Rakaposhi, towering in all its beauty above the Karakorum Highway
My Pakistani friend and me had just arrived at a local guesthouse off Karakorum Highway.
We were the first guests of the season, the place looked pristine.
When I routinely lifted the matraces, I found the remnants of Baygon eras,
little carapaces of the pest I dread most, bedbugs.
“No problem, sir!“ said the owner. “They are all dead. We sprayed, no bedbugs here.“
And now I also noticed that typical Baygon smell still lingering in the room.
So we opened the windows and the door to give the room some ventilation and went for lunch.
In an area with a serious percentage of the population being heavily armed, there is almost no danger of theft.
The guesthouse was situated at the foot of beautiful Mt. Rakaposhi, a majestice abode of ice and snow, towering above the highway with some respectable 7788 m, making it number 27 in the world´s elevation list, but also number three in the list of Pakistani Ultras.
If up to now, Ultras have been extreme football fans in your book, welcome to the club.
In mountaineering lingo, an Ultra, ultra-prominent peak, is a mountain summit with a topographic prominence of at least 1500 m, in other words, outstanding! 😂
With an uninterrupted vertical rise of about 6000 m it is even the tallest mountain in the world, if you apply the base to peak measurement method.
After lunch the owner of our guesthouse, happy to have his first guests of the season, offered us a tour up the slopes of Rakaposhi to see some glaciers. Like many of the offers we got by the locals during our journey due to my friend´s friendliness, this one was also free of charge.
I don´t know what´s it like nowadays, but in those days I had the impression that hospitality always came before money for the local mountain people. Of course guesthouse owners would charge you something for your stay, but there usually was some kind of treat free of charge or some favour they would do for you, like the guy volunteering to guide us to Rakaposhi.
So we followed some valley up the slope till we reached some glacier.
Now glaciers are tricky territory, with crevices deep enough to make you disappear forever, and ever changing with the seasons, but our guide knew his way around and I enjoyed my first walk on a glacier, an otherworldly experience. Suddenly our guide pointed up to the icy slopes of Rakaposhi, where we saw an elusive something crossing the white field of snow.
“Snow leopard“ our guide explained.
It was too far away for me to properly identify, but judging by the silhouette it sure was no goat or mountain sheep, so I believed him.
Soon it was time to retreat back to the safety and comfort, not that there was much comfort but surely better than sleeping outside, of our guesthouse.
I had been pushing it in a kind of altitude rush, trying to get us up the mountain as high as possible, as close to that beautiful majestic peak as possible and now we had to pay the price for it. We would have to descend quite fast in order to make it back before dark and the moment the sun disappeared in those mountains, the temperature started to drop pretty fast and we were simply not equipped for a night in the great outdoors.
Up to this point our hiking trips in the mountains had been on some easy paths, but the moment the going got tough, my friend chose to disappoint me.
While I was jumping down the slope from rock to rock, we were off the glacier already, back on safe rock territory, my Pakistani friend experienced serious problems going down, sometimes even sliding down somewhere on his buttocks, trying to navigate the terrain.
He was slowing us down!
Something I, being the immature hotspur I was at the time, did not take very well.
“Come on, mate, it´s getting dark“ I yelled at him.
“Sorry, I am no mountain goat like you!“ he sulked back.
Slowly, painfully slow, we continued our descent.
Our guide shook his head in disbelief.
I guess all his prejudices about Karachiwallas being a soft and fickle bunch felt verified.
I had found the streak of fat in my friend.
The streak of fat is a term I had learned from the Jack London novels and short stories about Kanada and Alaska I had devoured as an adolescent.
It was a metaphor for characteristics of people unfit for survival in the harsh and unforgiving environment of the goldrush. The guys who would fall out of the endles black line of porters up the white slopes of Chilkoot Pass, becoming black dots, dying in the snow.
My best mate and me even had a saying about that in school.
“We will do it like at Chilkoot, we´ll discard the weak!“
So me, being all tendons and muscles at the time, coming in with a BMI in the slightly underweight region, so no streak of fat, had no sympathy whatsoever for a guy flaking out about some little descent. I liked to push my limits, but obviously we had gone over his some time ago.
It is said that the sea and the mountains bring out the best and the worst in people and I was definitely showing my worst.
The guide joined in.
“Come on, hurry up. Animals will come“ he told my friend who felt really motivated and sat down.
“My feet are killing me, I have insoles!“ he apologized.
“What? Insoles? Why didn´t you tell me before?
You should never have gone up that fuckin´mountain in the first place!“ I shouted.
The guide started to look really worried and nasty thoughts of abandonment started creeping into my survival-of-the-fittest mind.
Somehow, under much lamenting by him who was now my ex-friend, we made it back to the road just before it became totally dark.
In utter darkness and most utter silence we followed the road back to the guesthouse.
The silent treatment continued till the next morning when the Karachiwalla decided he had had enough of me and went back to Karachi and I continued pushing north toward the Chinese border in search of glory and adventure.
Fear not, my dear followers and ecotrain friends, after years in an ashram with yoga and meditation, I´m a changed man! 😂
Now all this meditation doesn´t mean I won´t get angry at all if you give me a reason, but I will calm down faster than when I was still in bad motherfucker territory. 😎
Since this has now become a serious series of even more serious travelling, check out the last part too.
There you will also find a link to the previous parts.
For more inspiring stories and a group of inspiring and supportive people check out @ecotrain.