GURGAM AND TIRTHAPURI MONASTERIES

From top to bottom: Gurgam, the only bon monastery in Western Tibet. Detail of the swastika in Gurgam, that spins anticlockwise, unlike the ones decorating Buddhist monasteries. In the bottom, Tirthapuri monastery. Note the sun and moon symbol in the brown curtains.

DRESSED BY THE ENEMY

A Tibetan girl wears a tiny Chinese Army uniform at a teahouse in Namru.

SNOW SNOOKER

A Tibetan speciality, playing snooker under a snowfall…

THE KINGDOM OF GUGE: WHERE TANTRA SURVIVED COMMUNISM

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The road to the ruins of the old Tibetan kingdom of Guge was a 20 km long valley of eroded rock formations which the sunset inked with a caramel tone. Akatsuki, the Japanese writer who was traveling with me, and I were temporarily joined by a German called Anno, whose ability to trek always half a mile ahead of us earned him the nick “Messerschmitt”. Arriving in different waves, the three of us met at the caves. We overnighted there, thinking in al those eremite monks who may have inhabited or even reached enlightenment there. After a chilly night we were ready to explore one of Asia’s least accessible ruins. It became hard to distinguish what was part of the eroded landscape and what man made at first glance, so organically seemed to grow the ruins from its environs.

Flourishing in the 10th century, the Kingdom of Guge was responsible for the reintroduction of Buddhism in Tibet after a long ban, as its kings sponsored monk Rinchen Zanpo to travel to India to study the original Buddhist scriptures. The “Great Translator”, as he came to be known, returned 17 years later, rewriting the Buddhist sutras in the Tibetan alphabet and founding, by the way, 108 monasteries. To this event correlates the “Kashmir style” observable in the murals of the four temples still standing. Elephants, palm trees, and forests, namely everything that can’t be found in Tibet, is present there, even men clad in loose white robes who would have died from hypothermia had they ever been to Tibet. An extrapolation of aesthetics comparable to that of Christmas in South America, where Christmas trees continue to be dressed in snow even if December 25th is mid summer. The Kingdom of Guge fell in 1650, partly due to the West, as high Lamas plotted against the monarchy in response to the excessive tolerance shown to Portuguese missionaries who had came all the way from Goa to build a church.

There is no shortage of amazing tantric murals, who seemed to have suffered lees from the vandalism that hit Guge in 1966, when it was already in ruins. In that occasion the Chinese army executed the shameful process named “Cultural Revolution”, breaking into most of the Tibetan monasteries and destroying everything that seemed too traditional to be compatible with Communism. Logically the Chinese perceived monasteries not only as religious sites but, mainly, as a symbol of the Theocratic elite that had for so long ruled Tibet. Very few of the giant Buddha clay figures of the main temple have escaped the mayhem. Some are gone forever. I experienced the same sadness I had felt in front of the Buddha at Bamian, Afghanistan, blown away by the Taliban. In a strange twist of fate, a woman leaves a one Yuan note with the image of Mao as donation to a head of Buddha, all that remains of an 8 meters statue destroyed precisely by orders of…Mao! I remembered the Tibetan construction workers I had seen in Ali and I couldn’t help remaining thoughtful. Can dreams be imposed, regardless their goodness or badness? It then came to my mind a phrase pronounced by Miguel de Unamuno, as Franco’s police forced him out of Salamanca University where he was dean: “You will win, but you will not convince”.

Back in Toling we found the other four travelers still kicking back at the “Elephant River of Hotel”, regretting the impossibility of finding onward transportation to Kailash. They had been waiting for three days, certainly because their attempt was limited to try to charter passing jeeps in the town main street. When I announced that we would live within the hour, they had good reasons to consider us naïve. Nevertheless, it didn’t take more than an hour to hit the road and find a truck heading back to the main road for one third of the price of a jeep. It was he first time in my life I was paying for transportation, but we still felt lucky. Despite all the theoretical difficulties listed in guidebooks, we had proven that the easiest way to get you out of any place is to get physically out even a few hundred meters and let the road do the job.

Hence, the back of the truck accommodated Akatsuki, the Japanese writer; Pablo, the Argentinean guy who had decided to join us, and me, together with an elder Tibetan couple in pilgrimage to Kailash. The empty 200 liters oil drums the truck was hauling transformed each hump of the road in a drum jam, which doesn’t seem to disturb the old man that next to us was prying by passing the beans of his rosary. Half an hour later he abandons the task and with a grind of satisfaction starts distributing cans of “Lhasa” beer among the presents. “From the roof of the world” reads the label. “This is life and not Paris” –says Pablo with a tango like cadence. The sky was broad and blue, the air thin, and we were starting to explore, not only Tibet, but the Tibetan soul.

The “Dong Feng” truck dropped us at the crossroad with the main road. Looking anxiously at the map in our guidebook we discover it clearly said: “Nothing at the Junction” So that’s how we baptized the hamlet of yak herders that, in fact, was there replacing the announced nothingness. Evidently, our guidebook had been written by someone with a neat urgency for a sauna or a hotel. The people of “Nothing at the Junction” were kind enough to open an unused room for us and let us stay there for the night... We lighted a candle, prepared dinner in our camping kitchen and tried to bring ourselves to forget the cold and sleep.

Having visited the Guge Ruins, one of the Buddhist art treasures in the guise of a museum, it was time now to march towards the monasteries at Tirthapuri and Gurgam, functioning, remote, and little visited. The first of these was a Buddhist monastery attached to holy hot springs where the more strict pilgrims bath after the pilgrimage to Kailash. The second is the only monastery in Western Tibet belonging to the native faith Bon. Despite an enthusiastic morning we were all delayed by a snowstorm 3 km after the hamlet. Luckily we were not far from a town called Namru, where we found refuge in a tea house.

THREE BACKPACKS IN TIBET...

Our backacks by the roadside, near Namru.

A TYPICAL TIBETAN HOUSE.

The outstanding exterior feature of a classic Tibetan house is the doors and Windows with vertical inclined framing, normally in black. Mud brick walls form a perimeter around the house and a patio within them. Over the wall locals pile up scarce wood for the long winter. Before communications meant they could way wood from neighbouring regions, locals in Western Tibet depended on yak shit… The grid windows, (in the back) are also quite normal in Tibet.

ALIENS IN THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

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Ever since I was old enough to read an atlas or judge history, one country had surprised me, precisely, for its capacity to stay aside both maps and chronics through most of its history. Always embedded in mystery, qualified with titles which only assert its slippery nature: the Roof of the World, the Forbidden City, the Land of the Dalai Lamas… Naturally, I am speaking about Tibet, or Xizang, if one stumbles upon a Chinese made map.

Tibetan culture makes me think of the Kurds from Middle East: in spite of having their own cultural identity they have seen the land over which this identity stands split among the territories of modern states that more often than not limit the expression of such values. Likewise, the Tibetan Cultural Region expands beyond the Tibetan Autonomous Region sanctioned by China, onto the Trans Himalayan Northern areas of Nepal, Bhutan and India. Tibet vegetated in medieval isolation until the early 20th century, when British bayonets in search of –no wonder- favorable commercial agreements slaughtered their way to Lhasa. When the troops of Colonel Francis Younghusband gazed in wonder to the sight of the formerly Forbidden City, few Westerners had had such privilege.


Symmetrically, Tibet had by then scarcely noted the outside world, let alone the West. Little had changed in Tibet in the previous thousand years, and the Tibetan lived under the theocratic regime of the Dalai Lamas, secular and religious authorities replaceable only by their own reincarnations. The absolute absence of infrastructure was far from worrying in a country that, undisturbed in the lethargy of worship, even found its isolation comfortable. Let us remember that when the British presented the 13th Dalai Lama with an automobile, back in the 1930s, the later arranged to have horses engaged in the front, and celebrated his new chariot.

But even if Tibetan reality was hard, the transition towards modernity was going to be traumatic. In the 1950s troops of recently proclaimed People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet and annexed it to the Motherland, claiming to be “peacefully liberating” Tibetans from serfdom under a theocratic regime. Since then, the 14th Dalai Lama has resided in exile in Dharamsala, India. His efforts to find a pacific solution for the Tibetan problem have deserved him a Peace Nobel Prize in 1990. Partially –and cautiously- opened to tourism since the mid 80s, the Tibet I visit today undergoes the surgery of Beijing central policies: modernization, homogenization, support of Han Chinese immigration and brutal suppression of any separatist activity.

I left Kashgar with the heaviest backpack ever, due to the 30 energy bars, the six tuna cans, a flask for coffee, an extra jacket, and so many other extras appointed to make the trip through winter-edge Tibet at least bearable. The plan: to enter Tibet illegally from the West, traveling the road connecting Kashgar with Ali. Despite the road is officially closed to foreigners a little research had shown that once in Ali it was possible to pay a fine for the committed ‘crime’ and get in exchange a travel permit. No doubt bureaucracy and corruption are herbs growing not too far from each other. While Chinese bureaucracy conveyed the necessary amount of tension and uncertainty every trip to Tibet should have, I had started to fear cold and altitude.

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The Xinjiang-Tibet Highway is found among the most isolated, highest, and most dangerous roads in the planet, and has claimed the life of more than one independent traveler. It’s exactly 1370 kms between Kashgar and Ali, the capital of Western Tibet. As it’s the rule in Tibet, the unpaved surfaces unfolds at an average altitude of 4500 meters, and since we talk about a plateau there’s no chance of a rapid descent in case of developing a potentially fatal mountain sickness. Said this, the Kashgar-Ali chunk of road had been an unconditioned element of my itinerary since I started to plan this round the world trip in a Michelin map nailed to my room’s wall.

I covered the 270 km to Yecheng, in the beginning of the Western Tibetan Highway in the Toyota Camry of three Chinese that smoked as if they would next be executed. Some 8 km ahead, in a town called Aba, I should find the first of the two checkpoints that, between Kashgar and Ali, try to put foreigners off the idea of entering Tibet. Aba turned out to be a collection of garages personalized by the peculiar decoration provided by poker cards scattered along the streets and burning trash containers, but without checkpoint at sight. All I found in the matter of restrictions were two signs. One, tiny and green, branched out from a telephone pole, and suggested in white capitals: “This is unopened way to Aliens”. And there is no need to shed tears for ET, for ‘alien’ is the tender word with which Chinese bureaucracy designates the foreign traveler.

The second sign was an enormous poster in the advertising fashion, and seemed to explain the first sign: “Foreigners shall not be allowed to travel from here to Ali without permission” Next to the sentence there was a picture of two immaculately dressed policemen in the process of obeying it by shifting their hands to their foreheads. Amazingly close to the sign, a bus prepares for departure. In blatant ignorance of the sign –and the law- the driver offers to smuggle me in for a surcharge equivalent to the prize of the ticket: 30 Euros, part of which will pay for the selective blindness of the checkpoint staff at Kudie, some 160 km away. Having spent a week sick in Kashgar and with the second week of October giving a hint of the cold Tibetan autumn, I decided to save time, take the bus, and hitch hike only from Ali onwards. After all, there was nothing interesting on the way except for the isolation of the place.

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The trip lasted exactly 32 hours. After 60 km, past the forgettable town of Dahongliutan, we were officially in Tibet, but the region is so featureless that nothing indicated it but the level of the ground. Later we enter Aksai Chin, a borderland claimed by India but under Chinese administration. We also travel the edge of the Chang Tan Plateau, which occupies the uninhabited center of Tibet, and may be the most deserted region in the world outside of the polar areas. With towns every 100 km at most, the landscape makes one think in the discarded choice for a world that didn’t happen. Repeatedly, we cross 5000 meters high passes. Jieshan Pass (5240m), decorated with tar-choks (square pieces of colored fabric with printed prayers) is the turning point of the landscape. From now on every town will have its chortens (Buddhist altars) by the roadside.

Coming from such a minimalist scenario, the arrival to Ali, equals a mirage, since the city, despite its reduced size, ticks al the boxes of Chinese modernism: glass and tile buildings and plastic palm trees. But not only is the architecture Chinese, but also most of the passers by belong to the Han race, confirming the officially non existent policy of immigration, aiming to dilute the Tibetan ethnic majority. Some rather lost looking Tibetans also walk the streets as foreigners in their own land, effect enhanced by the fact heir colorful and somewhat untidy outfit stays in plain offside to Chinese gray urban order. When I realize that the pattern of the street tiling is identical to that in Kashgar I ask myself if, given the chance, the central authorities would like to reduce the contrast between the bands of the rainbow.

Ali, even if lacking any interest in itself, would be the magical point of my itinerary where, thanks to the graceful incoherence of Chinese laws, my sojourn in Tibet would become delightfully legal. The trick consists in giving yourself up to the PSB (Public Security Bureau) officers nominally in charge of catching you. In exchange of a 25 euro fine and a humble declaration of guiltiness one obtains a clubber “Alien’s Travel Permit”. Even if the permit itself, bearing a myriad of seals and red stars, is something I will someday frame to impress my grandsons, the dialogue that followed was the real highlight:

- Mr. Alien, how did you get here?

- By bus from Ali.

- Do you have a permit?

- Oops…err…no!

- That means traveling illegally in China, you should pay a fine!

- Oh thanks a lot!!!

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Such obvious was that everything was fake that as the interview develops neither the PSB officers nor the Aliens loose their smile. When the theatre finished, the fine, its receipts, and the permits were handed to us. Rather than a punishment it seemed we were receiving a prize, and somehow, it was. I speak in plural, because by then I had befriended Anno and Chris, from Germany, and Akatsuki, a Japanese writer who instead of taking pictures held in his memory the verses each place inspired him. Thinking in the Tibetan he had penned down: “While I am yawning, someone is enraged somewhere. That brings me tears”.

That night all the foreigners that were heading down deeper into Tibet dinned out at a Uighur restaurant to share information. A real meeting of Aliens. Backpackers, conventional tourists, cyclists, we all faced the same obstacles…namely Route 219, with al probabilities the less traveled in the world at some stages. 1500 km of pure plateau to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, with a few towns and the occasional monastery in the middles, and no showers… Three jewels awaited us however in that ocean of emptiness: the ruins of the Guge Kingdom near Toling; Mt Kailash, center of the Buddhist universe, and sacred Lake Manasarovar.

In the beginning Route 219 treated us with mercy. Akatsuki had decided to hitch with me to Toling, the closest town to the Guge ruins, and an hour later we were in the backseat of a VW Santana driven by a Chinese couple towards Namru, 60 km South of Ali, at the end of the paved road. Those guys not only spoke some English but also let us play Pink Floyd in their stereo, before parking us next to the tiny unpaved lane that whirled away into the mountains to the West. For its look, we expected to wait there for days.

But again, it was a merciful beginning, and an hour and 15 minutes later we were boarding an old Land Cruiser of 4 Tibetans. It was our first road meeting with the Tibetan, so the first minutes of the trip occurred among the tension of the language barrier and the fear of being asked a huge amount of money once in destination, distant 130 km. After al, it was 4 hours of rally in a demanding road. So there was enough time to chat, but words were missing, at least until somebody mentioned that word common to all mankind: football! A little disappointingly, people who have never been out of their province know the goalkeepers, strikers and coaches of all the leagues in the world. Like our driver, who proudly showed us a poster of Ronaldinho he was carrying home after shopping in Ali.

The valley climbed to a new plateau demarked in the South, in all the arch of the horizon, by the Indian Himalayas, clearly visible from Nanga Devi to the Ladakh Range, their summits completely covered in eternal snows. The Land Cruiser galloped across the plain as a gazelle dated by the horizon. It was hard to believe somebody had passed there before us, and even harder to believe that in fact those remote coordinates had been the cradle of a kingdom. Four hours later we arrived in Toling: a main street with snooker tables outside each shop, neglected buildings, and as many pedestrians as street dogs.

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We were then surprised by what soon would become rule: the total absence of a sewage system, which in all Tibet leads the average man on the street to behave like the average dog on the street… Looking for a cheap pension we confirmed that English grammar reached Tibet with the same intensity the light from Andromeda reaches Earth with, and we immediately surrender to the charm of the suggesting sign: “The Elephant River of Hotel”. Inside on of the rooms laid, as patients rather than as guests, four travelers. I know the one with the baseball cap: it’s Jazz, a North American with good humor sense that has set foot in unusual destinations such as the separatist Republic of Trans Niestr and Afghanistan. I also know the one snoring near the window: it’s Vladislao, a Russian with sharp resemblance to an anthropologist who dragged his wheeled case and kept his Nescafe for special occasions, something that innerved Jazz. The frame was completed by a Canadian and, oh surprise! an Argentinean from Rosario called Pablo, his argentinity rubricated by a No.3 Newell's football top from late 70s, a genuine relic, and also by the unworried way he described the Guge Ruins to me: “Well, you have the ruins of the citadel and in front of it there are a dozen caves, where I guess plenty of monks used to hang around…” The first day of Tibetan road traveling drew to an end, leaving us the misleading impression of a kind road. For a while we regarded all those tales of hardship as myths. Clearly enough, we still hadn’t had the need to build a roadside totem with sheep bones in order to attract the attention of a driver. The worst, but also the funniest, were still to come. (It will continue)

WHEN ALL THE WORLD BECOMES KASHGAR...

“Now, as a little punishment, you will go last in the queue”- said with a mischivieous smile the Chinese custom guard at Taxqorgan, the first Chinese city in the western province of Xinjiang. A moment before he had lifted the bag with the four apples Dr Ali Mohammed had given to me in Pakistan, dissaprobing them with a comment in Chinese that with no needs for subtitles conveyed the fact that heaven knows for what reason he was angry at the sight. When I asked for an explanation he showed a yellow paper full of boxes and ticks. I recognized the paper at once, I had filled it in and signed it myself on arrival to the country, obviously without paying any attention to it, because when it asked: “Are you carrying any fruits or vegetables with you?”, I had carelessly ticked the “no” box. When I placed myself last in the line for lugagge check, I suddenly realized that this small incident had saved me from a major hazard: against all predictions some foreigner’s lugagge was being checked meticulously. Since my folder with pictures and articles was in the backpack I was facing a considerable risk of being turned back to Pakistan, being journalist, writer and spy all synonym in the disctionary of Chinese ideology. But chaos had placed four apples in my front pack, and three Afghan merchants on their way to Kashgar’s Sunday Market ahead of me in the line. As predictable, when it was their turn, all the staff at the customs gathered around the bagagge of the now frightened Afghans, tasting no matter what substance came out of their packs, as they searchd for narcotics. I still remember that poor man trying to retain the powder milk for his tea, with no success. As the unusual picnic went on, a policewoman ordered the Afghans to take out their shoes, and ordered me to go straight ahead to the passport control. I stopped sweating.

In Taxqorgan my blue passport received its stamp number 58, red and eliptical, in the corner in the corner of the page opossite that of the visa. I had, strangely enough, officially entered China some 100 km before, after driving through the Khunjerab Pass from Pakistan. The reason for that weird border crossing may be that the first hundred kilometers develop vey near the Pakistani, Afghan and Tajik borders, an area where Chinese authorities decidely don’t want curious westners roaming free. If a matchbox would fall to the floor inside the Chinese Ministry of Economy, they would have the matches counted. In a very Confucian way, everything and everyone should be accounted for. Once and again I say China this, China that but… to what extent am I in China? A short walk around Taxqorgan, a outpost town where the broad avenues stress the feeling of abandon, is enough to realize that Xinjiang province is a foreign ethnic pocket absorbed by Chinese territorial imperialism. From the hooked noses and beards -facial hair among the Chinese is non existant- to the onion scented bread, everything indicates a cultural continuity of Muslim Central Asia. Chinese presence goes back to the days when the emperors sent their legions to keep an eye on the caravans on the Silk Road, and since then has increased slowly but surely as a cancer, to the point of annexing the region, the size of Western Europe, and its 20 millons of Uighurs, Tajiks, Kazaks and Kyrgyz to the Mother Land. To portray the vastness of the territory let me say that a bus ride between Xinjiang’s two largest cities, Kashgar and Urumuqi, takes 24 hours. Until the 19th century this land was called with the more accurate name of Chinese Turkestan, and in as fresh a date as 1947, a separatist movement proclaim the independence of the Republic of East Turkestan. Initailly recognized by Mao, the experiment came to an end when most of its leaders died in a mysterious plane crash on their way to meet the first at Beijing.

The anxiety to pass my hitch hiking baptism in Chinese roads wrested stronger than the temptaion of settling for a few days to digest the first impressions. I was soon in the road to Kashgar, trying to handle drivers who not only spoke only Chinese, but also had a criminal tendency to expect money for the rides.. My first driver was the owner of a JMC double cab pick up who took me on to Karakul Lake. On learning that I didn’t have money he grabbed me from the sleeve and starting pulling in the opposite diraction. Instead of resisting, I walked that way too, and he quickly undrstood that he could tow me around the whjole lake without hearing the cling of a coin as a result. Karakul Lake, at the foot of giant Muztag Ata (7550m), is one of the most scenic places in Western China. The landscape is typical from the Pamir, high but rounded mountains, that seem to have been fisrt risen vertically and then handpicked by the sides and stretched, to make up for some miscalculation in the design of the valleys. Kyrgys families graze their yaks, goats and camels around the lake. But if there is something China deserves a medal for, that’s its capacity to spoil idyllic landscapes with mediocre touristic devices. A wire fence separates the road from the lake, and a bunch of Kyrgyz nomads of dubious lineage hang around the ticket booth of the Karakul Lake Resort to offer (sell) a stay in their yurts, built with dental-white concrete. A circus.

Having got my first ride even faster than I wished, I headed for the road again in order to feel it, always walking northwards with Kashgar as my eventual destination. It sooned started to snow, the first snwfall since last January in the Turkish Kurdistan. 45’ later, when my classification of the snow had already changed from picturesque to bloody freezing, my second driver stopped, a Kyrgyz at the wheel of a roadworks truck distributing meals among the teams of workers. He curiously weared a baseball cap with the phrase “I love Jesus”, and he didn’t expect any money in return, so that one became my first ride without misunderstandings in China. He dropped me off near Bulungkol, a Kyrgyz settlment of confusing aspect, with two tiled compounds (school and police station) unhappily nailed in a mudbrick village, and to enourmous wind turbines to which no Quixote would ever dare. As it wasn’t long to sundown and I had no rush to reach Kashgar, I decided to attempt a landing. Something equals hitch hikers with the pilots of the old biplanes. Before airports and control towers would form an extensive network, these pioneers of days gone-by used to simply, with the last rays of light, look for a flat field or untransited crossroad, land, and sleep under the wing of their airplane with the only shelter of a sleeping bag. Likewise, when darknessw inches closer, the hitch hiker starts to look for a place to…land.

But there were other plans for me that afternoon, because even if the friendly locals were quick to let me know I could stay in their houses, the local police was even quicker to order me to head on to Kashgar. That didn’t surprise me at all: it’s a common policy of predator states to avoid the contact between opressed communities and foreign visitors. What it did surprised me was how naively had the kyrgyz happily suggested I should register with the police, to be only afterwards surprised at the results. In identic circumstances, the Kurdish of Northern Syria had almost abducted me and erased my footprints. I could have camped elsewhere around, and I was kind of thinking about it, whe a Mitsubishi Pajero driven by rich Chinese pulled by. One of the even spoke broken English, quite a luxury. Flying, they took me to Kashgar (or Kashi, as they called it), more exactly to the doorstep of the Seman Hotel. If something actually astonishes me about Kashgar is that its hotels are elastic enough to accommodate broken backpackers and parfumed agency tourists. Some rooms coast about U$S2, some about $80, but everybody meets in the corridors and patios of the unmeasurable complex that used to be the Russian Consulate, more often than not in near by John’s Cafe. It was a certainty that I was to meet again Rich, the Slovakian cyclist, Sdfanek, Chris the Swiss and all the others who were coming the same direction, plus a new bunch of travelers coming from inland China or Kyrgstan. Every evening tha cafe became an improvised forum where the mandatory topic was how to get, legaly or ilegally, to Tibet.

In Kashgar, row after rows of glass and tile towers, that delicacy of Chinese contemporary architecture, makes one effectively forget that there is a desert around. It’s a lifelless videogame tidiness that masks the more traditional areas of the city, where the majority of the Uighur population lives. It seems as if Chinese architects had carefully studied a Lego toy model before setting pens to plans. This sudden in-stage of modernity is specially irritating if you are coming from Pakistan. Even if I travel eastwards this is the closest to the West I have seen since leaving Europe. Considering we are 3700 km from Beijing, the contundency and the inexistant degree of hibridity with which central politics apply in the furthermost appendix of the empire is astonishing.. In China, ideology drives a bulldozer, and the Uighurs daily see their traditional dwellings mayhemed to give way to new squares, shopping centers and, of course, glass and tile buildings. Far from witholding the warmth of the life lived close shared by the Old Town mud brick alleys, these will stay empty for years, since it’s no secret among the specialists that China is trtaversing the worst real state bubble of its history. It is still almost possible to abstract from this bathroom-style futurism. In the narrow streets that spawn from the Id Kah Mosque, the Uighurs continue with their pace of life as a band that has decided to carry on playing until the ship sinks. The bakers bake, the smiths produce large golden pans, and the smoke of sizzling kebabs simulates the smoke a battle that has never taken place.. If you look carefully to the sky, if not Allah, you will se how perspective equals in holyness the crescent moons topping the minarets of a nearby mosque and more remote communication towers and chimneys. It’s a matter of time. While the government decided to gradually close schools in Uighur language, these caotically crowd outside the local branch of “China Mobile” to get hand of a telephone. Maybe the ringtones have a taming effect… While Tibet has a charismatic and cosmopolitan leader that draws the efforts of th international community for his cause, the Uighurs seem to have been abandoned by the world, and by themselves, since not a single spark of rebellion glows in this darkness.

No description of Kashgar is complete without mentioning the site that, if not in aspect, at least in spirit, conserves the inaprehensible epicenter of Old Kashgar: th Sunday Market. Kashgar factually owes its existence to its position of post in the Silk Road. For two millenia, Uighurs have trainned themselves in only one art: trading. As I get close to the market, the sideways get filled up with vendors offering knives whose blades displayed Arabic inscriptions. Not advisable if you are boarding a United Airlines flight to go home. Once inside the largest market place in Central Asia, one cannot less than imagine that the word ‘eclectic’ was coined in Kashgar to describe its market. Clothing, shoewear, food, dry snakes, mushrooms, horns of mythical creatures to heal sexual disorders, carpets, seahorses, 80s style doble cassete players, silk, plummery, knives, knives, knives… Several kilometers away, the livestock market and the motorcycle one have their own grounds. At noon, to recover from the arduous job of bargaining: the vendors go across the street to rejoice in a plate of ‘laghman’, the local speciality whose free interpretation by Marco Polo led to the re-invention of spaghetti in Italy. With all its shouting and noisy crowd, the Sunday Market confirms Kashgar a true alien in modern China, a victim of standardazing Maoist communism.
But how communist is nowadays China? For Richard, my Slovakian friend, some elements in the landscapes are something of a deja vu. Each time he wakes up in the morning with the anthems and announcements yielled by highspeakers he can’t avoid recalling when as a school boy he would parade in front the Party authorities during the “1st of May”, shouting “The Soviet Union is our brother!”. Of course, things have changed, and a Ricky Martin toone has somehow made its way to Chinese highspeakers. Ale, Ale, Ale… An old man peers at the small print of a newspaper glued along a board on the street. Another survivor of the times when indoctrinating was a priority over selling newspapers. But beyond this folclore there’s not such a thing as a Communist system anymore. We are in front of the phenomena of a political totalitarism issuing liberal economic reforms, without giving up its outer skin of hammer and sickle, censorship, political prisioners and other divices of the kind. The postcard of a giant statue of Mao showing the way with his right hand, just in front of a glass mall decorated with plastic palm trees is, at least, ambiguous, but as Den Xiaopeng used to say: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”. There is one thing certain among this confusion: walking down any of red flagged China’s broad avenues, you will find MP3 players or Cadillacs for sell much before you will see an empty shelf.

Meanwhile, the filmcrew of “The Kite Runner”, a new film based on the book of the same name, had arrived to our hotel. Being impossible to film in Kabul, where the origianl story goes on, the technicians decided to film in Kashgar and add a few mountains with the Photoshop later on. It was equally impossible to anticipate Irish travelers in discovering that free drinks were being poured somewhere in town. They didn’t fail to inform that the filmcrew was having a party in “The Orange Pub” and that all the bar was paid for. The beers and the Baccardi bottles were a shocking sight coming form dry law ruled Pakistan. There was even a table football, where I confirmed that the residual skills of so many summers in front of the wooden players with my cousins in Mar del Plata’s beaches were enough to send a duo of Chinese home with a 6-1. The The favourite chinese strategy? Spinning the sticks ad infinitum. A few other travelers had been tipped off the Hollywood cocktail. Among them was Jan, a recently graduated Northamerican who just found his first job in… Buenos Aires. Jan says: “ I think Latin America is not going to slide so easily in the materialistic rat race going on in Asia. You guys are more idealistic”- and he points me the botttle of Chinese made “Guevara Vodka” over the table. A “Che” in a dwelling of galls and barcodes looks at us ashamed of himself. “It is partly true –I conceed- When the fridge gets empty still there is the tango or the mate. Always somebody has mate. The worship of success can hardly summege a country that from the beginning has trainned itself in transforming defeat into something sweet. That’s the subtle destilation of tango.” Jan, who was inspired that night, added: “ What is going to happen when all the world becomes Kashgar?” He is now complaining about globalization. “There will be no world to explore. Mankind will have entered solipsism”

Mankind was entering solipsism, and I was falling sick for the first time in this trip, with severe headaches, fever, and mood of Russian Embassy staff. Told to rest by the doctor I had no option but to kick back in John’s Cafe, comparing plans with collegues also aiming to go to Tibet. There is so much talking about the checkpoint at Aba in the cafe that we all know perfectly the colour of the police hut, not to mention the black dog that, even if he hasn’t barked to us yet, he is already frightening us. The cyclist seem specially concerned about the dog, and they plan to pedal through after midnight. Others will try their luck by being smuggled into the cargo compartment of trucks, in exchange for a U$S50 tip to the trucker, who faces a serious risk of imprisionment if spot. In any case I experiment a malicious pleasure to see travelers otherwise faithful to buses and trains totry to become die hard hitch hikers from the night to the morning, because of shortage of options. The curious thing is, since nobody has come back from Aba to tell us the facts, all our knowledge, when not browsed from the internet, flourishes mainly from our very own expectations and fears. Some people have even dreamt of being caught at Aba and turned back to Kashgar in a police vehicle. Personally, I must wait for my health to improve before attempting infiltrating in the most remote, and monitored, province of this world: the Tibetan Plateau.

IN THE PAMIR MOUNTAINS, THE KYRGYZ KEEP MODERNITY AT BAY.

            

Next morning, before departure, Dr. Ali Mohammed presented me with four apples, and I was again in the road. By then it was impossible to foretell that these apples were going to be decisive in securing my entrance to China. After twenty minutes waiting A Nissan truck pulls by. The trucker is a man from Peshawar, sporting a white shawar camisse and dark bushy beard. It could be said that he has looked for a truck like him, judging by the hairy look of hundreds of metal chains that hang down the front bumper. The bearded man and his fellow had alarming levels of testosterone, and during all the trip to Passu didn't fail at spotting any of the women of questionable sex appeal that were tending the fields, with a happiness only matched by Columbus sailors at spotting land. Even if the truck was going all the way to Sost, the last Pakistani settlement before China, I decided to stop in Passu to photograph the immense glaciers that literally reach the road here. I had to wait an hour before hopping into another Sost-bound truck. This time, one of the drivers was an educated person who spoke English and Arabic. Unfortunately, he mistook my curiosity for Arabic language as curiosity for Islam, and therefore tried to pack it and sell it. He insists that Islam is the only religion that prepares us for the life that will come after the inevitable apocalypses. He was rather surprised when I told him that almost all other religion predict the same sequence and that more than one prophet promoted the same after hour. So focused was that man with the life after death that he was hardly sensible to the subtle harp of the present moment. He additionally committed a classic local contradiction, and with the peculiar logic of intolerance, he stated that all Muslims were brothers, and that the Ismailies were not Muslims. Otherwise, as most Pakistanis, he was a soft and overwhelmingly kind man who would have never rise a finger to kill a fly.

Sost was a typic border wasteland redeemed by the exotica conferred to it by the parked Chinese tracks waiting to unload, their incomprehensible characters an advance of the forthcoming world on the other side of the Khunjerab Pass. Before crossing to China I had another piece of challgenge for myself, namely, visiting the most remote Hospitality Club member I have heard of, excepting those in Antarctica. Alam's mail, confirming his readiness to help in his native village of Zoad Khon, in the Chapurson Valley, had come as a surprise and a challenge. Firstly because Zoad Khon didn't turn up in any normal map. Secondly, because when it did turn up in a trekking scale map, it resulted that Alam lived in the last stretch of a valley extending all the way north from Sost to Afghanistan's Wakhan corridor, a particularly cut off area where Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and Tajikistan are all within fifty kilometers of each other. While smooth buses or are usually enough to make it to European member's doorstep, reaching Alam's home demanded walking twenty kilometers in the darkness, with the flash of my camera as only defense against the rare but probable snow leopards, before miraculously meeting a jeep out of any schedule. Chapurson Valley was only "opened" to foreigners in 1999. Despite this, the isolation of the valley acts as a filter, and only eighty foreigners make it here every year. Its 2000 inhabitants, who share Wakhi as their mother tongue with thir neighbors of Northeast Afghanistan, peacefully make a living from growing weath, potatoes and tomatoes.

Most probably, Alam is the only cosmopolitan man in the valley. He is fully entitled to the adjective, not only for speaking English, but mainly for having an e-mail address and the only computer in the valley. Internet? That will have to wait, since post, land telephones and mobile coverage have been on the queue for even longer. As a good Wakhi, he receives me with a salted tea, and introduces himself. Only looking at Alam, a long haired, strongly built, easy laugh man is enough to agree that the matrix of the traditional Wakhi suffered a mutation at the decisive moment of creation. Mountain guide, musician, poet, but principally, horseman, he seems to know each valley and stream of his country, and has even discovered new mountain passes into Afghanistan. Besides the tourism related activities Alam bids to improve education in the area, and believes that local kids should not be disadvantaged having never confronted a keyboard. It was thanks to his contact with a North American benefactor that his village became the first in the valley with running water.

Naturally, it was Alam to advise me to walk 10 km further to Babagundi, a hamlet near the Afghan border used as meeting point for trade with Kyrgyz nomads from the Wakhan corridor. In this corner of the world the Pamir mountains keep modernity at bay, and harbour the last breezes of the Silk Route. It's six hours walk, among fields where complete families harvest wheat manually using curved knives. Finally, there it is, Babagundi: a dozen stone huts, a meteorological tower, and some twenty obese cows grazing within a large fence. Once in the "center", landmarked by the teahouse, the encounter couldn't have been more direct: three men with baggy pants, boots, Cossack style caps and knives by the side organize in the windswept ground a whole diversity of objects, from carpets to cooking pans. A little to the side, another two stitch flour bags. They are Kyrgyz nomads! And the fat cows, yaks. The first I ever see. Mi arrival has coincided with that of a caravan of twenty yaks, led by eight horsemen. As I drink the tea that eventually came from some side, I ask my self: what century is this? As Richard Bach, I start to believe that time is an invention of mortgage salesmen and car designers. On their way to communism, places like the DDR achieved, instead eternity... The image of the stretched eyed, red worn skin, and angular beards, loading flour bags in his yaks, belongs to no time. They have traveled five days on horseback, bringing with them sheep and goats, and yak cheese, to trade for all sort of objects from shoes to lighters. Every object is precious back in the Pamir Mountains. Visiting a doctor implies a week trip by horse. This seclusion redounds in self-medication, a record maternal mortality and opium addiction rate. Communication is difficult: the Kyrgyz have never seen foreigners and smile nervously. Their language is XX % Farsi, language I can only understand by a XX%. In spite of percentages playing against us, one of them, called Talaualde, makes an extra effort invites me to ride his yak. The Kyrgyz anchor their yaks by using ropes that, in one extreme locks the beast's nose holes and, in the other a heavy stone. May the wind not blow them away. Another of them, older and involuntarily hilarious, carries a key tied to his jacket by a yellow thread. Looks like a car key. I spent hours trying to think an object a nomad would need a key for.

A goat was slaughtered to seal the trade, and both parties ate on the ground after praying together. Witnessing the killing didn't, as expected, resulted in me becoming vegetarian. Apples and candies were distributed, the first ones being pocketed among the nomads with resolute speed. After lunch the Kyrgyz went on loading their yaks with rolled carpets and the Pakistanis their jeeps with yak cheese, just thirty meters away, but several worlds away.

Two days later I crossed the Chinese border in a pick up of the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation, being legally forbidden to cross the border independently. Cyclists on the route faced the same interrupted liberty. On the Chinese side the road becomes smoother, and enters a plateau surrounded in the distance by the wide, rounded, Pamir Mountains. Austerity is such that makes one think of the Nemesis of a condemned Eden. Double hump Bactrian camels obstruct at times the road, and the Chinese custom guard at Taxqorgan lifts in havoc the bag with the four apples Dr. Ali Mohammed had given me and asks, clearly upset at the apples: "What is this?" (Will continue).

A HIDDEN ICE WORLD IN NORTHERN PAKISTAN.

"Traveling among mountains is like undressing a maiden". The poetic exaltation penned down by German explorer Wilhelm von Goldberg as he crossed the Atlas range could easily be transported to Northern Pakistan, where each valley unfolds to reveal exclusive language, culture and traditions. The high peaks seem there as a veil for a parcel of this world that only confusedly has seen itself entangled in the phenomena called globalization.

From Chitral, my plan was to cross the Shandur Pass onto Gilgit, an from there start slowly the trip northwards through the Karakorum Highway towards China. It's been seventeen months on the road. I had been lucky enough to get a direct ride to Gilgit with a Chitrali merchant bound for Gilgit bazaar, the main gateway for incoming cheap Chinese goods. Trade has become the first income for some graduated Pakistanis who cannot find a job in their field. The prophet, who had urged his followers to seek knowledge, if need there be, as far afield as China, could have never imagined they would come, in search of household goodies and plastic toys. The bazaar, nevertheless, doesn't say it all about Gilgit, a town that for a century was in the eye of the Foreign Office as the last sure footed bastion of British India in a power wrestle with Russia for the contol of Asia. Those were times of bayonets and spies in pilgrim disguise. But much before that, Gilgit's claim to fame was its horsemanship. Polo is thought to have originated in the Northern Areas as a training game for the ruler's cavalry. Each year, the archrival teams of Gilgit and Chitral clash for honour over the world's highest polo ground at the Shandur Pass.

My stay in Gilgit, though, had nothing to do with Her Majesty's service or enraged horsemen. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to cross a glacier. Since this wandering began, road has meant anything from an old Roman Via in Syria to the spotless German Autobahn, from the cross- Baltic E-sixty seven to a maddeningly bumpy jeep tracks in Afghanistan. But it had never meant glacier. Finding a glacier in Northern Pakistan was decidedly short of being a challenge, for it's one of the most heavily glaciated areas on Earth. The challenge rather consisted in pulling myself over one of them, considering I regard the inclined plane as the most diabolic figure of the Pantheon of geometry... My hope was, of course, to parasit someone else’s experience and join a fit party. Madina Guesthouse, in Gilgit, was the obvious place to meet travelers with similar intentions. While in Indian guesthouses any bunch of travelers will be invariably found exposing their sayings about yoga, the Mayan calendar, and reincarnations, the patio at Madina guesthouse was a conference on climbing permits regulations and cycling technique. That's where I met Agneska and Martin, from Poland, and Sdanek, from Czech Republic. My new friends were committed to trek to Rakapochi (7780m) base camp on the following day, and from there, weather conditions allowing, they were hoping to cross Minapin glacier, as a side trip. Soon I realized that the two days walk to the 3500m high base camp and the glacier crossing were little more than a stroll for these guys, who now started to compete over who had smoked a cigarette at the highest altitude. Martin was quick enough to say I was welcome to trek with them, and slow enough to realize that they were climbers and I was a hitch hiker. At least there was one thing that, them being Eastern European and me being South American, needed no discussion: we would not hire guides or porters and we wouldn't use any of the official campsites.

The next most boring thing to describing mountains is describing trekking among them. For the reader is enough to know that more than once, as predicted, the author needed to be hand-towed as a kindergarten boy crossing an avenue. In a particular incident, I had resorted to having my backpack lifted with a rope to become light enough to ascend safely a vertical rock face. Standing over the southern Moraine of the glacier, we not only gained perspective over the magnificent river of ice and snow, but we also understood that we were in front of a live creature, the ice blocks cracking perfectly audible under our feet. Rakapochi wasn't n an static being either. On an hourly basis the sculptor sun would melt snow hangovers in any of the mountain's faces to unlock a sweeping and thunderous avalanche. Any climber on its way would have known how it feels to be a flea when the dog starts to scratch. Navigating the glacier was, to my surprise, the easiest part of the job, and I say it without underestimating crevasses and internal rivers. For a moment we looked like weird interplanetary beings jumping around an ice world: nothing else was visible except for the ice and the rocky edges of the moraines. The way back didn't lack an epic flavor: as a result of our policy of avoiding official campsites we were escorted a few meters by a local armed with a rifle, who vaguely claimed that, actually, the whole flat terrain belonged to the campsite....

When my little Artic adventure had concluded I headed on the Karakorum Highway, the road linking, since 1982 Pakistan and China. Almost twenty years were required to tend a double lane highway over one of the highest mountain ranges on Earth: the Pamir and the Karakorum. At that time the project was also an ostensive sign of the alliance of the two countries against the common enemy: India. The asphalt link greatly overlaps with the classic Silk Route, an commercial-ideological artery that until the 20th century saw generations of traders and scholars smuggling East-West and vice versa everything from walnuts to religions. It was also on these tracks that Islam made its way into China in the 20th century. The religion remains the main faith in Turkic ethnic Xinjinag province in Western China. Centuries brought, nevertheless, dust and oblivion, and the region fell in a medieval isolation that lasted until little time ago. Dervla Murphy, the Irish cyclist that in 1963 visited the region relates the story that, when in 1954 the fisrt jeep reached Chilas, the villagers provided it with a loadful of fresh cut grass. They believed that the jeep was the offspring of one of those strange metallic birds that occasionally flew over the valleys, and which if properly fed, would eventually fly.

From Gilgit northwards the road traverses the old kingdoms of Nagyr and Hunza, where fratricide and caravan preying was once as natural as the seasons. Hunza River marks also the geologic limit between Asia and the Indian Subcontinent, which collision against the earlier cause the Himalayan range to rise. After two disappointingly short rides in two fast new cars, both driven by Bank of Pakistan's employees, a philanthropic taxi driver and a motor biker, I arrived to the village of Nilt. Besides common features as apple trees, irrigation channels and old men hanging around teahouses, the village will always stay in my mind for a sign by the roadside... It goes like this: "Pepsi Agency: beat your thirst by the cold drink products". I tried my luck, only to discover that the pompously announced shop didn't have refrigerator. It is curious to see how the esthetic of the "American way of life" becomes eerily compatible with hatred for the same. Frequently I have spotted boys drinking their Cokes with the background of "Down with the USA" graffiti’s.

Nilt, Thole, and the other settlements along Hunza valley practice Ismailism, a more secular branch of Islam. Thus, for first time in a long time, I see women walking down the streets. Mosques have also left the landscape: Ismailies pray in their jamaat khana, or people's house, to which not only men but the whole family has access. Having left Gilgit fairly late, I was caught by darkness in Thole. When asked about a feasible place to camp, the village chemist, against my predictions, actually answers my question instead of inviting me into his house. I seat down by small general shop to wait for something. A gas fueled electric bulb coming from the shop made me visible to potential charitative souls, but after half an hour I had only gathered a bunch of local kids for whom I had become an effectively entertaining mix of clown and parachutist, as they deducted from the large backpack. Finally a tall mustached man wordlessly ordered me to follow him. He is the watchman of a health unit, where I would sleep that night.

WANDERING IN A RUBIK CUBE II: THE VALLEYS OF THE UNFAITHFUL

The day of my departure Azam handed me an envelope. It contained a letter of introduction to a relative of him, who lived in Naghar, on the way to Chitral, and who could put me up for the night. He referred to whim as “the prince”, which I thought was a nickname. But I was wrong; Azam’s brother in law belongs to the former Royal Family of Chitral. Let’s say it better: hadn’t royalty titles been abolished by 1969 he would be King of Chitral. Finding his residence, Azam explained, would be easy: you cannot miss a fort built on an island amid the streams of the Chitral river and linked to ground by a suspension bridge. I was shown a picture and hit the road. It was what I would call a nominal adventure: regardless the outcome, hitchhiking in search of a prince’s fort was quite the event alone. The towns of Chakdara and Dir set the turning point where, slowly, Pashtuns begin to give way to Chitralis. More and more frequently, I see white skinned, green-eyed people. Caucasoid features is something you wouldn’t expect from Pakistan, but the Northern Areas are truly an unfinished Rubik Cube, with patches of different people here and there, and many valleys speaking their own languages” Pashto, Khowar, Wakhi, Kalashmun, Farsi, Shina, etc Some of these people have migrated from neighboring countries centuries ago, following ancient trade routes. But the origin of some others still remains a mystery.

Exiting Dir I couldn’t resist the temptation of boarding an old Bedford trucks that was slowing down and inviting me with the horn. Pakistani trucks are giant rattles: from their entire perimeter hang metallic chains whose clash announce the truck from half a mile. The carved wooden doors seem to have been made for a temple, and the truck itself may well be a wheeled rococo cathedral. Boarding such a slow monster would have been a terrible mistake if the truck had been going far. But soon I was free and got a lift in the minivan of two engineers, bound to the other side of the Lowari Pass. After Ladakh’s high passes, I will need a one-year spiritual retreat in Holland to recover the adrenaline when going over 3000m.

Two hours after the pass the Prince’s for appear behind the bend of the river. When I arrive he chatted with his servants in the garden. Bore has diluted casts… As there aren’t anymore “regal” issues to be busy with, the kind prince, whose name was Salahudin, runs a small guesthouse inside the very fort. That’s where I met Richard, a Brit who had driven his BMW motorbike from England, and who gained my respect when saying that “work” once meant for him traveling to Sudan to arrange the exportation of sheep to Yemen.

Chitral seems a never-ending chain of farms under the dramatic background of Tirich Mir (7708m) among other Hindu Kush giants. While the entire bazaar was suggesting I should go to a hotel, a small man, dressed in white pants and shirt, and sporting a black navy cap with the embroidery of a war ship, called me apart. His name was M.I.Khan, and he was a lawyer. He promptly produced a wonderful speech on equality among men, and gave me the key to his office. He was one of that universal minded men that, if lucky, you may find even in the most remote of this planet’s provinces. Eventually I was off to explore the bazaar carefully, discovering that many vendors there spoke Farsi, since they are originally Tajiks from neighboring Afghanistan. Proximity to such country legally forced me to register in the local police station, where the sound of Olivetti typing machines still silences the few dusty oversized computers. “It is for you own safety Sir”-said the policeman there. I explained that I had been a month inside Afghanistan with no inconveniences, but let them fill the forms anyway. In the streets of Chitral I also met Richard again, who was trying to get the local mechanics to fix the electronic starter of his motorbike. Richard held the curvature of his head as the mechanics unscrew everything they found with the only inspiration of the Holy Quran, let alone the User’s manual.

On the second day after arrival I departed for the Kalash valleys. Who are the Kalasha? Nobody truly knows. In a country with 120 million Muslims, the Kalasha, that once dominated the whole Chitral, are the last 4000 survivors of the Kafiristan (or land of the unfaithful). Technically, they are the only Indo-Aryan people of Central Asia that was not (yet) converted to Islam. You can walk from Kashmir to the Turkish Mediterranean, and the only non-Muslims you will find are going to be the Zoroastrians at Yazd, Iran, and the Kalasha. Their beliefs are closely linked to the pantheism of old Vedic religions. Until the late 19th century the Kalasha lived relatively isolated, on both sides of the Hindu Kush, protected by a labyrinth of valleys and mountain ranges. Little was known about them, and the Royal Geographical Society considered Kafiristan the last mystery in Asia. The fate of the Kalasha changed when the British Empire, in their desire to avoid Russian influence in Central Asia, opted for a solid Afghanistan, drawing the Durand line in 1893 and arming the Emir of Kabul, who immediately launched a military crusade to convert the Kalasha on the Afghan side to Islam, through gunpowder… On the Pakistani side they still retain three valleys: Birir, Rumbur and Bumboret, although even there are outnumbered by Muslims (new settlers and converted Kalasha).

I thought the suspension of the jeep was going to cede before we would make it to Rumbur. The valley was comprehensibly narrow, being the sanctuary of an endangered culture. There is nothing in the valley big enough to be called a town. Only hamlets, where two storey houses edge the mountainside in order to take the most possible profit of the narrow even land used to cultivate corn or tomato. In Grom, one of the settlements, I met Engineer Khan. “Are you an engineer?” –was the first question to make him. “No, my father named me that way cause he wanted me to be the first one in the family to attend school” What was a family experiment had an unexpected outcome when the young Engineer announced he was ready to go to university. Both parents looked each other in dismay, in sought advice in their ancestors through the voice of a shaman. With the permission of the past (and not before swearing his grand mother that he wouldn’t convert to Islam) Engineer left his valley for the first time to study in Chitral, and came back years later with a degree in Political Science, becoming the first graduated ever among the Kalasha.

Having learned about politics, Engineer knew better than anyone that politics wasn’t at all what the Kalasha needed, and instead founded the first school in Kalashamun, their native language. It’s a pleasure to learn a few words of a language that is only spoken by a few thousand people. We must remember that a language is much more than a channel of communication; it’s a unique way to organize the universe. And the entireness of the Kalasha universe is still under threat: a group of Greek intellectuals have introduced the idea that the Kalasha may be the descendants of Alexander the Great’s lost legions. A romantic explanation we would all like to believe, but without scientific back up, unless you consider the prevailing green eyes as an argument. There are some who even think that these Greek are creating a small Christian community among the Kalasha, and that they are waiting for a larger number to build their first church. I spent two days walking around the plantations. From everywhere I could here a melodic “Ishpata, baia!” (How are you brother!). Regardless their blood links, the Kalasha refer to anyone as brother or sister. You feel like in a Rainbow Gathering. As usual, cultures based in brotherhood and harmony have the worst cards against a destiny that plays kings and aces. I am walking towards Gilgit: China is inching closer.

WANDERING IN A RUBIK CUBE I: GUNMAFIAS IN THE LAND OF HOSPITALITY.

I had left India with the pace of an escaping inmate, with extreme nostalgia for Muslim hospitality, and reached Lahore, the first city in the Pakistani side of the Punjab, with the anxiety of that who has accumulated the thirst of several deserts. In Lahore Tabreez, my Hospitality Club host waited me. When you see Tabreez sitting in the conference room of his company, eyes fixed in his laptop with a stock market like preoccupation you wouldn’t guess he is checking hitchhikers forums and websites advising how to sleep in airports. Since his country cannot provide him with a credible passport, Tabreez travels through his guests, to who he treats as ambassadors. In this way, even if I normally enjoy walking around cities, I wasn’t brave enough to reject the offer of an air conditioned Corolla manned with a kind chauffeur.

Beyond static wonders, such as the Badshahi Mosque and the Mogul built Red Fort, the jewel of Lahore is by far the Sufi music nights every Thursday. Sufism is Islam in its mystic variant, a staging through dance and percussion of the mourning for the death of Emam Ali, the leader of Shiite Muslims, murdered 13 centuries ago. Far from being a tearful ceremony, Sufi nights in Lahore are a causeway for the very human instinct of party, so repressed in modern Pakistan, where discos are criminalized. But how do we pass from the mourning to a hypnotizing drum jam witnessed by a hash stoned, head shaking mob? I just know that we humans owe our survival to the fact our morale is made of plasticine. Obviously, most attendants wish, at least once a week, to do without the unperturbed understanding imposed by Islam and embark in a trip.

My plan was to reach China through Pakistan’s Norhtern Areas, and the most direct way to achieve this would have been to take the Karakorum Highway connecting Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, with Kashgar, in the remote Chinese Turkestan, but a certain allergy for obvious roads and a compulsion for unnecessary detours caused me to tr4avel towards Peshawar, to only then start advancing northwards trough the Tribal Agencies of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). NWFP is a conservative area inhabited by the rebel, proud, and fiercely hospitable Pashtun, and where the central government is as much of a tourist as I am.

The 450 km from Lahore to Peshawar were covered in a day. Fast cars driven by upper class Pakistanis were plentiful in the spotless motorway, so there was no need to stop the low, old, and over decorated Bedford trucks. Traveling north from Peshawar, Afghanistan’s proximity is evident. It’s a naïve statement, considering that Pashtuns have lived as one people at both sides of the imaginary line much before this came into being in 1893. Women covered in blue or brown burkas walk by the roadside as silent ghosts. More meaningful, a group of Kuchi nomads who clearly just arrived from Afghanistan set up their tent just meters from the now narrow asphalt lane. The artificial nature of the border is a well-assimilated notion in the Tribal Agencies. Over the last 4 years, this local phenomena has given a headache to the international community lead by George Bush, who has always accused Pakistan of not guarding its borders strictly enough, encouraging thus the free locomotion of extreme elements between the two countries. A guy called Bin Laden, for instance, is supposed to be hiding somewhere in the Chitral mountains, if you believe in Washington comic stripes.

In Malakdn district I was going to learn something more about the famous border. I was crossing Takht-I-Bhai bazaar when a Suzuki Vitara pulled by, as if arrived from another planet. The door opened…”Come in men! I am going to Sakhakot, if you like the place you can stay with us and continue traveling tomorrow” – said the driver with an unmistakable American accent. Azam had studied in Oklahoma and now occupied the main seat at the (ruling) Islamic Party of Pakistan for NWFP. I asked the, what was there of interest in Sakhakot to see. Ruins? An old mosque? Maybe somebody selling a roadmap of Pakistan? No. Azam think that it’s the bazaar that I am going to find interesting. I was about to feel disappointed, when he goes deeper: the specialties of the local smiths are guns and rifles, manually crafted. I can see their workshops and take pictures, if I like, he adds. “Wouldn’t they feel unease with a foreign photographer peeping around their stalls?” – I had to ask, because it was clear to me that, should something go wrong, 8 mega pixels didn’t stand a chance against caliber 45. Azam’s face transformed, and a bit offended, he replied: “It’s my bazaar. They do what I say”. Pashtun hospitality, either accept or choose an epitaph.

Next morning I was tidily combed and ready for my peculiar sightseeing. Azam summoned two of his nephews as escorts, and we were off. I was expecting to be conducted to clandestine cavernous workshops, to camouflaged installations, which a private militia makes sure remains off limits to everyone. And no: all along the main road, at day light, without any intention or need for cover, two dozen workshops produce and sell only one thing: guns. It’s hard to find in town where to buy bread or cucumbers, but shops displaying row after row of AK-47s and M-16s need no search. Local gunsmiths delay only three days to cut, bend, screw, and come up with a freshly baked Kalashnikov automatic rifle, charging some U$D 150 for the job. It’s a real free zone: without registers of any kind guns are bought and sold as day bread. Pakistan itself has enough landlords with personal armies to claim a substantial slice of the output. The rest travels to Afghanistan, at night, through well-established trails, joining the caravan of computers and other electronic goods that have zigzagged all the way from China without meeting any custom, from full tolerance from authorities both sides. “When the Soviet Union split there were some men here trying to sell tubes with uranium” – remembers with proud a kind machine gun seller as he re-fills my teacup.

Back in the house Azam asks me if I have ever fired a gun before. “Well, I guess I never needed to… I admire Che Guevara but I am not following his steps” The joke doesn’t manage to break the silence produced by my confession. Being gun-virgin in NWFP is worse than having never kissed a girl. (And since this is an Islamic country, the last is likely to happen much after local boys become experts in all sorts of rifles) “So do you want to try?” I knew that question was coming. “Do you have a fusil here?” “We have some 30. Sometimes we have problems with the lands and we have to use them. Kalashnikov or Mauser?” As if I had been furious with heaven, in Azam’s garden, I I fired a few thunderous bullets in the void.

ESCAPING FROM MOTHER INDIA

Ladakh is a land of fragile balance. From the coexistence of the Buddhist and Muslim communities, to the stability of the political borderlines, everything stays in the loose cord. This is scarcely apparent when one contemplates the stark hand with which men have landscaped their habitat. Leh Palace, with four centuries behind that haven’t exactly tiptoed trough, is imposing enough to make a random observer believe he is in the capital of a solid and homogeneous empire. Visually closer to the high peaks behind than to the compact town beneath, it could perfectly be the dwelling of one of those kings who are never seen by their subdues, and to whom is irreverent to look in the eye. Sometimes, clouds with poor navigation skills dock among the rocky environ, giving the wrong impression that their emanating from the dilapidated landmark, as a sign of its holy character. This is anything but the case. This area of Indian Kashmir, as any other, belongs to the Indian nation only on the grounds of a strong military presence. People here are not Hindu, nor they speak Hindi. They are Ladakhis, of a such an orthodox Tibetan culture that sending one son to the monastery is still the rule in many families, keeping at line demographic growth in an arid area where agriculture could hardly support a baby boom. The other stratus of the rainbow is the Muslim population, that here is a minority, even if around Srinagar their figure hits 90%. Most of them live near the 16th century mosque, making trade their main activity. Despite most families in Leh, due to intermarriage, have members in both communities, and both sides exchange tiny metallic discs in the market place, there is a certain tension in the air, a scar of the last decade social boycotts that both communities imposed on each other. When each day at dusk the high speakers of the mosque call to pray, the nearby monastery replies with sounding Buddhist choral music, in what may be the oddest DJ contest on Earth. In another level, India attempts to retain its sovereignty in a region landlocked between Pakistan and China, all with their own territory greediness that little cares for the local determination.

The first thing that kept me busy since arriving in Leh, was finding a legal way out. As a result of landslides and roadblocks, my journey to Leh had taken five days, instead of the expected two. Well, expecting something in the Indian Himalayas is a mistake in the first place, but with my visa expiring, I had only another five days left to make the journey back to Manali, than travel a similar distance south to Delhi and cross all the Punjab into Pakistan. When I visited the Superintendence of Police at Leh I perfectly knew two things. First, that one week visa extensions are theoretically free for most nationalities. Second, that Indian police bureaucrats, sporting moustache and dark glasses as if copied from a 1970s Latin-American dictatorship, were good at the maneuver of receiving banknotes under the table. I decided to play the role of the die hard journalist instead of that of the ordinary backpacker, and got ready, as in many other occasions. My hair correctly tight, reading glasses on, and a folder full of newspaper articles under the arm. I introduced myself as a journalist from the inexistent Buenos Aires Times, showing at the time Respublika articles in Lithuanian language (they would never spot the mismatch).Yes, a journalist from remote South America promoting Asian countries through media reports, and also –of course- sharing these with local Indian papers. Reading between the lines: if you ask for a bribe, I will publicly denounce it. The high rank police on the other side of the unnecessary long desk listened to me with little interest, cupping his chin with his hands. While I spoke I could see other functionaries of brown uniform arriving in chauffer driven Ambassadors. As this local Indian cars respect in every detail the 1950s design, they seemed as returning from Philadelphia Experiment.
The policeman I was trying to persuade of how VIP I was seemed more interested in the teenage soldier bringing him tea. When I was done with my speech, he simply said: “No problem, the extension is possible, but you have to pay the visa fee of U$S 40”. So took calmly my camera and took a nice snap, and assured him he would be in next weekend Hindustan Times. From then on, they started to pay attention, but insisted in the U$S40 fee even if I assured them I knew it was free. Eventually, after parading around several offices and acting in front of several office workers, got my legal –and free- one week extension.

During my stay in Leh, I must admit, little I did to spin in the local orbit, and succumb to the temptation of joining the backpackers own kaleidoscopic existence. Sometimes I think that the Indian chapter of my trip will definitely lack the depth of field achieved elsewhere in Asia through isolation from my western pairs. I somehow consider India as a deserved break from this immersion experience. When I have met foreigners in Iran and Afghanistan, they were themselves part of the local landscape, NGO workers, for example, or soldiers, and a few adventurous travelers. In Leh instead, as in the rest of India, it’s all about café hopping and chatting with other foreigners. Just sit down, in five minutes you will be surrounded by Germans, Israelis, French, etc. Even if most of this café talk fades away rather fast, in Leh I had the chance to meet some people who impressed me with their sensibility. The first time I talked to Eugenio, he asked permission to my landlady to inspect the light conditions of my room. He explained he was a painter, and if the room was lit enough, would I be leaving, he would take over. A white beard as the one the fat man with the sleigh. A matching forehead with wrinkles as a philosopher. Bushy eyebrows. I couldn’t help thinking of Leonardo Da Vinci. When he said he was actually from Firenze (not far from Vinci) I started looking for the hidden camera. The coincidence of physical outfit, occupation and nationality was too much. His name could be Eugenio, but for me it was Leonardo…

Leonardo had passed 12 of his 72 years in India. The first time in 1972, when he had rode two horses from France all trough Middle East, crossing Afghanistan on the way, something that instantly bebrothered us. What amazed me most about him was not his experience, but the calm and attention with which, in spite of this experience, he listened to each of the answers to his questions. As if planning to travel for some hundred years more, he justify his curiosity saying that “it’s always useful to learn fromother travelers experience” We would meet everyday in the Corner’s Café at 6 pm. He would arrive punctually with a copy of Dante’s “Paradise” kept under his arm. 1926 edition, printed in Milano. We would talk for hours over a tutti frutti of issues from photography to autistic children, for whom he felt an unparallel tenderness. Frequently, Jose, a Dutch girl, would join our table, to deliver the dosage of thriller, and relating how her guesthouse’s owner had misread the trust and started to enact an insane jealousy. The tendency rocketed out of control when the night of the party (because there are always raves and parties in these travelers hang outs) the local aspirant, in shock when Jose turned up with an Israeli friend, started a fight that ended with a motorbike chase across the Indus valley under white washed moon lit monasteries… And yes, there is always an Israeli involved, otherwise you are not in India. I have been running into many of them here and then on the way from Leh, since there is only one road to follow for everybody from Manali. I feel such nostalgia for Arabic language, that I still hope to fins one of them that has learnt, by osmosis, the language of their neighbors. But the most I could find so far, somewhat disappointingly was someone who could say the equivalent of: “If you make a step further I fire.” Very useful in checkpoints…

Virgilio didn’t leave the pages of Leonardo’s book to lead me trough the road to Manali. Classic poets still have a but at the time of hitch hiking. Instead, I earned the company of Ian, a South African of Dutch ascendance whose first language was Afrikaans, blend of old Dutch, German, and a dozen of black dialects. The Dutch that settled around the Cape of Good Hope are known as Boers. The trip to Manali was long enough to discover that, despite coming from different continents, there could be unexpected things in common. To begin, we are both grafts of European experiments in the New World. Both Boers and Italians climbed down their ships with more sense of the adventure than realism, in similar latitudes (Buenos Aires and Cape Town) and created a microclimate compact enough to psychologically exclude the place they were living in from the rest of the continents. In this way, when a South African goes to Kenya, he says he is going to Africa. Likewise, English buy ferry tickets to Europe when they cross to France and Argentinean backpackers happily announce they will set off to discover Latin America, when they intend to visit neighboring Bolivia or Peru. Comprehensibly, Peruvians accuse us of considering ourselves a branch of Switzerland…

Ian enjoys walking barefoot, for I nicked him Barefoot Boer, but his distinctive note is his passion for all things Asian. He lives and teaches English in Taiwan, what is not so terrible, if he wouldn’t loose his head for local girls. It’s this frenzy for the “narrow eye staff” what entitles him to the intensive care unit. Or maybe I should be more respectful for other people’s decision to follow the steps of John Lennon. So a Malasyan girl was waiting for Ian in Manali, and that kept him smiling, in spite of the slow pace of the local Tata trucks. In one of those we reached Tikse. A tire screeching halt and we jumped off to explore the local monastery. I still don’t see clearly the way monastic life is fully compatible with Buddhism. It was by abandoning his cloister style life and traveling that Buddha concluded that “life is pain” and that the reason of such pain is desire. But Buddhism doesn’t seem to take note of that importance, for I have never seen an image of a “Traveling Buddha”. Can you imagine a Buddha with his thumb up as a mudra?

The next stop was in Tso Kar, a brackish lake at 4500m, at which shores stands a compact tourist camp, mainly used by prearranged trekking groups who made week long walks with horses, guides and porters to take all their gear. The guides seem bored, since they have covered the route infinite times, but the trekkers seem to experience adrenaline, still don’t know how, even if they are guided and someone else is carrying their luggage. In the very shores of the lake, I also met two Austrian ornithologists who were the first people I have met that didn’t need forewords to know immediately the ring in my left hand is a cormorant’s tagging ring and not a spouse tagging one… In the third day of our trip together, Ian and I reached Pang, one of the many transitory camps I had already come across on the way north. There, the only thing heading our way was a big black stormy cloud. As if the road builders had forecasted the episode, a yellow sign by the road side said: “SMILE!”. But that was a difficult task under the rain that eventually showered us, so we sheltered in the camp. The tents there are old army parachutes forced into a conic position with a sturdy wooden pole. I said old army parachute, so that means that every time it rains (every night in this season) part of the stuff filters through, making my first Chinese lesson (language I will soon need) even more epic.

The night had closed in long before we made it to Koksar, an insignificant village more notable for its checkpoint. The policeman there was of the kind that sticks to the word and letter of the laws and opened the door of the truck to scream ”Illegal! Illegal!” Indian laws, apparently, forbid tourists to travel in overloaded local trucks whose drivers consume brandy at 5000m to amuse themselves. That’s quite sensible. The Indian laws of course ignore a tiny part of the foreigners love all that mess, but philosophy was not the way out in this case. The roles were set from the beginning, Ian would play the goog traveler, I would play the tough one. In these occasions in I feel grateful to have dogged into theatre many years ago. It’s only a matter of turning on the switch of emotional memory and speak to the policeman as if he had just dropped my pint. And of course, take him a eye blinding snap with flash…. The man smiled confusedly. Then recovered his seriousness, and ordered the truck drivers to follow him to the police station, parentheses we used to jump down and walk past the checkpoint, enveloped in darkness. We had barely done a hundred meters when we heard a scream, and noticed a torch advancing as an acrobatic firefly in the nights of the Himalayas. After our truck sped without lifting us again, we were hopeless. Obviously, they had instructions not to help us. The policeman fastened his steps. Then, unfolded from the pen of a hidden novelist, with the synchronicity of a guardian angel, a white jeep stopped and asked: “Manali?” Wemounted it as we would mount the flying dog in Never Ending Story and let the driver understand we were in the run: “Chelo, chelo!” (Go, go ,go!). “Stop!!!” – was the last we heared from that isolated policemen interested in applying the laws of an artificialentity called India in the middle of eternal mountains. The flow had rescued us once more.

There is one technical way to describe our arrival to Manali: we were stinking, with a fragrance I would commercialize with the brand ‘AFTER475”. Four hundred and sevety five kilometers of unpaved road. Eau du routard. At Manali, Barefoot Boer and I split ways. The day after I only waited for ten minutes for a fast car of three young professionals from Delhi who were back from a short holidays in the North. “What is the aim behind traveling?”- they asked. “Well, I guess traveling is the aim”. As everybody in Asia, they found it hard to accept the concept of a project that doesn’t lead to a economic progress. They dropped me in Delhi Bus Station a couple of hours before sunrise. There is something oppressive in those places that have the same rushed pace in nighttime as in daylight. They seem cities built for machines, not for humans. But those were my last 48 hours in India, and my mind was craving for crossing the border into kind Pakistan.

Conclusions about India. I often receive letters from readers asking me about the famed spirituality of this nation. It’s true, many travelers find a denial of western materialism in the frugality of the local lifestyle. I just see the contrary. I see that India is not in the condition of rejecting anything, it simply can’t afford things as a starting condition. A potential West. The upper classes exhibit a worship of success with a typically Asian abandon, as the one Max Weber attributes to the Protestants who forged capitalism in the 16th century. For them, the magnitude of the local market is an addictive predicament: “If you make a profit of one rupee per sale, in India you are earning one billon rupees.”-would state categorically one of my drivers, as dollar symbols aligned in both his eyes. In the meanwhile, the low casts combine the lack of any self improvement discipline with the instinct of everyday fight for the basics. I assume that in the 60s and 70s India sounded out enough of the bipolar world to attract seekers of spirituality, but it’s clear that today India is galloping in the same global horse as the home countries of the travelers who come here to find the source of spirituality. It seems curious to me that the disenchanted of our side of the world find shelter in a society which is far too hopeful to produce a disenchanted bunch. Isn’t disbandment a privilege of the West? Are there Asian Carmina Buranas? To make the matter more complex, most of the travelers that arrived here in the 70s used to come overland, and comparing. Now people just arrive by plane with the prejudgment that the rest of the continent, except South East Asia, is a battleground. Arrive by plane to study yoga in Rishikesh.3 days course, fast food. Valid, as everything else under the sun. But there is also a bit of fetish, and I say this having done myself a 3 days Reiki training, but aware that it was the same to do it in Dharamsala or in Caracas. I mean, yoga, reiki, ayurvedic medicine, have been traveling with international passport long enough and don’t need to be discovered in the Himalayan foothills. But well, of course, there is the plus of cheap cafes to hang around… A Spanish fellow insists that I should revisit India and I will realize that Mother India is beautiful and feeds a lot of people. Of course, he had never tested India and never needed to be fed, plus India was the only Asian country he had been to. I held my ticket gladly and took the train to the Pakistani border. (I had to gave the thumb a rest due to the visa expiry date inching dangerously closer).

On the way to Amritsar, by night, sleeping, I could know we were traversing a city due to the smell of urine that invaded the carriage. My last vehicles were a locally made truck who engine needs to be spinned manually to achieve ignition, and some cricket players in motorbikes thanks to whom I bated my first cricket ball before leaving the country. In the border I met a French couple that were driving all the way to Paris. They pushed me to the other side, to Lahore, with the Pakistani customs unobserving the whiskey bottles hidden in the back. Once in Lahore I phoned Tabreez, my local C host, from a phone shop whose owner produced a chair and a glass of chilled water. Evidently, I had crossed the border. Once in more in lands where hospitality is not a lateral consequence of higher education.