Free A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout Page A

fat problem. There were bombs on buses, headless bodies turning up in ditches, land mines, kidnappings. Al Qaeda was in Pakistan, bin Laden was in Pakistan, the Taliban was in Pakistan. Nobody there, it seemed, was to be trusted.
    Still, people went. I’d met a couple of travelers in India who’d been. And I’d met people who knew people who said they’d met a guy a week earlier who’d just come over the border from Lahore or had a friend who’d gone six months ago. The word on Pakistan in this context was always positive, an interesting bass line playing beneath a more familiar song. The place was amazing, untouched. The food was awesome, the people friendly and welcoming. The headlines were the headlines, as ugly and frightening as they were anywhere. The country itself was supposedly something very different.
    I sent my mother an e-mail, telling her I was planning to head into Pakistan to travel around. While in Delhi, I’d gotten a visa. I was now in the far northern Indian city of Amritsar, seventeen miles from the Pakistani border.
    Her response was swift and emotional, announcing that she did not want me to go. She garnished the request with a thick wedge of guilt. “I would never want to change you, Amanda, nor would anyone else in your family,” she wrote. “But I want to ask you to put the shoe on the other foot and consider us and our feelings before you go . . . I can’t help but feel physically ill to think of the danger you’d be in.” She went on to compare my travel plans to having sex without a condom. Reckless, in other words.
    I read her e-mail and thought about it. I tried to put the shoe on the other foot. But it didn’t work. My mother and I were closer than we’d ever been, and yet images of Russell, of his leering relatives, his piled-up liquor bottles reeled through my mind, the uncertainty of the place hanging like a vapor in the air. We weren’t safe then. What right did she have, I was thinking, to worry about it now?
    *
    In Pakistan, I felt like a bird on a limb—perched and ridiculously light. Lahore, where the bus from northern India deposited me, was a booming, modern city. With a Dunkin’ Donuts and KFC near my cheap hotel, it was more familiar, less exotic, than most of the cities I’d visited in India. Immediately, I started to erase any fears, chalking up all the warnings to Western paranoia. I kept the argument going with my mother silently for days. What was reckless, I decided, was the way people were writing off huge swaths of the world as unsafe, unstable, unfriendly, when all they needed to do was go and see for themselves.
    It was “Sufi night” at my three-dollar-a-night hotel in Lahore. The hotel manager corralled a bunch of us travelers into a van and took us to a mosque where, in a buggy outdoor courtyard, men pounded barrel-sized drums while others shook their bodies, whipping themselves into a state of spiritual ecstasy. The drummers chanted: La Ilaha Illa Allah! The hotel manager translated: There is no god but Allah.
    Meanwhile, I deliberately ignored my mother’s e-mails. Rightly or wrongly, I was punishing her for trying to put limits on me. I let her marinate in her worries as I took a two-day bus ride from Lahore to Gilgit, in the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan, where I met up with Jonathan so we could travel up the Karakoram Highway, a slim ribbon of pavement cut between some of the highest mountains in the world, connecting Pakistan to China.
    As instructed by Lonely Planet, we flagged down a northbound truck on the highway, a jingle truck—one of the ornamented transport rigs common in central Asia, with chains and bells dangling noisily from the bumpers to help shoo away animals in the road. Thedriver slowed and halted. He climbed out, a smiling, mustachioed man dressed in a sand-colored vest over a white shalwar kameez, and gestured for us to climb the metal ladder that led to an open-roofed cargo space above the cab.
    It was another