Free Footloose Scot by Jim Glendinning

from Rawalpindi on the plains, and now I was deep in the mountains. The flight route took us straight past the 26,660 foot peak, Nanga Parbat, known for its immense ice walls. In those days, you could get into the aircraft cockpit by asking nicely. I gazed in fascination at the 14,700 foot rock face, so close to the aircraft, first climbed in 1953 by the Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl. Close to the summit Buhl's companions turned back and Buhl climbed on alone to the top. On the way down he became stranded in the dark. He stood high on the mountain through a long night and survived to climb down.
    I stayed several days in Gilgit at a guest house near the airport from where I made several one-day hiking trips into the nearby mountains. There were plenty of wild-looking tribesmen in the streets, but there was also a good choice of restaurants and hotels. Gilgit reminds me of a Wild West town with plenty of comfort but with dangerous territory nearby. Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor lies due north, the Chinese border is to the northeast, and the volatile region of Kashmir is southeast. I watched a polo match. Nothing can show better the dashing spirit and bravado of these mountain people than the thundering hooves of the horses and wild cries of the spectators during a polo game.
    I was heading north across the mountains to China, a two-day trip by bus over a 15,397 foot pass. I had obtained a Chinese visa in Islamabad, and I was planning to take the recently opened Karakoram Highway to Kashgar (sometimes called Kashi), a major city of the Silk Route in the far west of China close to the border with Tajikistan. The route had opened only the year before, after twenty years of construction and almost 900 deaths. Now there was a regular bus service.
    My bus, elaborately painted in bright colors like all Pakistani buses, was filled with local merchants with things to sell in China and a few western tourists. We left Gilgit early and drove steeply uphill on a winding, two-lane road, passing evidence of landslides and the occasional vehicle lying at the bottom of the ravine. At stops, if they were of any length, the merchants would start an impromptu cricket game by the roadside.
    We were now well into the Karakoram range and soon, on our left, we could see its best known mountain, Rakaposhi, a beautiful peak known as "Shining Light" locally. We stopped in a village where the bank's safe was outside of the bank in the main street. "That's the best spot for it, much more visible, and therefore safe," said one of the Pakistani passengers.
    On top of the Khunjerab Pass (three miles high), a bleak, treeless place, was the Chinese border entry post. Impassive guards in padded uniforms and blank faces stood around. All the passengers had visas, so we did not spend much time. We resumed our journey and later spent the night in a nondescript Chinese tourist hotel. Fortunately there was a restaurant and the rooms had heating.
    By late afternoon on the next day we had dropped down steadily and the weather turned warmer. Cultivated fields and orchards lined the road. The road was in the process of being straightened and widened, but this had not yet happened. Instead, we bumped along on temporary detours around unfinished culverts.
    We arrived in Kashgar in the early evening. A steady stream of trucks, cars and buses shared the streets with carts pushed by men or pulled by donkeys. We saw Chinese faces on sidewalks, but the majority of the people were shaven-headed Uyghurs with broad noses and dark complexions. The older men wore skull caps, and some had wispy beards. Many of the women wore brown veils.
    The city of 170,000 (1980 statistics) is rimmed by mountain ranges; the Tien Shan to the north, the Pamir to the west, and Kunlun Shan range to the south. Kashi was the last town on the Silk Route and the hub where the northern and southern arms of the Silk Road converged on their way to the Mediterranean. From Kashi caravans travelled northwest