Nanga Parbat
To my knowledge the only 8000er in Pakistan, you can see from the highway.
“If you find a woman in the mountains who is injured, has had an accident, fallen down somewhere or something, don´t help her!“ my Pakistani friend lectured me.
“Don´t touch her, her people will kill her, maybe also you. There is always somebody in the mountains who sees something. Go to the next village, tell them that there is one of their women lying injured over there and continue your trek.“
When I looked at him in utter disbelief he told me a gruesome story.
In a refugee camp close to the Afghan border a woman was about to give birth. When complications occured, the other women called for a Pakistani doctor for assistance. The doctor helped to deliver the baby. When the men returned in the evening, the women told them about the complications and the assistance by the doctor. The men then went off and killed the doctor, because obviously he had seen the woman naked and touched her.
“Those Afghanis are very primitive.“ my friend concluded.
In that moment I decided to definitely heed his advice if I ever came across such a situation.
During our journey through the wild and wonderful mountain regions of Pakistan my friend and me ventured into quite a few places without any Western tourists during our trip. While I was a bit of an attraction there myself, it was him being the icebreaker.
In an area like Kohistan, which my Lonely Planet guidebook described as “a traditionally hostile district“ and advised “don´t venture into the neighboring valleys, unless accompanied by a local dignitary“, it sure helped that he spoke Urdu.
Though of course the mountain people in Pakistan have their own languages, nearly everybody, men that is, because as a foreigner you don´t get to talk to local women in that archaic society, spoke Urdu.
Also the local people were very happy about my friend´s jovial attitude toward them, him talking with everybody about everything.
The locals were under the impression, and maybe that´s true in general, that the Karachiwallas (residents of Karachi) were an arrogant, condescending bunch in their behavior toward the locals. So when they finally met a Karachiwalla who was generally interested in their life and customs, they really opened up. Many interesting encounters resulted from his warm and friendly demeanor.
We were invited by some shepherds to accompany them and their herds to their high altitude pastures, which were in Afghanistan, and this would have surely been a great adventure but collided with my visa restrictions.
We were given a free ride in a minibus by some pilgrims returning from Mecca.
We were paddled around a bit on some river in one of those traditional boats made of animal hide, probably yak.
One day, we were hiking on some narrow mountain path when we heard some commotion around the corner ahead of us. Then a guy came around the corner and said something to my friend, indicating to us that we should wait.
“There are women ahead of us.“ my friend told me.
"So?"
"Just wait, will you?" my friend answered a bit tense.
After some time the guy gave us the ok to proceed.
When we walked around the corner we saw a bunch of women and girls squatting by the path, facing downhill away from it, looking to the floor heads bowed, hair and faces completely hidden under their shawls.
"Don´t look at them!" my friend said.
I obliged though I thought the whole exercise was more about them not looking at us than us at them.
But in a region where men were prepared at any moment to kill and die for their honour, you better behave.
After we had passed them, I heard some commotion again and turned around. They were all hurrying downhill, as if the devil was after them, except for the last one, probably the youngest, a girl of maybe thirteen years of whom curiosity had got the upper hand. She stood, in pure defiance of the laws that ruled her life, upright in the middle of the path and looked at me.
It was such a beautiful moment!
Two rebels, two siblings in spirit, revolting against some unforgiving archaic customs.
After a few seconds she turned around and ran after her sisters.
It is moments like this during my travels, I will never forget.
Sometimes some split second encounter can be one of the most memorable.
So thanks to my Pakistani friend I could come into contact with the locals and their culture, which made my time there so much more rewarding.
But then, one day something happened, which in retrospect I am not particularly proud of, but in those days, at age 28, in my physical prime but with the EQ of a toddler, I was a bit of a bad motherfucker.
Though Pulp Fiction came out only in 94, I watched it in a cinema in Singapore in 95, and I never owned a wallet like this, I definitely belonged to that illustrious group in my youth.
Since this has now become a serious series of even more serious travelling, check out the last part too.
There you will also find the links to the other seven parts.
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