A cycle courier takes on the world

A few hours after I arrived in Gilgit I was taken ill. It was nothing serious -  just a splitting headache, a sore throat and a fever – but it was deeply annoying. I had hoped to be back on the bike the next day, finally, after all these weeks of sitting around, launching myself onto the Karakorum Highway, a road I’d been dreaming about for years, and which I expected to be one of the high points of my trip, both literally and metaphorically.

And instead I found myself forced to spend another three days doing nothing. Anything other than lying still made my head throb and buzz unbearably. My skin prickled, my throat ached, and my legs were so weak that when I tried to walk round the corner to the shop to get myself some water, I very nearly fell over. My usually indomitable appetite was a thing of the past. I slept all day, worried that this would mean I wouldn’t get to sleep that night, and then slept all night as well. On the second day a bunch of local journalists turned up to interview me (not much happens in Gilgit, so my arrival constituted something of a scoop), and I heroically managed to stay upright, smile for the photographs, give them all the usual soundbites about what a wonderful and unfairly misrepresented country Pakistan is, and ride my bike in circles for the TV cameraman without fainting or crashing. After they left I crawled back into my bed and slept for another few hours.

Thankfully, kind friends had found me a room in the women’s hostel of the Karakorum International University, so I had somewhere safe and quiet to convalesce, and a constant stream of sweet, shy, but extremely friendly students and lecturers to keep me company. Unfortunately I couldn’t offer them very good company in return. As well as being exhausted, and at times barely conscious, I was deeply deeply annoyed with myself and my body, for getting ill at this inconvenient moment, wasting the precious final days of my dwindling visa and putting the final nail in the coffin of my fitness. But there was nothing I could do. The illness would pass in its own good time, and I had as little chance of hastening it as I did of changing the weather.

I’ve been thinking lately about the various factors that inhibit me on this journey. Some, like my own laziness and fear, like red tape and bureaucracy, like steep hills and Turkish winters, can be overcome with a little determination, toughness, hard work and optimism. Others I am powerless to affect. If I wake up and see that it’s snowing so hard I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me, I can’t do anything about that, and I’d probably be a fool to try and cycle in it. If the Baloch police force refuse to let me cycle (as they did), I can argue with them, but ultimately I have to give in and put my bike on the truck. If part of the Karakorum Highway is swept away by a landslide, I have no option but to sit and wait for it to be cleared. In a few days’ time I’ll be up above 3000m, and at risk of altitude sickness. There’s no telling how susceptible I’ll be – youth and fitness don’t always make that much difference, and apparently even seasoned Himalayan climbers are not immune. And if I do find myself suffering from acute mountain sickness (AMS), the only reliable treatment is descent to a more hospitable altitude. I can’t just gird my loins and battle through it. This is not something I can overcome with bravery and stubbornness – it’ll be a matter of recognizing the symptoms, judging the risks, and making the right decision, even if that decision involves stopping or turning back.

Sometimes the decision to back down takes more courage than the decision to carry on.

That’s what I was told by one of the many people who advised me to take the bus through Kohistan. And he’s right – it would be folly, and blind bravado, to throw myself at all obstacles in my path without any serious consideration of how likely I am to survive them, and whether I’m more likely to survive them if I retreat, regroup, rethink, and tackle them from a different angle.

But also – I’m coming to realize the virtue, and indeed, the necessity of patience in an expedition like this. Sometimes you do just have to sit and wait for the weather to pass, the road to clear, the paperwork to be processed, the seasons to change and the virus to work its way out of your system.

I spent my convalescence reading Ernest Shackleton’s account of his 1914 expedition to Antarctica. I picked it up on a whim, having read the first half of it in my tent between Sivas and Erzurum (to remind myself that there are worse things than the Turkish winter), but it turned out to be extraordinarily apt. You can read more about Shackleton here. He stands out as one of Britain’s greatest explorers, not because he was the first, or the fastest to achieve anything (he was beaten to the South Pole by Amundsen in 1912, and the 1914 expedition failed in its objective to traverse Antarctica from coast to coast), but because of the extraordinary feat of bringing back all 27 of his men alive after their ship, the Endurance was trapped in pack ice and crushed.

There was no swift, dramatic rescue operation. Shackleton and his men were trapped in the ice for over a year before they eventually took to the sea in lifeboats and made it to the remote and desolate Elephant Island (where no human had ever set foot), from which Shackleton and four of his team set out to cover the 800 miles of open sea to South Georgia, where they managed to make contact with human race again and sent a boat to pick up the men stranded on Elephant Island, who had been waiting there for over four months, and were almost out of food.

If you read Shackleton’s book (be warned; it’s long), you’ll be struck not so much by the expedition’s heroic feats of physical strength and daring, but by the fact that most of its three years were spent waiting – for the seasons to change, for the ice floes to drift in the right direction, for the rescue party to arrive. The real challenges were to provide constant food and shelter for 28 men in impossibly inhospitable conditions, to sustain morale, to maintain health and fitness and to stave off boredom.

I’m reminded, once again, that on a long-term expedition like this (although it would be absurd to put mine in the same category as Shackleton’s), the glamorous bits are few and far between, and the bulk of one’s time is spent either moving very very slowly, or actually sitting still. The tales of pain and glory that will populate my dinner party conversations in years to come are few and far between.

I’ve also been reading books on mountaineering recently, by writers like Mark Horrell and Jon Krakauer, and have come to understand that climbing an 8000m peak is similarly slow, careful,  laborious and frustrating. Mountaineers will wait for days at Base Camp, for their bodies to acclimatize to the thin air, for the snow to consolidate after a blizzard, and for that elusive window of calm weather that’ll allow them to make their summit attempt in relative safety. Then they climb up to Camp 1, spend a night there to acclimatize to the even thinner air, and descend back to Base Camp. And so on. No matter how skilled, experienced and well prepared they are, they have to accept and work within the limits of their bodies, and the whims of the weather.

And I’ve been following the progress of Sarah Outen, who’s now finally rowing across the Pacific, after a frustrating couple of weeks spent scanning the weather forecasts and waiting for the sea to die down so that she could actually launch safely. There’s nothing you can do under these circumstances; you just have to be patient and wait it out.  So I did.

Just after we descended from Sri Paye, a cool 2962m above sea level, and the highest any of us had even been, Mum and Dad and I were accosted by the owner of the endearingly dilapidated resort we were staying in, sat down and given a cup of tea.

Since 9/11, foreign tourists in Pakistan have become a rarity, meaning that the intrepid few who do visit the country are subjected to endless – and sometimes overwhelming – curiosity, hospitality and offers of help, advice or tea. Several times a day we would be stopped by some friendly local, who would welcome us to their country in impeccable English, ask us what we thought of Pakistan, and offer to help us in any way we needed. Although I’m very reluctant to give my number out to men (having acquired an impressive crop of stalkers in the last couple off months), quite a few of those who managed to get hold of it just wanted to phone up now and again to check everything was OK. One chap I met on the road between Murree and Abbottabad even offered to call ahead and sort out my hotels for me.

The heartbreaking thing about these encounters was that most Pakistanis are well aware of how their country is portrayed by the Western media. They would ask us pointedly and pleadingly if we felt safe here, and how our experience of Pakistan contrasted with what we had been led to expect. They would go out of their way to convince us that, although, yes, the country has its problems, and some of them are quite serious, the vast majority of Pakistanis are friendly, intelligent, hospitable, and peace-loving. Having met hundreds of them over the past few months, and having so far not been even slightly kidnapped, bombed or murdered, I cannot help but think they’re right, and sympathize with the frustration they must feel about being so grossly misrepresented to the rest of the world.

Junaid, the owner of our hotel, was no exception. In fact, to my mind he exemplifies all that is excellent about Pakistanis. He spent a few years studying in upstate New York, but, rather than staying to pursue the American Dream, as we assume all immigrants would want to do, given half the chance, he returned to Pakistan, to do his bit for his country – much like Moin Khan, and so many of the other people I’ve met in Lahore and Islamabad. He lost several family members, including his brother, in the 2005 earthquake, but, committed to his community and determined to bring something good out of something bad, he and some friends quickly established the Kaghan Memorial School, an awe-inspiring project that survives entirely through charitable donations and currently provides a world-class education (along with transport and medical care) to over three hundred local children.

The children are taught in English, by a mixture of local and international teachers, the aim being, Junaid explained, to put them on an equal footing with children educated in places like Islamabad and Lahore, and to give them the opportunity to become something other than shopkeepers and rickshaw drivers like their parents. It’s been a struggle in many ways. Getting a project like this off the ground isn’t easy, and sustaining it is even harder. Junaid pointed out that many of the pledges made by individuals and organizations in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake ultimately failed to materialize. It’s very easy to promise money – the challenge is finding a way to turn donations into actual functional projects, given the devastation of the area and its population. The Kaghan Valley isn’t an easy place to work at the best of times – it’s remote and hard to get to, and subject to constant landslides and floods.

Another challenge has been sustaining the funding for the five years (and counting) that the school’s been running. As we all know, the world tends to forget tragedies like earthquakes within a few months of the initial news blitz, even though it will take those on the ground at least a generation to get themselves back on their feet, economically, socially and psychologically.

“So how long do you think it’ll take,” asked my father, “before things are back to the way they were the day before the earthquake?”

“Oh, that’ll never happen,” answered Junaid. And we all realized how naive we’d been to think that things could just be picked up and put back together again. After such devastation, how could that be possible? Much like Bam, which haunted me so much a few months ago, the Kaghan Valley will always bear the scars of what happened in 2005. The community is rebuilding itself around them and in spite of them. Some lessons have been learned. (There are significant differences between pre-earthquake and post-earthquake building styles, for example.) Some things will never be resolved. (Many of the children at the school lost one or both parents in the earthquake.)

But of course, once the earthquake had disappeared from the headlines, most of the world forgot all about Kaghan, making it all the more difficult to muster the sustained annual funding necessary to keep the school running – and growing. Junaid and the other trustees employ five full-time volunteers in Islamabad, whose job it is to schmooze every company, charity and international organization they can think of, to try and raise money for the school. There have been some significant successes, including a computer lab donated by IBM, a playground supplied by UNICEF, and classrooms funded by diplomatic missions from various nations. But what the project really needs is cold hard cash – to pay the salaries of its almost 40 staff, to fuel the buses that ferry the children in from the upper and lower reaches of the valley, to buy medical supplies and to provide a daily meal for the children, every single one of whom, according to the most recent medical assessment, is suffering from malnutrition.

So the school runs a sponsor-a-child programme – for $500 a year, foreigners can cover the educational, nutritional and medical expenses of one child. At the moment roughly 50% of the children are sponsored, and the Kaghan Memorial Trust is trying hard to increase this. Another huge fundraiser is – and this was very exciting for me – an international mountain bike race that has been held in the Kaghan Valley for the last three years (photos here). This, of course, has the added bonus of bringing Westerners out to Pakistan, to witness things first hand, and for a practical demonstration of how much more there is to the country than doom and gloom and terrorism.

Of course, we were easily talked into paying a visit to the school. And all three of us were utterly captivated. These children can’t be easy to teach – they are all malnourished, many of them suffer from birth defects, and many of them will have illiterate parents – and yet, within five years of the school’s foundation, they are fluent in English, and falling over themselves to practice it. Wherever we went we were followed by crowds of little charmers, firing non-stop questions:

“Please miss, where are you from?”
“How do you like Pakistan?”
“What is your favourite colour?”
“Is this your mother?”
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“What is your favourite animal?”
“Will you play cricket with us?”

When my mother read The Hungry Caterpillar to a class of nine-year-olds they all shouted out with excitement when the caterpillar turned himself into a chrysalis, since they’d learned about this just the week before. When she sang them a song, they picked up the words and actions so quickly that half of them were joining in the second time round. At break time my father was hustled off to play cricket with the boys, while Mum and I were mobbed by girls, asking us endless questions, telling us all about their lives and families and studies, and trying to pull us in eight difference directions at once.

I’m not a particularly child-friendly person, but I found I was grinning from ear to ear the entire time we were there. And some of the kids were so bright and intelligent and well-spoken that it almost broke my heart. Will they really be able to compete on an equal footing with the city kids one day? Will they ever get to university? Or will they just become very well-educated shopkeepers and rickshaw drivers? I found myself wanting to scoop one particular little chatterbox up into my panniers, and take her back to the UK with me. And to come back in ten or fifteen years’ time, and see what’s become of them all.

Since I posted last night, I’ve received a great deal of sound advice and wisdom from a great many people. (Thank you.) And perhaps I should have realized that, after all I said about Kohistan, no one was going to say anything other than ‘take the bus!’, for fear of being the one who sent me into the arms of my kidnappers.

I think the advice that most successfully struck home was this:

Your indecision is that place inside you giving you space to think carefully before moving forward.  You have to consider your motives.  If you’re bowing to pride than you’re making a mistake.  If you’re wanting to be seen as a risk-taker then you’re thinking is only from the ego and therefore misplaced – many risk-takers don’t make it.  If you’re riding along on your luck then know that good fortune can fade and the way you got through Zahedan, Balochistan, Kohala, Abbottabad may not remain the norm.  Then ask yourself why you’re putting yourself at risk when you have so many more miles and so many more adventures ahead of you in the coming months and years.  Sometimes the decision to back down takes more courage than the decision to carry on.

Many more people assured me that their admiration wouldn’t falter in the slightest if I took the bus. “You’re fantastic and daring and mad anyway, nothing will change that as long as you’re ALIVE”, said my friend in Köln.

The most immediate result of this was that I started looking at bus timetables.

Another, less immediate result is that I’ve begun to question my motives. Why, after all, did I want to risk life and limb riding through Kohistan and maintaining my unbroken line? A lot of it, I realized, had to do with what people think of me, and the superhero image I sometimes like to think I present to the world. And with living up to the daredevil exploits of people who’ve done this sort of thing in the past. There’s an episode in one of Al Humphreys’ books where he asks all the experts’ advice on whether he should cycle through Columbia, and they all say it’s a very bad idea and that he’s likely to die, but he does it anyway, and has a marvellous time. I wanted that sort of narrative.

You’d think I’d have realized by now that there’s more to this expedition than what it looks like to the outside observer – or that, even though this is a major factor, I should leave myself space for something other than the tired old stories of overcoming fears and laughing in the face of danger. There is, of course, the deep, simple and exhilarating joy that I feel when I ride my bike. That’s very real, and the main reason I want to keep going. There is also the sense, which struck me a couple of weeks ago, during a conversation with my father, of being entirely at peace with that portion of my character which, in most people, will always be whispering “what if? what if? what if you had dared to pack it all in and cycle round the world when you had the chance?”. That’s a wonderful feeling.

But, even though I sometimes go to great lengths to emphasize the mundane elements of this trip and my character (how infrequently I wash, for example, and all those days I waste sitting around eating junk food and playing on the internet), I still kind of want people to think of me as a hero. Yes, I do want to be seen as a risk-taker, as the cyclist who kept the line unbroken, and as the plucky girl who triumphed where all the men failed. But this is my ego talking, plain and simple. And it shows a lack of imagination. I shouldn’t be trying to be the next Dervla Murphy, or the next Alastair Humphreys, or even the next Loretta Henderson. I shouldn’t be trying to shoehorn my journey into predetermined templates, or straining towards targets like the fastest, the first, the strongest or the bravest.

The person who wrote the paragraph I quoted above no doubt intended to flatter me when they said that it may well take more courage to back out than to carry on. But let’s leave courage out of this for a while. We know all about courage. Courage is boring, and gets too much airtime, and drowns out all the more interesting little fragments of my motivation. Let’s give ourselves some space to think about what other emotions (admirable or not) might be influencing our decisions.

And I have plenty of space right now. There aren’t any buses today, so I have at least one more (unplanned and unwelcome) day in Islamabad, with nothing left on my to do list, and my mind and legs going crazy for want of the bike and the road. I think I’m going to go and run up a hill, sit on top, look at the view, and give myself a good talking to.