ride to Rawalpindi, I groaned. Twenty eight hours if landslides do not hamper your progress down the Karakoram Highway. The evening before I had been scheming: if the flight was cancelled I resolved there was no way I was going directly to Pindi. I would take the bus to Gilgit seven hours away, I thought, and book into a hotel to recuperate overnight. Conversely, I could take the Pindi-bound bus, break journey at Pattan, half way between Skardu and Pindi, and resume the next day. That, so far as I could think, was the only way to reduce the terrible tedium of that back-breaking, nerve-jarring journey. It is only that and more. What with the rattletrap busses, uncomfortable seats, loud music that plays non-stop for the entire journey to the accompaniment of assorted noises, it is not something that I savour anymore.
I decided there outside the airport that I was not waiting to try flying the next day, but getting out immediately by bus. I told the taxi driver to take me back to the PIA office where I cancelled my ticket, collected the money and went to the first bus station. Their single service of the day had left two hours earlier. I tried the famous Northern Areas Transport Company whose gruff and unfriendly clerk said they had no service to Gilgit. By the way, having decided I was to get away to Pattan, I don’t know why I was asking for Gilgit. Surely, it must have been due to nervousness at the thought of the terrible journey ahead. And surely when you have braved this horrible journey a dozen times, you have done it ten times to many.
Masherbrum Tours had three services to Gilgit daily. But – just my luck, the last one had left only minutes earlier. I could, however, have a seat on the nine o’clock bus the next morning, said the man. I purchased the ticket and returned to my hotel that I had left two hours earlier telling the receptionist to hold the room for me. There, in my room, I moped. Visions that rode my mind were of the dreadful journey ahead. The noise, the endless sitting upright in an uncomfortable seat, the ache in the coccyx. Most of all I dreaded the damned endlessness of it all. I lay in bed, half dead, and moped. There was nothing else to do. My book was finished and yesterday’s papers had not arrived – they arrive in Skardu a day later and then too sometime in the mid-morning.
When I went out to get the papers, I walked past the Masherbrum station and casually looked in the big bus with the legend ‘Skardu-Rawalpindi-Skardu’ on the front windshield. Several hours later, after I had finished all three newspapers and long since eaten lunch, I suddenly sat up and thought, why don’t I get away on that bus to Pattan? I ran out to the bus station only to discover that the bus had left an hour earlier.
Returning to the hotel I moped some more. When Nisar Abbas, the hotel owner, came around I told him my troubles. No problem, said he, if I gave my ticket to him he’d have me on the flight tomorrow. But I had already returned that because I thought I was going to get away immediately by bus. He called his friend at PIA, but the man wasn’t there, so he advised me to change my bus ticket from nine to ten in the morning and buy a fresh air ticket. That way, if the flight arrived, I would get away by air. But if it didn’t, I would still be able to get away by bus.
I returned to the bus station changed my ticket and walked on to the PIA office. The young and cheerful man at the counter said they had closed for the day. But he remembered me from the morning and laughingly told me that my ticket was ‘dead’. There was no way I could get on tomorrow’s plane. “If it arrives,” I replied somewhat smugly for I knew it wouldn’t. Those of us who know mountain weather know that it usually remains fouled for days on end. But even if it changed there was no seat, the man insisted. The plane was full. I told him I would still be in their office at eight the next morning. And if the plane was coming, and if there was a seat available, perhaps he and his colleagues would do me the favour of putting me on it. As I was leaving he said, yet again, I would only be wasting my time.
Wonders never cease and the following morning dawned crisp and clear. So I walked to the PIA office. Near Yadgar Chowk I saw an old friend standing by the road: Shah Jehan complete with his dark beard and laughing red face. Now Shah Jehan is mountaineer and works for PIA and my wife and I had befriended him back in 1990, but for the past some years we had been out of contact. After bear hugs and back slaps he asked me where I was off to so early in the morning. I told him.
“No point going to the office,” said Shah Jehan. “They’ll shortly be leaving for the airport with the passenger manifest,” he explained. And sure enough only a few minutes later their van drove past. But, said my friend, I should be at the airport not later than nine if I wished to get away with the plane. How was he gong to do that when I did not even have a ticket? He said not to worry and be there on time.
Arranging for the Masherbrum bus to pick me up at the airport – in case the flight failed yet again, I rode a taxi. Shah Jehan was waiting for me. My ticket was arranged, backpack and tent checked in for the hold and I was given the seat that afforded the best views of Nanga Parbat when we flew by that mountain. But Shah Jehan’s wireless kept telling him that the plane had not taken off from Islamabad. The minutes ticked by. At half an hour after the scheduled take-off time I had very nearly given up when the magic words that flight PK452 was airborne crackled out of the speakers.
It was too good to be true and I couldn’t believe all this was happening for me. But we all know that flights are aborted even as they hit the Indus Gorge north of the Nanga Parbat. I feared some such thing would transpire and I would be faced with that horrible bus ride. But somehow all my ticket buying and posturing had tricked the gods above into thinking I had already departed by bus and they permitted the aircraft to land. And once it lands, it has to get out so I knew it wasn’t leaving without me.
Before noon on that blessed day I was in Islamabad and by late afternoon in Lahore, muggy with the remnants of the monsoon that hasn’t been great at all. The moral of the story is that it pays to be friends with good old Shah Jehan.