Saturday 28 April 2012

Spectacle

Several things go wrong as I try to free myself from the clutches of the tiny rickshaw that has just dropped me off at Lahore's train station. While the rest of my body steps onto the pavement, my right foot seems to have decided it isn't quite ready yet to leave. Miraculously, I manage not to fall flat on my face. My foot, however, in a last-minute attempt to catch up with its companion, bounces off the kerb, leaving me with a bloody toe and a flip-flop that hangs limply around my ankle. I pick it up. It seems my shoemaking skills leave room for improvement. The safety pin that was meant to hold thong and sole together has broken in two.

Who needs words with a smile like that?
I'm on my way to Wagah Checkpoint. Each day just before sunset a selection of India and Pakistan's finest perform a wonderfully pompous closing-of-the-border ceremony. Cheered on by an ecstatic crowd that watches the spectacle from purpose-built grandstands, soldiers on both sides of the border parade up and down a narrow strip in peacock-like attire, moustaches pomaded to perfection. After a good deal of huffing and puffing the flags are lowered and the gates slammed shut. Sounds like a tourist trap if ever there was one, but a tourist trap I wouldn't miss for the world.

I look around, uncertain what to do. A cobbler would come in handy. The moment that thought crosses my mind I spot one at the edge of the square. He is surrounded by piles of old shoes, nondescript tools, orange peel and various odds and ends. He smiles as I limp towards him. Without speaking he reaches for my flip-flop. I sit down next to him. With great dexterity, using his feet like an extra pair of hands, he sets to work, cutting a piece of fabric from a long black strap, sewing it onto the end of the rubber thong and then pulling it through the opening in the sole. He looks up and smiles at my amazement. Over the years, his teeth have migrated to the corners of his mouth, leaving a triangular gap in the middle.

The entire operation doesn't take more than sixty seconds. I fumble for some money and hand him all the change I can find. Fifty rupees, it's not much. Still, the cobbler seems satisfied. I half expect him to say something, but all he does is point at the sky and smile his keyhole smile.

I put the flip-flop back on my foot and marvel at the craftsmanship. Normally, I would have headed straight for the nearest shoe shop. After all, replacing is easier than repairing. But, looking at the stitched-on fabric peeping through my toes, it seems as though this piece of rubber has acquired some kind of personality of its own. It's been given a new lease of life.

I say goodbye to the old cobbler and turn around to find a ride to the border, knowing full well that no amount of stomping around in shiny uniforms will impress me as much as what I've just seen.

Monday 23 April 2012

The Interview

Taking the Punjab by storm
Cycling the world won't exactly send the press after you to turn your incredible story of courage and hardship into a three-column front-page article. If it's fame you're after, you might be better off walking. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, when someone with a press pass around his neck practically threw himself in front of my bike the other day to shoot me a few questions. Well, two questions, really.

'What's your name?' he asked, duly writing down the answer. 'And what is your nationality?' That was it. 'Keep an eye out for tomorrow's edition of the Daily Express,' he said as he walked back to his car.

Next morning someone showed me the paper. The story hadn't exactly made it to the front page, but the journalist had done a splendid job of beefing up his material. I was reported as saying: 'Pakistan is a great country. Its people and its nature are absolutely stunning. I love Pakistan and Pakistan loves me.'

Now that's solid journalism for you. I wonder if he would be interested in doing a little ghost writing on the side...

Saturday 21 April 2012

Road to Solitude

The police are your friend. I've always thought it a pretty high standard to set yourself, but in Pakistan the police really do their best to live up to it. Even though I was a stranger on a bike they fed me, listened to me, gave me a bed and protected me from invisible threats. And what did I do in return? I scowled and devised ways to get rid of them.

Our first encounter was in the busy junction town of Rohri, right across the Indus River. During my ten-day stay in Quetta, a frontier city full of bushy beards and black burkas, I had imagined Rohri to be some sort of gateway to freedom. All I needed to do was hop on a Lahore-bound train, watch the last part of Balochistan glide past and then, on the other side of the Indus, I would be able to cycle again. The mere thought made me giddy with anticipation.

At last...
Life, however, is rarely as straightforward as we would like. Procuring the right train ticket was easy enough, and I even managed to show up on time early next morning. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said of the Jaffar Express, the diesel-powered turtle on wheels that was supposed to take us to Rohri. At nine o'clock, the time indicated on my ticket, nothing happened. At ten, still no train.

The people around me remained composed. As the hours passed no one lost his temper or even so much as complained. On the contrary, people laughed and talked, sat down for lunch and on the whole seemed to be having a jolly good time. The sheep someone had brought along seemed equally unfazed as it continued to nibble on some freshly cut grass. It was an admirable display of calm acceptance. I thought of what happens back home if a train arrives ten minutes latethe buzz of frustration shooting across the platform, the whispered obscenities as people realise that they will miss their connecting train. Here in Quetta, a mammoth delay was accepted as a fact of life.

'We can't spend our life in perpetual frustration,' a young business man I met on the platform told me. 'This is Pakistan. The only thing you can rely on is that nothing works properly.' He then went on to explain the dynamics behind the frequent power outages that cripple the countrya phenomenon called 'loadshedding'. What it comes down to is that the national government, tied up in various embezzlement schemes, simply can't foot the monthly energy bill, leaving the power companies no other option but to take entire cities off the grid for up to twelve hours a day. To make matters worse, an estimated twenty to thirty percent of electricity is stolen.

At five pm our train came rumbling in. Having lifted all the boxes, crates, pieces of furniture, motorcycles plus one bicycle and one sheep into the luggage compartment, we found our seats and finally took off. The journey was blissfully uneventful. I shared my cookies with the man sitting next to me, he gave me some of his peanuts, and that was about it. At nine we retired to our berths, where I spent a couple of sleepless hours imagining which parts of my bike would be bent beyond repair by the unsecured motorcycles in the luggage compartment.

We got to Rohri in the dead of night. The town, however, was up and about. The ubiquitous hole-in-the-wall shops selling biscuits and soft drinks were open, and an old man behind a cooker was whipping up one egg-filled pancake after the other. I found myself a dank little room with a charpoy (a wooden bedframe strung with rope), returned for one of those greasy pancakes and then tried to catch some sleep.

Someone must have tipped off the police when I put the panniers on the bike a few hours later, because they caught up with me before I had the chance to turn the first corner. For a moment I feared I would have to relive the entire parcel experience again. 'I'm here to cycle,' I told them coldly. To my relief they just wanted to keep an eye on me. It must have been a dreadful bore for them, having to watch my heaving back all day long. Then again, I never asked for a police escort. I so desperately didn't want one that I kept hoping one of their tyres would blow out.

Yes, it really says 'elite' on their shirts
That didn't happen, of course, and as the sun crept back towards the horizon I tried to make it clear that I needed to find a place for the night. 'Next town,' they smiled. 'Guesthouse.' This soon became some kind of magic spell to keep me on the bike. Each time we reached that 'next town', my armed friends would tell me to keep at it a bit longer, until I realised they were trying to push me out of Sindh and into the next province.

It was pitch dark when we reached the provincial border. My police escort stopped and clearly wanted me to do the same, but, smelling freedom, I shot straight past the checkpoint only to nearly crash into a waiting delegation of the Punjabi police force. These fellows tried to pull the same trick on me with some vague promise of a hotel thirty kilometres down the road. Had I listened to them, I would have ended up in China without ever stopping for the night.

Too exhausted to feel any real anger, I knew I had to raise my voice. Somehow, a fit of rage always seems to work in Islamic countries, so I thundered that they could either take me to the nearest police station or bugger off to let me pitch my tent in peace. It worked like a charm. I was swiftly escorted to a nearby police station, a lovely little courtyard affair with a trellised gate and a few tables and benches under the open night sky. Two inmates watched me from behind the bars of their cell door. I collapsed in a chair and had to make a conscious effort not to break down in tears. The long wait on the train platform, the eleven-hour journey to Rohri, the lack of food and sleep, the frustration of being followed and misled. Something snapped.

I woke up the next morning feeling my same old self again. We agreed to make a try for Chani Goth, a small village where I would be able to stay at another police station. Knowing what to expect made the 170-kilometre ride a breeze, although it isn't easy to pace yourself with four pairs of eyes prodding you on.

The Chani Goth police station turned out to be a near-perfect replica of the one I had left that morning. Even the bathroom fittings were the same. There weren't any inmates this time, only a man with a gash in his head the size of a tennis ball. He was filing a report. The man sitting next to him looked as though he wanted to hide under the table. Not too difficult to figure out what had happened there.

The next day was the last of our uneasy coexistence. A few kilometres before Bahawalpur I felt something wasn't right. I looked over my shoulder. No police. For a moment I was confused. What had happened? The flat tyre I had been praying for? Had they crashed their car into a lamp post out of sheer boredom? Frankly, I couldn't care less. I whooped so hard I nearly flew over the handlebars.

Saturday 7 April 2012

Parcel Delivery

Cycle tourists are a childish lot. At least, the puritan wing I belong to. Most of us are good-natured and well-mannered. We try not to give the finger to every truck driver who nudges us off the road, and we never say 'Papua New Guinea' when again someone screams from an open car window: 'What is your country!' But there is one thing we simply can't handle, one thing that makes us twitch: fellow cyclists who admit to taking a bus or hitching a ride when the going gets tough. 'Why?' we laugh nervously. 'Why on earth would you want to do that?' This is usually met with a counterquestion: 'Why not? Isn't this supposed to be something you enjoy? Why freeze your arse off or endure hundreds of kilometres of mind-numbing desert emptiness if you can take a bus somewhere nice?'

It's hard to argue with this line of reasoning. Of course, harsh conditions aren't something you actively seek out. But there seems little sense in running away from them either. Frantic traffic, buckets of rain, a long slog uphill: I've found that there is something to be gained from the suffering and the setbacks, even though it may not be very obvious when the road seems endless and all you want to do is pass out on a soft bed. Making it to the end of a particularly nasty day is infinitely more rewarding than a week of sunshine and tailwinds. Call me a masochist, but I feel you can only fully appreciate the good times when you've been through the what-on-earth-was-I-thinking-when-I-started-this times. In this respect, the relationship many of us have with our bicycle is not unlike a marriage.

A soldier acting as kickstand
You can imagine my dismay, then, when upon leaving Akbar's Tourist Guesthouse I was met by a soldier who first pointed at my bike and then, grinning, at the pickup truck behind him. I had been anticipating this moment for months. Bam is the gateway to Balochistan, a vast swath of desert that occupies parts of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For years, the authorities have been trying to knock down a tribal uprising fueled by drug trafficking and kidnappings. Foreigners are allowed to enter the area only with a police escort. Cycling is out of the question.

Of course I put up a show. I acted surprised and shocked and tried to make the soldier see that I really didn't need his services. He seemed unimpressed. Then I went on explaining that I'd already seen my way through one or two hairy situations, that I had a good feeling about Balochistan, that I had cycled every single inch from Holland to Bam and that I really wanted to continue that uninterrupted line all the way to Beijing. The soldier listened patiently and then indicated the pickup again. I sighed, contemplated crying and then handed over the bike.

Settling into the passenger seat, I found I was unable to feel suitably annoyed, let alone work myself into a rage. Neither did I feel disappointed. The soldier and I had performed the parts we were supposed to play and now we were ready to move on. Annoyance was something that would come later, building up gradually over the course of the day, culminating in a fit of anger late at night.

That moment was still far away when, after a solid three kilometres, we left the highway and stopped at an army compound. I was under the impression that we would cover the 450 kilometres to the border in one go, but the soldier clearly wanted me and my bike away from the truck. Surrounded by my own luggage, morose soldiers gawking at me as if I had just crash-landed a flying saucer into their courtyard, I felt a bit lost. I smiled feebly and thought how nice it would be if I could just hop on my bike and ride off. Suddenly a commanding officer walked up and told me to do just that. 'Go,' was all he said. For a moment I looked at him in the same way the soldiers were looking at me. Then I got my stuff together as fast as I could and took off with a big smile on my face.

Unfortunately, this state of bliss was rather short-lived. Riding out of Bam, I was soon accompanied by two soldiers on a small motorbike. I said hello and asked them if they were to accompany me all the way to the border. They nodded. It seemed a fair deal, although I wondered where we would spend the night. A police station? An army compound? My two-person tent? Soon I learned that providing reliable information to foreigners on bicycles isn't part of the Iranian army curriculum. After fifteen kilometres I was told to stop. We waited in the blazing sun. Nothing but rocks and sand and a single straight line of asphalt that cut the grey monotony in half. Then a pickup truck materialised and a fresh batch of soldiers started lifting my stuff onto the truck bed.

On our way to Quetta
This pattern repeated itself several times that day. I would be transferred to a new vehicle, we would drive for thirty minutes or so, and then there would be a lot of waiting around in the middle of nowhere for God knows how long. The lack of information, the banter, the blaring music coming from the car stereo, the fact that they were eating my cookiesit all got on my nerves. In the end they got pretty fed up with me too, I think, because suddenly I was put on a bus to Zahedan, the last city before the border, leaving me to wonder why they hadn't done so in the first place.

When I got to Zahedan it was dark. Afraid I would have to deal with the army again I jumped on my bike and set off for the city centre, on the lookout for a place to stay. I was growing increasingly tired and desperate, but every single hotel I tried turned me down for no apparent reason. Eventually, I was spotted by a soldier in a candy shop and taken to a compound a few streets away. No one had a clue what to do with me. Phone calls were made, people were walking in and out and the only boy who spoke some English was more interested in playing me his home-recorded music than telling me what was going on.

After a couple of hours it dawned on one of them that there was a luxury hotel on the edge of town that accepted foreigners. In fact, it turned out to be the only hotel in town to accept foreigners. Weaving my way through Zahedan's backstreets, my eyes fixed on the taillights of my escort, I got there not long before midnight. When I finally opened the door of the little chalet I had been appointed, having forked out a lump of cash that normally would have seen me through a fairly comfortable four or five days, I was greeted by used towels, dirty linen and a full ashtray. Having a go at the hotel manager was probably the best moment of the day.

The next morning I decided on a different strategy. If they preferred to treat me like a parcel then so be it, I would behave like a bloody parcel. As soon as I left the hotel the escort merry-go-round started spinning again. I let it all happen. There was no option but to resign myself to the fact that I was no longer in charge of this trip.

At two in the afternoon we hit the border, where I bought three bus tickets: one for myself, one for my bicycle (which didn't get its own seat but was strapped to the roof) and one for my bodyguarda shriveled, toothless man who kept stroking his rifle. Thirteen bone-rattling hours later the parcel was delivered to its address: Quetta.