Exit Row Seating

Last Leg

2006-12-21T18:32:00.000-06:00

In an hour I'll leave for Sydney's airport to board my third last flight on this trip. Four months have flown by, it seems. I'm ready to return home. I'm not quite ready to return to work, but I have about 10 days to become ready.

Denver airport plans to start limited operations at noon on Friday, 22 December. I hope those limited operations include the flights I'm booked on. I arrive from LAX just after 17h00 local time and depart for Winnipeg an hour later - according to my schedule.

It would also be nice if the system that just hit Denver with a pile of snow moved up to Winnipeg and arrived shortly after I will. But that would just be a bonus.

It's been a great time out here. I made the right decision in planing this trip at this time in my life. Thanks to all of you who have been praying for me and writing to me, keeping in touch. I actually feel like I've got to know some of you better while I've been gone and we've been forced to communicate over e-mail in concentrated packets of thought.

But face to face meetings are always preferred.

See many of you quite soon.

Peace.

Notes from Australia 3 - Impressions

2006-12-20T22:08:00.000-06:00

Naturally, Australians ask about my impressions of Australia, this being my first trip. The impressions have been subtle. Apart from the accents, great coffee, exotic flora and fauna and fine weather, this could be a large Canadian city. People are busy, but not too hurried. Apparently Sydney has the same opinion of itself relative to Australia as Toronto does of itself relative to Canada - enough said (after all, I'm just from a prairie outpost - we don't even have paved roads or schools and still hunt buffaloes to feed and clothe ourselves).

Generally, I have tried to compare Australia to Canada. Canada's and Australia's beginnings were significantly different, but both started off as British colonies and maintain a relationship with Britain and Her Majesty. White Australians seem more distinctly British, however, than do Canadians. There's more of a sense that a white aristocracy still exists that holds some allegiance to Britain. Like Canadians, Australians seem generally good natured and content with their place in the world. Politically, as you know, Australia has recently aligned itself with the B. administration and that perturbs many Australians in a similar way that some Canadians are dismayed with our current government's political leaning.

I get a sense that, if possible, rural Australia is even more isolated from the major cities and more sparsely populated than rural Canada. The difference is that you can drive to most of the isolated parts of Australia.

Quite a few of the 20-somethings I've met have been to North America and Europe - better traveled than many of my acquaintances of the same age and socio-economic profile in Canada and the U.S. Perhaps that is because of Australia's great distance from anywhere.

So those are some of my impressions from my short time here. Australians, especially, feel free to comment.

Notes from Australia 2 - Food

2006-12-20T21:33:00.000-06:00

Food. I love food. And I've eaten plenty of great food in Australia so let me list a few of the highlights:

1. Coffee. I've traveled a bit in the last few years and always wonder, before I arrive in a country, how the coffee will be. For the last few years in Canada, I've been drinking a lot of Starbucks, so that was my benchmark.
Finland met my expectations: good coffee was available everywhere (prepared in bulk through a drip filter, but much better than your average cup of Canadian coffee, and more mellow than Starbucks), but a little expensive at 1 euro 80 for a cup the size of a Tim Horton's small.
On the contrary, I was most disappointed with Norwegian coffee when I travelled there 3 years ago.
Going to Pakistan I knew what to expect. They don't drink coffee so it's not available at shops or hotels (even the posh places serve instant prepared in a teapot). But my host, a man of means, stocked his place with Starbucks beans and each morning I ground 20 or 30 beans and brewed my fix in a French press - bonus.
In Afghanistan, as you know if you've read my blog regularly, I was introduced to an espresso bar run by an American, also stocked with Starbucks where I could completely escape from the dust on the street and be transported to my comfortable life from far away - nice.
But this post is supposed to be about Australia. Thanks to the many Italian immigrants, I understand, the Australian's have developed a taste for Italian, espresso-based coffee. Espresso machines abound. Every cafe (and there are plenty of these serving great sandwiches on Italian bread (like Focaccia)) has one. Even gas stations, McDonalds and climbing gyms have espresso machines. You couldn't get drip coffee if you wanted it. There are Starbucks here in Sydney, but after the first couple of days I realized that you can get much better coffee on every street corner. So I am impressed. Now I know why cappuccinos were so important to an Australian family that worked in Pakistan with my parents-they brought out an ingenious stove-top espresso machine, complete with a milk steamer. The only drawback here is that espresso-based coffee is more expensive per cup, around $3.00 (Australian Dollars, about 90 cents Canadian) at most places - but entirely worth it.

2. Chinese Food. My exposure to Chinese food has been very limited. And I know few people who are connoisseurs of the cuisine. My host's father, however, cooks Chinese quite proficiently. So, for the first time in my life, I have been treated to a home-cooked Chinese meal, simple noodle stir-fries, baked pork, dumplings that taste genuine with subtle broth and soy/fish sauce accents. On Wednesday night last week (13th), I went with my friend and a group from his church to a Chinese restaurant in Ashfield where we had fabulous pork and cilantro dumplings dipped in soy sauce mixed with a rich chili sauce - excellent.

3. The Belgian Beer Cafe, Adelaide. This must be my third mention of this place, so you can guess it was great. Belgian beer (I had a dark, chocolaty Leffe) is always fine. The feature at this restaurant is mussels, boiled in various broths with onions, mushrooms and white wine served in hug pots with chips (french fries, thick cut) and whipped mayonnaise. I've never had mussels before. These were great. Such simple food that is so satisfying.

4. Chocolate. A bigger chain of chocolate cafes is Max Brener. On Monday I had a mocha - melted dark chocolate mixed into an espresso with steamed milk. Then yesterday I went to the Lindt cafe (that's right, of the Lindt chocolate makers from Switzerland) where I had a cappuccino graced with shreds of dark chocolate and a chocolate hazelnut cake. The person I was with had a hot chocolate consisting of melted dark chocolate and steamed milk served separately so you can mix your own drink.

5. The Australian Hotel, the Rocks, Sydney. Here I went for another Australian experience - beer and pizza with exotic Australian toppings. Like saltwater crocodile. The crocodile, white, slightly rubbery strips of meat was married with coconut milk, sweet basil and red capsicum - not bad. We also had pizza topped with roast duck - amazing. Our beer of choice was Little Creatures pale ale (not available in Winnipeg, unfortunately), a great ale with a perky fruit taste up front and a crisp bitter finish.

And I'll wrap this post up on that note.

Notes from Australia 1

2006-12-20T20:17:00.000-06:00

Well, I've been off the air for some time. A lot is happening down here, but I haven't had much space to sit down and write posts on my blog. So today, the day before I leave Australia, I'll try to give you a brief update on the two weeks I've spent here.

On Monday (19th) I had an Australian moment. I had just taken the train back to the CBD (Central Business District of Sydney - we call it the downtown, I think) and alighted at Circular Quay. The day was perfect - sunny and probably 25 degrees with a breeze coming off the water. I knew the cricket must almost be finished and was eager to know if Australia had won. Sure enough, I arrived at the giant outdoor TV on the East side of the Quay to see the Australian team involved in a giant group hug, stumps waving wildly in their hands and the commentators repeating the fact that Australia had won the Ashes. Ricky Ponting grabbed a flag from a fan in the crowed and trotted his victory lap around the grounds (Waca, as the Perth cricket ground is called - I think it stands for something) hugging various teammates as he passed them. And there I was, leaning up against a palm tree surrounded by sunbathers on the grass and suited business people toting briefcases with the Bridge and Opera House looming behind me, participating in a celebration of national pride - a muted national pride, not overwhelming or obnoxious, just strong enough to give me a feeling of being Australian for a fleeting moment.

Then I went to the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) to look at large squares of Belgium linen painted with areas of solid black, brown and white outlined with white dots - genius :)

That done, I bought a milkshake at Copenhagen's and boarded the train to the Inner Western Suburbs.

That's just one day out of 14 so I'll spit the rest of my notes into different posts.

Adelaide

2006-12-11T22:23:00.000-06:00

In Adelaide, a city of a million or so, it's still called the town hall. The streets are wide and quite. There's a vast ring of park land around the downtown. The grass along the river is green. Saturday was high summer and Monday late fall. The beer is good, not to mention the wine. The time was rich with old and new friends and mussels at a Belgian beer cafe. On the flight home JetStar insisted I leave my barely touched "flat-white" coffee at the gate so I ordered another on the plan and ended up paying $3 for a cup of hot water and a coffee bag.

and...24 hours later

2006-12-04T17:58:00.000-06:00

Yes. Here I am, in one piece, brain intact and feeling awake, in Sydney.

I must report, first off, that I secured an exit row seat on BA009 from London, Heathrow to Sydney. It wasn't just an emergency exit by which I sat, it was a full-blown exit giving me more room to stretch my legs then I could use. See, it pays to arrive at the airport 10 hours before your flight.

I won't say much about the flight. It was long, broken by a stop in Bangkok where we got out for a 2 km walk to a security screening area and back to the point where we started, to re-board the aircraft. The new airport, on the outside, is quite striking. On the inside it is steel gray - everything- and has the air of a medical research centre, or maybe a high-tech, ultra-modern prison block.

In Sydney, I was whisked through the efficient passport control area. My bag was waiting for me And then I got to customs. There too, queue control was well engineered, but then I got to the customs agent, a stout Fijian woman who made mild small talk about driver's license while laying all of my earthly possessions out on her stainless steel counter top and picking through them, asking me this and that - trying to figure out if my excursions to Afghanistan and Pakistan (well known for all kinds of things you should never mention in an airport or to a customs agent) were legitimate. In the end (sans strip-search, I was relieved to find) I was declared clean and quited the area.

So that's that. I'm at my host's house, I've had another cup of coffee and will sit down and watch a bit of cricket, perhaps.

Discover Christmas at the Airport

2006-12-03T10:15:00.000-06:00

I'm in Heathrow working on expensive wireless time supplied by British Telecommunications (or BT for short). I scanned terminal 4 for an electrical outlet and spotted one. I set down with my Starbucks (thank you Globalization :) and proceeded to dole out my MasterCard number for this internet time.

I was looking around absently at one point and realized that right in front of me is a glass display of some festive lingerie. Around the top of the display reads the enigmatic phrase: "Discover Christmas at the Airport."

Christmas - I had pleasantly forgotten about its imminent commercial approach in Pakistan. Suddenly I emerge from the 4-mile long line at the intra-terminal security check and there are red things and tinsel and large posters announcing that it is now time to BUY!! because Christmas is coming. Starbucks is now red and green and peppermint and gingerbread syrups (the drinks they enhance, actually)emphasizedsised. And red thongs are on display with Christmas tree ornaments under halogen lights.

Outside the sun is setting through the London smog and lighting the vast side panels of the 747-400 located directly outside my window. I thought it was a mountain again and snapped a few.

Anyway. here I am, back in the "free world".

Yesterday I bought V. S. Naipaul's "Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey" written just after the Iranian revolution based on travels to 4 Moslem nations to try to understand the revolutionary aspect of Islam and what it is that unites (and divides) Moslems to create space for themselves in the world. A world that the "free world" wishes would smarten up, see the light, start consuming like civilized people and relegate religion to personal spirituality or simply dispense with it all together.

My week in Islamabad was perfect for debriefing after my two months in Gilgit (which, on reflection, appear as the blink of an eye). And a topic that came up more than once (almost in every significant conversation I had over the week) was: is it possible for development workers to see beyond their ethno-centric paradigm? In other words, is it possible for me to stop thinking of development (at a core, sub-conscious level) as "them" moving in my direction?

This dilemma was highlighted in conversation I had just last night with an American working on dispersing a huge amount of money from USAID to reconstruct heath care and educational facilities in three areas of Pakistan hardest hit by the October 05 earthquake. He recounted a conversation with a highly educated Pakistani working in Geneva. In Geneva, his children are getting a fine education in a local school. He realizes, that even at the ages of 10 and 12 they are learning to think much more critically than he did in all his years of post-secondary education in Pakistan. So he is reluctant to bring them back to Pakistan (though torn at the same time because he knows that they will likely be hard-pressed to return to Pakistan in the long run if they complete their secondary education in Switzerland). My American friend expressed dismay at the vast amount of human capital that is "going to waste" because of the deficient education system in Pakistan. And there our conversation came to an awkward pause. What do we say? What can be done? The scale of the problem is too large. The prospects for a solution seem grim. "They" will continue to suffer because they are not being educated like "us".

Now, I personally agree that a liberal education emphasizing critical thinking and analysis is extremely valuable. And I can see the disadvantages of an education based on rote and a command structure where the teacher is "above" the student and can't be questioned. But is the answer simply to export "our" system to Pakistan? My friend and I didn't assume this to be so. And it doesn't seem like many other answers are being suggested.

Development in Pakistan is ethno-centric, politically motivated, inefficiently distributed and makes only small differences to the vast majority of Pakistanis. Of course that's a blanket statement, made by disproportionately inexperienced person (me). But this appears to be so.

I could go on, but I realize this post is drawing out. Comment if you will. Again' I certainly donÂ't know the answers to these questions.

this is it from Pakistan

2006-12-02T08:48:00.000-06:00

So, I'm back from Abbotabad. This trip I realized that I'm still quite fond of the town. A billboard on the way in advertises: "A town of schools and pines".

I took lunch on Friday with good friends at an old restaurant that continues to serve great northern Pakistani cuisine. I had chicken tikka, for the first time on this trip, together with another flatbread variety - rogani naan, thicker than ever with butter drizzled on top, lots of sesame seems. The air was grey and cool. The hills were green and close and coal smoke hung in the air. Leaves from stately trees carpet the vast grounds of the renowned Army Burn Hall School for Boys.

In the evening I met an old family friend. We walked in the chill night through twisting back lanes and suddenly, into the warmth of a cheery home with a gas heater burning and hot food waiting and Swedish peppering the air and conversation. Later we talked about Canada and what all this curfuffle is about regarding Quebec "as a nation within Canada" and then about how Swedes feel about how Fins feel about Sweden. Still later, I sat and chatted about holistic development, and then I turned off the heater in my room and lay under the covers in the dark listening to the night watchman whistle.

Back in Islamabad the clouds hang low. I meet a retired Brigadier (an old friend of old friends) for lunch. He has invited his nephew and we chat over decent food in a stodgy club.

Then I pack, say thanks to my hosts who are off for dinner, publish this post, turn off my computer, the last thing to pack and arrange a taxi for the morning.

Thanks for sticking with me thus far good readers.

More from Down Under.

Allahhafiz.

On I go...

2006-11-30T00:30:00.000-06:00

(at Hispar)

Today I handed in my report, the culmination of the work I did in Gilgit. That felt good and right. A friend living in London suggested I celebrate "with a cold beer, or whatever is appropriate". What was very appropriate, and accessible today was hot chai and a samosa fresh out of the oil. The price was right as well, CAN$0.40 for the lot.

Then I hailed a taxi and rode back to my hosts' house reveling in the warm sunshine and the green. And trying not to breathe the smog.

I'm dashing up to my old hometown, the military and colonial Abbotabad tomorrow to visit family friends and then back down to Islamabad on Saturday for an early departure on Sunday morning.

I will attempt more summing up at a later date, but I will say now that I am entirely this trip was exactly the right thing for me to do at the right time in my life. The pace has been right. Time allotments in each place have been sufficient. And I expect that the last segment Down Under and will follow this pattern.

Cricket, and other things...

2006-11-28T10:30:00.000-06:00

On recommendation from an American friend working in Pakistan who recently traveled to Australia, I bought Bill Bryson's "Down Under" (2000). I don't know if you've read Bill Bryson before. My house in Gilgit contained a copy of his book "The Lost Continent", about the American Midwest. I read a few pages and thought his satire was over the top. I put it down.

But "Down Under" is well crafted, easy, informative and devastatingly funny. Much of his humour is self-deprecating to the extreme. For example, he goes on for a page describing his unsavoury demeanor when sleeping in a car. And I nearly died laughing. Of course, in a book about Australia, by an American, there must be a section on cricket. And, to be sure, Bryson shows no mercy. With cricket it's just too easy. I will simply quote Bryson here. Let me know if you think its funny. I nearly wet myself.

Bryson is driving West from Canberra to Adelaide on the Sturt Highway. As he gets further and further away from "civilization" he begins,

"As if to emphasize the isolation, all the area radio stations began to abandon me...Eventually the radio dial presented only an interrupted cat's hiss of static, but for one clear spot near the end of the dial. At first I thought that's all it was - just an empty clear spot-but then I realized I could hear the faint shiftings and stirrings of seated people, and after a quiet pause a voice, calm and reflective said:
'Plichard begins his long run in from short stump. He bowls and . . . oh, he's out! Yes, he's got him. Longwilley is caught leg-before in middle slops by Grattan. Well, now what do you make of that, Neville?'
'That's definitely one for the books, Bruce. I don't think I've seen offside medium slow fast pace bowling to match it since Baden-Powell took Rangachangabanga for a maiden ovary at Bangalore in 1948.'
I had stumbled into the surreal and rewarding world of cricket on the radio" (pp.144-145).

Okay, let me interject just for a second before going on. If you happen to know nothing about cricket in the first place this won't be quite as funny. Part of what makes it so funny is that all Bryson had to do was to tweek the real terms and names ever so slightly to turn the commentary he heard into this absolutely nonsensical rant. On we go...

"Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it out to centre field; and that there, after a minute's pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt towards the pitchers mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to handle radioactive isotopes and a mattress strapped to each leg"(pg.145).

"Listening to cricket on the radio is like listening to two men sitting in a rowing boat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren't biting"(pg.146)

"'So here comes Stovepipe to bowl on this glorious summer's afternoon at the MCG,' one of the commentators was saying now. 'I wonder if he'll chance an offside drop scone here or go for the quick legover. Stovepipe has an unusual delivery in that he actually leaves the grounds and starts his run just outside the Carlton & United Brewery at Kooyong.'
'That's right, Clive. I haven't known anyone start his delivery that far back since Stopcock caught his sleeve on the reversing mirror of number 11 bus during the third test at Brisbane in 1957 and ended up at Goondiwindi four days later owing to some frightful confusion over a changed timetable at Toowoomba Junction.'
After a very long silence while they absorbed this thought, and possibly stepped out to transact some small errands, they resumed with a leisurely discussion of the English fielding. Neasden, it appeared, was turning a solid performance at square bowel, while Packet has been stalwart in the dribbles, when set beside the outstanding play of young Hugh Twain-Buttocks at middle nipple. The commentators were in calm agreement that they had not seen anyone caught behind with such panache since Tandoori took Rogan Josh for a stiffy at Vindaloo in '61. At last Stovepipe, having found his way over the railway line at Flinders street - the footbridge was evidently closed for painting-returned to the stadium and bowled to Hasty, who deftly turned the ball away for a corner...
'So as we break for second luncheon, and with 11,200 balls remaining, Australia are 962 for two not half and England are four for a duck and hoping for rain.'
I may not have all the terminology exactly right, but I believe I have caught the flavour of it."(pp146-147).

"...the mystery of cricket is...that [Australians] play [cricket] at all. It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament. Australians much prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each other's noses. I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.
And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it" (pg.148).

This is the book I have selected for my primer on Australia as I prepare to land in Sydney exactly 1 week from today. I think it's great fun. I already have gleaned ideas for a walking tour of Sydney which should be sunny and hot according to BBC's 5-day forecast.

Pictures

2006-11-27T09:20:00.000-06:00

Okay, boys and girls...this is what you've all been waiting for. As I type this blog, I'm uploading a slew of pictures to my Flickr site (link at right). So, go on. Have a look and refer back to my blog for additional explanations if you need. Sorry it took so long.

I've already had fun getting pictures printed. Today I ran in to the Kodak place in Jinnah. Right there they made a test 8x10 of a black and white print and 20 minutes later they had the other 10 8x10s finished and charged me a grand total of...CAN$15.57. I'm not complaining.

"Step across this line..."

2006-11-27T07:49:00.000-06:00

Islamabad.

I wrote about boundaries and imagination in an earlier post, stealing the title of Rushdie's other collection of non-fiction.

On Sunday I arrived at the Gilgit airport, a small stone building on the edge of the alluvial fan that is Gilgit's resting place in the world. The airport stretches away between rows of tall pines and beyond are the ever-present parched hills (now with snow dusting their worn down ridges). The clouds were high and the sun warmed the waiting lounge. It appeared the flight would go that day. And it did. At around 9:30am, the C-130 military transport, succunded to PIA, touched down with a roar and disgorged passengers and baggage and Gilgit's supply of newspapers.

As I sat in the waiting lounge I realized how thankful I was the flight was going that day. The previous two weeks were characterized by bad weather and about one flight each. Finally they called us to get on the plane - ladies first. They piled out of a doorway at the back of the waiting lounge that I hadn't noticed before and stood in line at the door that led down two or three steps to the tarmac. Suddenly the whole line of ladies did an about face and retreated behind a wall into their waiting room again. The rest of us (men) sat down. No explanation. I started to get nervous. But the weather still looked good.

About half an hour latter, the ladies were called out and again formed a line through the aisle in the waiting room. This time they were let out and the men followed, forming another queue by rear door of the transport plane. We piled in strapping ourselves into the seats fashioned out of canvas webbing clipped to aluminium stays running the length of the plane, one of the modular configurations for the cavernous interior, big enough to drive tanks into when the seats are
removed.

The captain came on the air, then and said there would be a delay. And then, a few minutes later, we were told to exit the aircraft and return to the waiting lounge. There, the PIA rep told us we would have to wait for 20minutes until we were given permission to land in Islamabad (Chaklala Field is the name of the military airbase there). I was greatly dismayed at this. First of all, NOTHING in Pakistan happens in 20 minutes. And secondly, permission=bureaucracy and that definitely takes longer than 20 minutes - it could be 20 days, I thought. But somewhere, deep inside me there was an inexplicable glimmer of hope - maybe it sparked when someone in the waiting room called for chai and the PIA chap refused on the grounds that there would not be enough time (and, that there was no good hotel nearby from which to procure the stuff).

Sure enough, at around noon, we were again called to the plane. This time it was a free-for-all and so the men (me included) pushed to the front of the line. I took my chances and walked quickly, once we were on the open tarmac, hoping to get one of the five seats in the whole plane that offer a view of the spectacular mountains we would fly over. But I was out of luck.

This time, however, the engines were started and the bare-bones interior reverberated with the howl of four big turbo-props. And then we shot down the runway and lifted off above the dust and cold and grey water of the Gilgit river. We passed Nanga Parbat (I caught a glimpse as we turned South, but missed most of it) and then headed over the shrinking mountains to the plains and smog.

I walked across the tarmac to the arrival area in Islamabad glad to be back - surprised at how glad I was to be back. Maybe when I stepped up beside the baggage carousel I crossed this line. And suddenly I saw myself arriving in Islamabad on a hot summer day with plans in my head to stay long time and I shrank inside myself thinking, "I can't do this". Again, I surprised myself. And then the feeling passed.

I walked into the perfect early afternoon and sat down beside my taxi driver for the half hour drive to my gracious hosts who once again have invited me into their home for the duration of this week.

That evening I was in a bookstore in Jinnah market in the purple haze and gathering cold of a November evening. I felt removed from myself, pulled in to the evocative sensual experience of being in a place that was once so iconic to my experience. As I was browsing through the V.S. Naipaul section, a dreadfully tasteless version of Seal's (who's Seal? I haven't heard of him for ages either) "Kiss From a Rose" started to play on the store's PA. The subtle combination of all that gave me a very strange feeling, as if I would walk out the door and meet someone I knew, as if there would be a (Toyota) Coaster waiting filled with sunburned, hot-blooded teenagers and I would jump in and travel with them back in time, up a river of shadow.

And then it passed. I remembered who I am and who I was and walked out to the photo shop where my prints were waiting and then in a taxi back home. The sky was dust and orange and grey and the call to prayer floated in through the windows on cool air and lush green dark in the musty shadows.

Engineer, not for long...

2006-11-24T11:36:00.000-06:00

(likely some cheeky person will write a comment to the extent of "once and engineer, always an engineer :)

I was going to include this in the previous post, but I thought that one was long enough and complete.

As I’ve finished up my report, the summation of my activities here at AKRSP, I’ve started to realize what it is that really thrills me, what I could spend a lot more time doing and studying. It is exactly this, what I’m writing about and what AKRSP is, at this moment in time, trying to figure out: how does development move forward? In the case of AKRSP, the initial push for grass-roots self-development and social organization has been a resounding success. But what next? What’s the next economic model (John Clarke)? How do equity and community equilibrium and co-operation move beyond donor-subsidy (ultimately) to a self-sustaining model for future development? This is a great question. It’s progressive, cutting-edge, a question that more development organizations should be asking. And I, an inexperienced, junior engineer-in-training get to be thrown into the thick of it for a fleeting minute – enough time to know that I want more.

I thought my dream job was working directly with micro/mini hydels, designing and implementing and the like. But it’s not – this is, maybe not with AKRSP or in Gilgit, but somewhere out here, asking the tough questions and watching things work themselves out on the ground and working with donor organizations, governments and community organizations to take the next step.

Pure engineering is vitally important, not only to our society in Canada, but in the development sector as well, but it’s not for me. I’ll leave it to the people who are actually good at maths and know how to solve partial differential equations and perform Laplace transforms. I’m thankful I did my degree in Mechanical Engineering and, by God’s grace, got through it with reasonable grades, but there are things that I’m much better at, subjects that excite me enough to motivate me to put in the long hours and become proficient at. That said, a lot of the soft skills I learned over the course of my education came into play during my assignment with AKRSP – an engineering education gives a person a keen ability to critically analyze problems and synthesize diverse data and, if you pay attention in Tech Comm, the ability to put all of that together into a decent report.

NB. For those of you at New Flyer who are reading this (I see a hit from Transcona every once in a while) don’t worry…I’ll be back in January-call this development gig a hobby :)

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I think I’ve found something that I’m reasonably good at and very excited about. We’ll see what happens from here on. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a bad review on my report and tell another story.

And as an aside, I look at the possibility of doing a master’s in English on post-colonial literature through the University of Guelph’s Collaborative International Development Studies department and my mouth waters. But, only a few people in this world seem to be able to do everything at once, and I’m not one of them.

PS. The Northern Areas Power and Water Development people are way ahead of the times, they offer a wide variety of products to electricity consumers in the Northern Ares. For example, they just switched to the 5-volt special...oh! now it's back to 220V, I guess that was just a demo...you probably have to give them your credit card number to order the 5V package if you want to keep it.

A Day in the life of...

2006-11-24T11:28:00.000-06:00

Today is Friday. Fridays are half-days at AKRSP, Saturdays are full work days and Sundays are off. One Friday, after a week of Eid holidays, I walked back to the Eye Hospital where I’m staying. I arrived just after noon with my laptop swinging on my shoulder. The American doctor who works at the hospital saw me and said, “What, off work already?”. “Yes, Fridays are half-days at AKRSP.” “At the Department of Public Holidays, more likely.”

The lawyer I mentioned in a previous post mocked the director of Market Development during the post-meeting chai session in the Market guy’s office, “I wish someone paid me to sit in a nice office and listen to people tell me about their problems.”

Today was a good day, a long day, a day in my future life (perhaps). Today is my penultimate day with AKRSP and I’m trying to wrap up my report. Yesterday the Regional Programme Manager directed me to beef up my analyses of the project. So today I was working on that. I stayed late and the office emptied out. I moved to the office one of the accountants so I could use his printer and network connection.

A kerosene heater warmed up the room and made my eyes sting. I had the door open a crack for some ventilation. The window in my office looked out into the cold gray hallway, through the windows that line it onto a long lawn and up into the mountains coated with fresh snow and pink and mottled in the chilly dusk. The local mullah started his mournful call to prayer and I chirped away on my laptop trying to make sense of Pakistan’s policy on renewable energy development and splicing segments of the World Bank’s latest evaluation into the final section of my report.

As the dark gathered outside I finished up the final section offering recommendations to the Programme based on my analysis of progress so far on the community-based mini-hydel project and the implications of privatizing the hydel.

Before leaving I printed out the text of my report, feeding the finicky HP laser printer one page at a time and thinking I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

It was cold when I left the office. I told the night guard I was going to the hotel across the street for supper and asked if there would be a vehicle available to drive me home after.

The hotel is the same one that served me suspect chicken jalfrezzi last time I was there, so I ordered their chicken ginger handi hoping the (new) cook was not going to apply his maverick methods to the entire menu. The handi had changed, but was still good and the naan hot. I sat at the table with my back warmed by the heater going through my print-out highlighting errors, but realizing that, overall, it would probably be acceptable.

Green tea with cardamom accompanied my meal.

I paid and walked out of the restaurant just as an AKRSP Land Cruiser (the “white jeep” criticized as a symbol of AKRSP’s aloof approach to development by one person I spent about half an hour listening to speaking in breakneck Urdu) pulled up to drive me home.

I washed dishes, made myself chai and sat down to write this blog post. Now I will post it and spend a couple more hours on my report, hoping to finish it to present for final review tomorrow.

I could do this everyday, all of it.

(PS. Word keeps switching back to US spelling and now it’s telling me that “programme” is spelled incorrectly. At the home of an American family here in Gilgit we were sitting around discussing American, Canadian and British spelling and pronunciation. “Do Canadians use American or British spelling?” said one of the Americans who teaches English here in Gilgit. “We’re confused,” said I. Another Canadian in the room laughed in agreement. “And you guys say “aboot”, don’t you,” challenged the American. “No,” I said. “Canadians simply pronounce vowels they way they’re supposed to be pronounced.” That one got a triumphant smirk from the other Canadian and a laugh of disbelief from the American)

Flashback

2006-11-24T11:18:00.000-06:00

Here's a post I wrote in Peshawar the day after arriving back in Pakistan from Kabul. I never posted it. I think I was having difficulties with Blogger. I read it again and thought it would be worth posting now, so here you are, from September 26, 2006...

Kabul International Airport is a frontier airport in the middle of a warzone. The ISAF/NATO(one or the other, I'll call it ISAF) base stands out. The civilian building is understated: small and dirty and crowded. Somehow I found my way through a small, disorganized room to the desk with the sign that had my flight number posted over it. I got my boarding pass and headed out to the departure lounge, a long, plain room with a row of dirty windows looking out onto the roof of another part of the airport. Only the tops of Ariana tails were visible. The roar of a fighter jet punched through the air periodically. Helicoptors circled the runway.

The waiting lounge was packed. I took a seat near the entrance to it. To my right sat a row of buff Afro-Americans. One had an iPod strapped to his barrel-like bicep. He was singing along. I wondered if they were with the military. I couldn't see anything about them that identified them as such.

Later, a man appeared in the small doorway at the end of the lounge. He had a loudspeaker and announced quickly, in accented English, "Kam Air, Dubai". At once most of the people in the lounge stood up and crowded towards the loudspeaker man. The afro-americans were on the flight to and stood to get in line. I guessed they were taking leave and travelling to the Emirate for a holiday as, it seems, most of expatriate Kabul does at some point.

Another flight, this time for Moscow-Kabul's one-time colonial lord-was called, then another for Dubai.

The lounge had emptied considerably. At one point a mass of bearded mean in white shalwar-chamise and prayer caps stood up and moved toward the exit. No flight had been called. I wondered if it was mine and I had missed a telepathic announcement. As the line thinned out and men disappeared down the staircase, I started to worry. I walked to the end of the line and asked one if the flight was for Peshawar. He said "No", it was for Dubai.

Finally a man in a suit walked through the lounge and said the Peshawar flight was ready. I walked down. A large, scruffy-looking camera man with a reporter's multi-pocketed vest and his collegue, a diminuative, attractive young woman were on the same flight. They sat in first class and tried to sleep.

My seat turned out to be an exit row seat. So I stretched out my legs and leaned back in comfort for the entire 30 minute flight.

Two ISAF Huey's rose and skimmed over the runway just before we took off. We passed Italian F-16s in their bays. The view of Kabul was stunning from the plane. The city is covered in dust. Even the concrete, multi-story buildings look like mud huts fromt he air. We flew over the TV tower that the Americans took out in the first air strike on the city in 2002. Brown, desolate hills stretched out in all directions from the city. Then we were off, above the clouds.

My seat was right over the wing. I saw a gap in the cowling over the structural joint between the port engine and the wing. It widened under the stress of flight once the aircraft lifted off the ground. Bording the A-310, I had noticed a large section of the side of the fuselage which looked like it had been patched up (after what?, I thought). But the plane held up and we landed in Peshawar. As I was walking from the plane to the arrivals area, the siren for Iftar (the breaking of the fast) sounded. Hardly anyone was around. The airport was deserted. No one manned the customs table. I took my bag off the carasoul and left. The streets were deserted. Eventually I hailed a motor rickshaw, folded up into the back seat and told the driver where I wanted to go.

...and Pieces

2006-11-20T23:52:00.000-06:00

Last week and this week are cut out for writing my report. The days have gone by surprisingly quickly and have been largely uneventful, but profitable none the less. Now I’m 6 days away from my departure from Gilgit (if the plane will fly on Sunday).

It’s getting colder. Every time the clouds roll in, the snowline descends on the surrounding hills. Yesterday I was showering in the evening in my cold concrete bathroom and the flow of hot water inexplicably stopped cold (pun fully intended). I was left standing there, the soap lather on my body doing little to stop the heat racing from my body. I thought the problem might be temporary, possibly caused by sudden use of hot water by the Northern Scouts who share my plumbing system in the building next door. But the water was about to return and I was slowly turning hypothermic. So there was nothing for it. I dried the water and soap off, jumped into my blessed long underwear (thank you MEC) and headed to bed.

***

On Sunday I got up at 6:30am. I don’t have many pictures of Gilgit so I thought I try taking some sun-rise pictures. The Urdu verb associated with picture taking is “nikalna”, not “kanchna” as I thought – maybe it’s a Gilgit thing. The verb carries the idea of extracting or taking out. So there I was, shivering in the dewy pre-dawn, pulling pictures from the smoky grey around me.

I live on the road called “Riverview Road”. Surprisingly, it skirts the Gilgit river for the length of the very long town. My section of the road veers away from the river and in between the two is a gravelly wasteland. Crews dig rocks out of the area to dress for walls or crush for gravel so there are mounds and holes scattered across the area. Spindly, sad-looking trees sprout up between the stones in a few places. The road is built up across the alluvial deposits and an electricity transmission line runs beside the road held up by square lattice galvanized steel poles. At one point, asphalt makers have set up shop. The met tar (bitumen) out of rusty barrels and mix it with gravel and sand in huge, black rotating drums. The tar is lit to keep is soft and flames leap from the rotating barrel while laborers shovel gravel and sand into a hole in the middle of the drum. It all looks rather industrial and barbaric. They’ve pitched tents in between the gravel mounds close to their flaming drums.

I started shooting from just outside my door (producing poor results) and then started walking along the road towards the asphalt maker and the encamped workers as the sky lightened. Broken clouds spread across the sky forming a porous roof and settled raggedly on the brown ridges that march away toward the Indus.

I parked myself at a high point on the road, facing the rising sun with the asphalt camp between me and the sun. Smoke hangs heavy in the Gilgit valley and filled the air between me and the trees bordering my property. Before the sun rose, the asphalt workers emerged from their tents to start their unforgiving labor. One man climbed on top of the drum. Another started a smoking fire under the tar melting station and others passed buckets of something to the man on the drum. As the sun crested the last ridge before hitting Gilgit, I shot the asphalt station with a small aperture and fast shutter speed. I shot the wasteland by the river – weak yellow sun-light seeping through the smoke making ghosts of trees and shrouding the feet of the ridges that end at the river.

The results were strong, silhouettes of the asphalt men on their black machine with dirty smoke rising and electrical poles fading into the yellow sun and smoke. It reminded me or Mordor.

***

Yesterday, the guy I usually buy samosa from tried to teach me to count to 4 in Pashtu.

***

Today I went to have supper at the restaurant I frequent and either they have a new cook or the current one decided to experiment with his recipe for chicken jalfrezzi (a tasty and enigmatic northern Pakistani curry that I haven’t been able to reproduce). The result was insipid and watery and the price unchanged. As I ate I read a paper on the impacts of 9/11 on South Asian states from a journal put out by the Strategic Studies Institute in Islamabad. And then I walked home in the dark, because I think, to save electricity, Gilgit must have legislated “Streetlightless Days” – perhaps they coincide with Pakistan’s meatless days. Or maybe the guy who throws the switch had to leave for his village in Baltistan because his wife’s father’s oldest brother’s second cousin from Nagar was getting married in Lahore.

Bits

2006-11-16T10:27:00.000-06:00

Today I went on a little field trip to visit a hydel turbine and generator refurbishing shop set up by the Norwegians. The managing engineer of the plant was a somewhat hyperactive chap who was very excited about everything. His English was good so we got to chatting. He said he had studied at Lawrence College, Murree ("Yes!" his eyes wide "I am a Galleon [their school mascot]"). He remembered playing football (soccer) against my school, Murree Christian School, but that was before my time. He was surprised at my youth when I told him I graduated in '98 - "You white people are looking so big and old."

Yesterday after lunch in the tea shop across the street from my office I went for a walk with a friend, the guy I went to Naltar with on Gilgit's independence day. I stopped at a shop and asked for a box of Prince biscuits in Urdu. He looked at me with a grin, "You even know names of biscuits. You are 50% Pakistani, I think."

Today I sat at the end of a long table in a nice restaurant with three AKRSP managers, including my boss. They have been taking part in a week-long training session (training of trainers - or TOT because they like to make everything into acronyms here) only today all of the trainees were out on a field trip - so the long table was empty, but apparently the seminar's tab was still open.

Today I made parathas yet again. And this time they were perfect :)

The Northern Areas

2006-11-14T11:21:00.000-06:00

I’m reading another travel book. This one I found in the stately book shelf in the living room of my little house. The shelving unit is solid wood and has two levels, each with three shelves. Each level has a set of glass doors. The collection includes everything from a textbook titled “Personal Trainer” to the paperback version of “Cold Mountain” to an ancient copy of the Koran in English with copious notes. And there are plenty of books about this area, a little text on glaciers, books about religion and history and, of course, travel books like the one I’m reading: “The Golden Peak” by the Scot Kathleen Jamie, copyright 1990 and 1992.

Jamie traveled through this part of the world by herself over a period of two years or so spending a good deal of time in Gilgit. She stayed with a Shia Moslem family. One conversation with the head of the family, Murtaza, she recounts thus:

“’You have visited the Major, my cousin?’

‘Yes, we were speaking of local politics.’

‘Ah, do you understand our problems? Do you know, here in Gilgit we have a Commissioner, for the whole Northern Areas. This one is from Peshawar. He, the heads of the various departments, even headmasters of middle and high school, are from Outside. Subordinates only are local, they can’t speak with us people. We are like sheep, like colony of Pakistan’” (pg. 71).

On Saturday (11-Nov) I was sitting in the office of AKRSP’s manager of Market Development with a local lawyer and his associate. We were conducting a short meeting regarding legal issues surround the company that village is setting up to manage its hydel. We had exhausted the topics set for the meeting and chai was ordered. The lawyer lit a cigarette as did the manager. Together the tobacco smoke and the kerosene fumes from the heater nearly knocked me out. The lawyer started talking about Pakistan. The lawyer (rendered “liar” by the Urdu accent, unfortunately) had been adamant that the company would be formed legitimately, all of its assets disclosed from the outset, etc. The Pakistani bureaucracy, however, is rife with corruption, the lawyer stated (I don’t doubt it). “It is fully accepted that illegal practices are going on the side to make extra money.” He asked me what came to mine when I heard the word “bureaucracy”. I said, “hundreds of desks, piled high with paper.” He guffawed and held out his hand so I could give him “five” (a Pakistani gesture-perhaps part of other cultures as well-made when a point is well and humorously made).

Somehow his monologue shifted from bureaucracy to the political situation in the Northern Areas. He explained to me the deplorable political situation – how people in the NAs are not allowed to vote (on the flip side neither do they pay taxes – but who does in Pakistan?) and are ruled over by “Outsiders” as Murtaza said. He slowly worked himself up until he really got going, his lawyer-speak taking over – “The Westerners – they are worried about our mountains and the snow leopards! They don’t care about basic human rights! On their TVs they show a dead duck on a lake and are outraged – but what about people?!” The Marketing manager, a soft-spoken, diminutive man, kept smoking behind his desk and laughing at the lawyer’s intensity. Then it was time for the lawyer to leave, chai and cigarette finished.

I lived in Pakistan for 14 years but was never really aware of the status of the Northern Areas. It’s still something new to me.

PS. I'm curious to know who's visiting my blog from Hungary.

Parathas

2006-11-12T08:06:00.000-06:00

Josiah’s comment on my Rakaposhi post cracked me up. So I’m going to write a post about parathas, the flaky flat-bread that I’ve raved about on at least two occasions.

There are some Pakistani foods, try as we might, that are nearly impossible to replicate perfectly in Canada. Samosa, for example, are great in Canada, but there’s something about the ones I pick up at the corner sweet shop in Gilgit that are different. Is it the blackened oil that their cooked in, or a trace amount of kerosene smoke that mingles with the oil or the newspaper they’re stored on? I can’t say. Perhaps it’s the flour used to make the pastry (flour that sits reasonably well with me, I might add).

Likewise, I’ve never tasted anything like Pakistani Chicken Karahi (a fairly basic curry heavy on tomatoes with something else in the sauce) in Canada.

Likewise, flatbreads seem nearly impossible to replicate in Canada (and Indian restaurants seem to manage no better than us white folk, while charging ridiculously high prices for the simple creations). And parathas fall into this category. After all, they are simply fried chapatti with additional oil worked into the dough to give the final product a pastry-like flakiness. We have, of course made parathas in Canada – and they were pretty good. Again, the differences between parathas in Canada and the those made and eaten here are ever so subtle. So subtle, in some cases, the difference could simply the experience as a whole. After all, how can my faculties ignore the differences between sitting cross-legged on the floor of a mud and timber hut in the fading afternoon above 3000m and sitting at the table in my well-insulated, warm house on the prairie with snow outside?

But what are parathas, the phantom cause of Josiah’s real hunger pangs as he sits half a world away in a university computer lab?

Let me explain.

Flat bread, I think, is one of the 7 wonders of the culinary world (don’t ask me what the other 6 are). How can something so simple, often just flour, water and salt mixed together with heat applied, be the cause of such enormous gastronomical pleasure? I’m sure I don’t know, but that doesn’t change the experience. In Northern Pakistan, there are, at least, a few varieties of flat bread. One is the simple, chapatti, the most basic bread, the tortilla of the sub-continent…

funny story about the term “sub-continent” here, as an aside: The term refers more or less to the countries situated on the plate that pushes into Asia and forms the Himalaya: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka (perhaps Bhutan as well, I’m not sure if there’s a concise definition). Anyway, I was at a Navigators spring conference (for the Western Canadian chapters) in Colorado and, as an ice breaker, we were playing a game that is often called “Fruit Basket Upset”. Basically, everyone sits on chairs formed in a circle except for one person standing in the middle. That person describes something possibly unique that she has done and everyone else in the circle who has done that same thing has to get up and shift sets. In the ensuing chaos, the person in the middle must try to find a seat leaving a different person to cause the next upset. When it was my turn, I said “I’ve traveled to the sub-continent”. And nobody moved. I know that that part of the world is far away, but for an international crowd in their 20s this surprised me. I thought perhaps they hadn’t heard correctly, so I said again, “I’ve traveled to the sub-continent”. Still – blank faces all around. Then someone, probably a brilliant engineering student, asked, “what’s the sub-continent?”, The experience of realization on my part was similar to the time, just before leaving on this trip, when I said that my colleagues in Pakistan would probably “dress Western” and my co-workers started laughing. I realized they were picturing Pakistani development workers dressed in Wranglers, snakeskin boots and Stetsons. Whoa! Your still a TCK/GlobalNomad/MK/Re-Entryer, Jordan – don’t forget it.) Long aside.

…Chapatti are unleavened-flour salt and water-rolled almost paper thin and baked on a dry hot steel surface. These are best fresh and dry out quickly. But they are made in a surprising number of varieties. At a small hotel in Karimabad, during the month of fasting, I received two dark brown chapatti, quite thin and earthy and steaming hot with my order of chicken curry. In a Gilgit hotel, that sets itself up as posh, I had large, chewy chapatti made with white flour that I folded double to scoop up the daal (curried split-peas another simple dish made in wide variety of ways – a subject for another post perhaps) I had ordered that night. Roti, or Naan are made in a Tandoor, a large clay oven, oriented vertically or horizontally, heated red hot. The dough is rolled out, stretched over a cushion and pressed against the side of the oven. The dough for Roti (also a generic term for bread, or even food in general) and Naan contains leavening (what kind, I’m not sure – the Joy of Cooking calls for live yeast-but they don’t reference the Joy out here). Roti is made with white flour in Gilgit. In Jhika Gali-my old haunt from boarding school, near the hill station Murree-, a coarser flour is used (when fresh, I’ve never tasted their equal). Naan contains something else. The dough is more dense than that used for chapatti and is baked to a golden brown; often sesame seeds are scattered on the fire-side of the naan.

Paratha (okay-we’re finally here – I get carried away when writing about food) are versions of all of the flatbreads described above, but made with oil. I’ve described two types in previous posts. The deep-fried version I had in Hispar was made with a course wheat flour, rolled out thickly and deep-fried until golden. I doubt they contained leavening.

At Eagle’s Nest, the paratha are also unleavened. They probably used a simple technique to layer fat and gluten sheets such as rolling the dough out into a square, putting a tablespoon of oil in the center, folding the corners over, rolling the dough flat and repeating this procedure several times. The result was impossibly thin bread resembling layers of phyllo, but not as brittle. These again are best eaten fresh off the stove as they appeared from the kitchen after my morning with Rakaposhi.

In the town where I grew up a shop near our house used the leavened dough prepared for naan, but deposited oil on the dough and then rolled the dough out into a long rope. The rope as then coiled and the dough rolled out flat. This was baked in a tandoor. This resulted in yet another variety of paratha, soft and flaky simultaneously. The baked bread broke away along the lines of the coil and tasked particularly divine with honey.

And always chai. Chai (the simple tea made with roughly equal amounts of water and milk, brewed strong and boiled together – the Gilgit people I work with take a pinch of salt in their tea instead of sugar) has the effect of purging the grease in ones mouth. The creamy sweetness complements both the parathas and the eggs or omelet commonly eaten with paratha using the paratha to scoop up the egg as you would chapatti or naan to scoop up a curry.

So that’s my hopelessly long-winded response to Josiah’s comment. Cheers.

Rakaposhi (7789m)

2006-11-09T10:07:00.000-06:00

Wikipedia, I found, has quite a few entries on mountains and mountaineering. A list of the world’s 100 highest is available and for each mountain information is available on the first ascent, the possible routes and notes about its location. The entry for Rakaposhi remarks on how close it is to terrain of a much lower elevation. At one point on the KKH you can look straight up from your position to the summit up a nearly vertical wall more than 6000m high. From the major town in Hunza, Karimabad, you are remarkably close to three 7000m peaks. Just before I left ISB I met Isobel Shaw’s traveling companion, back from a couple of weeks in this part of the world. “The mountains are so big!”, she said.

On Monday (Nov 6) I traveled back to Karimabad to participate in a meeting with the village organization of a town near Karimabad. We discussed matters relating to a mini-hydel under construction just above the town. The second part of my small mission was to conduct a market survey of the area, relating to the sale of surplus electricity from the hydel. Much to my delight we decided to start with Eagle’s Nest, the hotel situated on a remarkable viewpoint several hundred meters above Karimabad. I was there earlier and wrote about that in a previous post. At that time, however, my camera was not functioning. We ended up electing to stay the night at Eagle’s Nest and continue our survey the following day – perfect.

The sky was clear and the air crisp. I whipped out my camera and started shooting as the sun set, flaring above the ridge to the West and silhouetting Rakaposhi as it sank. I shot Hunza peak and Bublamating rising high above the hotel to the North. I tried to concentrate on the discussion at hand (the aforementioned market survey) as we sipped tea in the gathering cold.

Just before supper, at about 8pm, I walked up to the official viewpoint above the hotel. The valley was bathed in light from the rising moon. Rakaposhi glowed clean and pale. I set my camera to a 15 second exposure and balanced it on a rock, pointing out across the valley. The scene was ghostly and cold and beautiful.

I set my alarm for 6am. The next morning it was 10 degrees in my room. I jumped out of bed and into my synthetic long underwear, finished dressing and walked back up to the view point. It was light. It was cold. The sky was perfectly clear, the air like crystals and daggers. Rakaposhi glowed muted and the hazy sky at the bottom of her Western flank was rose and dark blue. I started shooting again. I got a great picture of the entire Hunza bowl in the pre-dawn light. My right hand was out of its glove and starting to sting with cold.

Then the sun touched the summit, slicing through the rarified air near 8000m, cold and dark blue. The sun was golden on the snow and red on the rock. I kept shooting as the glow crept down Rakaposhi’s Eastern shoulder, eventually resting on a triangular face perpendicular to the direction of the sun. The valley under Spantik, lying across the path of the sun filled with glowing mist.

Hunza peak with its 6000m granite spike stands to the north and catches the morning sun after Rakaposhi. Its southern face is vertical, twisted veins of granite. The round summit is crowned with snow. I was close enough that my limited zoom allowed me to capture details of the rock and the snow highlighted by the strengthening sunlight.

I kept shooting, fine-tuning my exposure, desperate to capture the light that changed by the minute and every crease in the snow and ice on the mountains around me. When the sun was high enough that the light turned white. I stepped back to capture the mountains with the bleak foreground available on the lookout point, rock cairns, brown earth and flags still standing from the recent visit of the Aga Khan and Prince Charles. The flags are a field of forest green with a crimson diagonal stripe bisecting the green. They stood fixed by the rock cairns.

Below, the sun had started to filter through the remaining fall colours hanging on the trees, light highlighting the leaves, leaves leaving orange and yellow and russet streaks through the morning haze like an impressionist’s brush strokes. I shot those too.

Finally the sun reached my position and started to warm me. Two of my colleagues had come out to have a look at the world before breakfast. I shot some more, different angles, and exposures and compositions of fore and backgrounds. And then it was time to go. I was torn between the beauty and clarity of the moment and the hot, flaky parathas and steaming tea that awaited me inside.

Such a day could hardly improve.

But the skies remained clear and around 4pm, we were driving back towards Gilgit, but on the north side of the Hunza river. The valley was in shadow, but the afternoon sun was highlighting the Western ridge of Rakaposhi and we stopped in Hussainabad where the entire Western ridge of Rakaposhi from summit to just above the point where it meets the KKH is visible. I shot about 60 more pictures from the village. Wisps of spindrift billowed off the summit and another irregularity lower down, illuminated by the sinking sun.

By the time we reached Gilgit, Rakaposhi was glowing dust pink and orange. But my memory card was full and I had already spend Sunday afternoon with the mountain shooting until all the light was gone and the wood and coal smoke had started to fill the valley.

Hispar (3383m)...and a broken record ending

2006-11-05T09:03:00.000-06:00

The road is dust if it’s dry, otherwise, I’m told, it’s a deadly mud track and in summer, parts of it dissapear, washed away by the swollen river and constant rock slides, and have to be re-built every fall, by hand. The road branches off the KKH just past the main bridge under the Altit fort. It’s metaled for about 5km until just before the village of Nagar (Proper). The road then follows the Hispar valley past the settlement of Huru where it plunges to a few planks and logs lashed together to form a bridge across the river. On the opposite side, the road comprises a trough through large rocks recently sent hurtling down to the river’s bed. Eventually the it crosses a permanent suspension bridge and climbs steeply to the level of the village. From this section of the road, the valley opens up, hills receding on both sides and a large V of blue sky corresponds to the trough cut by the Hispar glacier.

The village consists of 150 households scattered over a flat-topped alluvial deposit. From the central part of the village, the snout of the huge Hispar glacier is clearly visible flanked by high peaks. The glacier stretches away to the southwest for 50 km before its head at Hispar La (pass) at 4770m and snow lake. From there, the Biafo glacier snakes down into Baltistan. The trek traversing the two glaciers takes around 14 days. Apparently migrants from Baltistan originally settled the village of Hispar several hundred years ago.

The day was perfectly clear. At over 3000m the sun was hot and the air chilly. The sun sets over the village at 14h30 this late in the year. The potatoes have been harvested and we met a caravan of 7 or 8 tractor-trailers (small Massy-Ferguson 270 farm tractors pulling trailers roughly the same length as the tractor, the standard, go-anywhere form of transportation in the mountains) on its way down to the town of Ganesh on the KKH to sell the produce to market. Ice stays frozen in the shade. People are starting to hunker down for winter.

We had come to visit a 150 kW micro-hydel funded by the Swiss Development Fund (SDC) and developed with the assistance of Partner Aid International (PAI) and a senior mechanical engineer who currently works for my organization and on the project I’ve been assigned to – thus the connection for this trip. A German staff member of PAI accompanied us to discuss the implementation of a maintenance fund for the micro-hydel. The first part of our visit consisted of an impromptu meeting lead by the German and the engineer. It ended in a high-pitched, but short-lived argument in one of the local languages and a side meeting between the German and one of the village leaders.

The second part consisted of tea and parathas (a local variety that is completely deep fried and beautifully flaky, eaten in this case with cherry jam and local Yak butter) at the village leader’s house and more discussion about the hydel project’s funds.

After tea we walked out again into the too-early evening. Boys played soccer in one dusty field and in another a volleyball net had been erected and a game was in progress against the sun on the brown hills and ice on the high peaks.

Finally we visited the hydel station. All the material had been carted up on a tractor-trailer. The German and the engineer had had to visit the site almost weekly at one point and during the summer they were forced to walk the last 15km. Now, when the sluice is opened in the evening, the pelton wheel hums alongside its generator and lights and heats the homes in the village.

On the ride down, we discussed why the villagers lack motivation to initiate a maintenance fund and take responsibility for upkeep of the hydel, a considerable asset to their village (according to the proposal for the project, at any rate). To us, it seems so simple: why wouldn’t you want to invest in the maintenance of something so valuable, something that you, yourselves initially invested quite a bit of time and money in?).

I thought of my own world view, once again (here's the broken record part), and how far removed my reality is from theirs. To me, the world is open – I can go anywhere at anytime. I can fly around the world if I want: one month I’m in Babur's garden in Kabul and weeks later I’m on a beach in Sydney and then, within a matter of days I’m skiing in the forests of central Canada. I have money coming out of my ears, a secure job, insurance for everything and a healthcare system that’s so reliable (let’s face it, Canadians, it’s actually quite good-I think I mentioned this before) I take it fore-granted. If there’s something I don’t know about I assume I’ll be able to find the answer somewhere. I work hard and assume it’s my right to expect ample remuneration from both my employer and society.

I don’t see how it’s possible for me to understand the world view of a villager who lives at the end of a glacier far away from everywhere, might get an education and interprets life by Nature’s cycle. To enlighten them, I assume they must move in my direction, that’s my natural ego-centric response. If I’m to move in theirs, how do I start? Some of the answers to this question have been found, if the impression I’ve gained of the organization I’m working for is accurate, but I’m still asking them of myself and of all the expensive white people who fly into poor countries expecting to make a difference. So let me ask, or tell me the answers.

***

Tonight the moon is nearly full. I took my last picture of the day of the fading light on Bojohagur (7329m) and Ultar (7388m) with a 1 second exposure, F4.0 using a small stone to prop up my camera as a make-shift tripod.

Rakaposhi glowed majestically in the muted, clean light, towering over the smoky valley, guiding us home.

cell-phone camera self-portraits

2006-11-05T08:58:00.000-06:00

2-Nov-06

November, and the weather in the Gilgit valley turns cold. Now is my favourite time of year in Northern Pakistan: sweaters are required inside, but not yet heaters; the sun is just the right strength and tea is taken outside, still in a sweater, soaking up the rays and the blue mountain sky.

Yesterday was a local holiday, some kind of Gilgit independence day (I didn’t quite gather from what, people don’t seem to know entirely), but this day off work leant itself nicely to a day trip to the Naltar valley, a high, alpine valley about 2 hours' drive from Gilgit. A friend from work (a young Pakistani with a commerce degree working in the accounts section of AKRSP) and two of his friends hired a jeep for the day (the fare was $34). This was a new experience for me, hanging out with Pakistani men my age. And it turned out to be a good one.

The valley is beautiful, though overforresting of the huge pines on the valley’s slopes mares the view. Snow had fallen not far up the valley’s sides. The four of us set out to climb up to the snowlines, following the edge of a terraced and cultivated bowl (now brown and smooth after harvest) with great views back of the fields, a temporary settlement of stone huts and, behind that a sheer rock face rising 3 or 4000ft. At the highest point of our short hike Rakaposhi was visible, it’s knife edge southern ridge shear against the intense blue of the sky. The afternoon shadows were already engulfing out position though it was only 14h30 and it was cold. We wound our way back through the big trees and encountered some black-haired yaks grazing on the way.

One thing I’ve noticed about Pakistanis’ picture taking habits is that they are much more interested in taking pictures of each other than the scenery or anything else. My friend had borrowed someone’s camera-phone and he and one of his friends snaped incensently on the way down, posing in every concievable location-against tree, atop a charred stump, on the edge of a terrace. It was comical. And my friend kept taking pictures of himself with his hat at different angles. The other guy and I walked some ways ahead and discussed the perception of Islam in the world today and the circumstances under which a Moslem is allowed the take the life of another person – a fascinating conversation that our language barrier limited somewhat.

Back at our jeep, our driver had ordered food for us at a small, smokey hotel. Greasy, but tasty daal and chapatti and, of course, chai. That combination of tastes and smells and the cold afternoon air always thrills me.

Many of you have commented on my blog, both on the website itself and in e-mails. Thanks for that. These comments motivate me to keep posting and lead me to believe that this blog is reasonably valuable way to communicate what’s happening out here.

Traveler

2006-10-26T05:36:00.000-05:00

“Travel returns us…to sharpness of notice; and to be saturated in the sight of what is entirely new…is to revisit the enigmatically lit puppet-stage outlines of childhood; those mental photographs and dreaming woodcuts or engravings that we retain from our earliest years. What we remember from childhood we remember forever-permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen. Travelers regain this ghost-seizing brightness, eeriness, firstness.” - Cynthia Ozick in her short entitled “The Shock of Teapots”

I’ve just finished reading a few travel narratives. I particularly enjoyed Rory Stewart’s book on his solo travels in Afghanistan in 2002, “The Places in Between”. Good travel writers capture the sense of wonder and innocence to which Ozick refers. Good travel writers are unpretentious; they are ready to learn from every encounter, ready to see new things. Perhaps my aunt, who has spent years studying travel writing from the turn of the century can attest to whether or not this has always been the case. I suspect that travelers of the past have looked down at exotic cultures from their perceived high place of enlightenment and civilization. I suspect this may have been subtle in some writings and more blatant in others, but always there. Maybe it still exists, but I can’t see it.

Much of the travel I’ve done in Pakistan has taken me to places I was before. But I was a different person then. My “mental photographs”, “dreaming engravings” and “permanent ghosts” grew up out of experiences I had as a child in the same places I now visit as an adult. Yet I try to maintain the innocence of a traveler, an alien, and overlay my childhood memories with new ones, fresh experiences of places seen, now with different eyes and an older mind.

I’ve stayed in the town of Karimabad many times. Now I traveled up from the town to a different place and I looked down from a vantage point previously unknown. I sat above the town and remembered walking its streets with my family and friends. I remembered the restaurants we frequented; the hikes we didn’t take because I objected; tea in the sun; parathas and eggs and chai in the crip mornings at the restaurant on the side of the mountain; the lights of the October festival. Then, I sat and looked up at the burning tires rolling off the mountain sides, now I walk among the burning tires of the same festival and hear the laughter of the young men lighting them and tossing them off the precipice. Then, I stayed inside the hotel room, drank tea with my family, and played Lists with my sisters. Now, I hover above the town and drink in grander views of the mountains and the stars through the thinner air. Then, I relished a school holiday. And now I relish a life holiday. I stay by myself and think slowly, processing light and colour and sound like a delicate, hand-made truffle. Then, I thought life would never end. Now, I look back to the life before and the life now that’s a circle of friends in an Indian restaurant. New and old, superimposed, make a picture of ghosts and life.

Travel is a series of simple, everyday encounters that jump out at the traveler because she’s looking for them. I took a short cut on my hike back up to my hotel on the afternoon of the day before yesterday. I clambered up a dusty slope with loose rocks. At one point, I realized I’d have to cross over a low stone wall where a gap in it’s crown of thorn bushes had been left. As I climbed the wall, I realized I was stepping right into someone’s yard. A small stone and mud plaster house has been squeezed onto a terrace. There was a fruit tree in the small yard. I felt bad for trespassing, cringing at the image I must present: ignorant, insensitive white person, ogling quaint native domestic scenes. I hurried over the wall and up a stairway set in a wall, eager to exit the property. Suddenly I heard someone call out behind me. I turned, embarrassed. But the ancient Hunzakut woman who had called out was smiling and insisting that I take an apple from her hand. I retraced my steps, wishing her peace and thanking her. As I accepted the apple, she called out in the direction of her house. A younger woman appeared carrying three more apples. She didn’t cover her head and approached me with self-confidence and dignity. She, like the older woman, spoke no Urdu. I accepted the additional apples graciously and tried to thank them. I felt foolish for having no gift to offer them in return. I smiled again, bowed and climbed up and out of their sight.

I’m an invader, an imperialist, whether I like that or not. Some would argue that by dropping the equivalent of a decent month’s salary into the local economy over a period of two days, I am contributing to the one thing that can help these people: economic growth. I wish development was that simple. Everything is complicated. Poverty is subtle, especially in such a beautiful place. From my perch this weekend, I looked down on a scene of breath-taking beauty. I traveled the mountains by water channels, carefully and painstakingly built to bring life-giving water to the valley. The water erupts in the fragile beauty of fruit blossoms in the spring, bold green in the summer and the dazzling earth tones of fall. Neat stone houses and dry stone walls dissect the fertile bowl into pleasing shapes. From high above, where I watch jet airplanes burst over sun-drenched peaks-my escape vehicles-I look down and see beauty and not the poverty, desperation and the fragility of livelihood that exists there. From the seat of my CIDA and DFID funded jeep I struggle to see it. I squint through the fog of privilege and the haze of worldly wisdom to try and see the opposite.

“Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers-and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.” – Cynthia Ozick

Pretty words, and true, but travelers pass by and leave.

I try to climb a mountain

2006-10-24T11:59:00.000-05:00

It's been a while. I just got back from a couple of days of holiday in central Hunza. I'll write more about those days, but here's the appetizer.

I finish work early and visit an apricot processing plant.

I walk up a windy gorge under a cloudy sky threatening rain and hear water running.

I look out the back of a moving Suzuki, feel rain drops and smell the samosas I'm about to buy

I get a ride home from a friend

I savour a few days off work

I look at the sun and try to climb a mountain with two Canadians, two Americans and a Brit

I learn to drink tea from the Brit in the Serena dining room looking out on Gilgit town and the space usually occupied by Rakaposhi, now sealed in with clouds.

I chill at my house.

I wake up late and make coffee.

I shoot hoops on my private court

I get the front seat of the van to Karimabad, next to an old man who grins up at me

I eat food at midday with my back turned to the fasters

I arrive in the town and hire a jeep

I step out on the edge of a mountain and gasp at the beauty of snow and ice-bound rock and azure sky and golden sun.

I look down at the valley spread out under me. Under the irrigation line of thorn-bushes the earth is laced with golds and ambers and greens and Horatio's russet mantle pulled off the dawn and cut into ribbons.

I watch the gold on Spantik and shadows on the glacier and nearness of a 6000m granite spike hooking the last rays of the day.

I eat by myself, smiling at peace and solitude and the crisp air that greats me when

I step outside, dazzled by the milky way, more brilliant through the thinned air and

I sleep.

(I (will) try to post more picture on my Flickr page and hope that it works :)

exhibit from an alien place

2006-10-20T03:33:00.000-05:00

(written on 17 October 2006)

Pakistan beat Sri Lanka in style today at the ICC Champions Trophy in India; it was Pakistans first game of the tournament. I got to watch it on the TV here at the hotel which was a bonus, as I dont have a TV in Gilgit, nor access to one.

Im finally getting into the actual work of my project with AKRSP. On Monday, I came out here early. An engineer from my project area and I went up to one of the potential hydel sites we visited last week. I didnt really do anything but observe. But I was able to watch the survey (for elevation, exclusively) of the site from the existing channel to a potential powerhouse site. As I sat there on a large boulder in the warm morning sun, I looked up at the surveyor's rod, past the survey tripod and level to the top of a sheer rock face that rose up behind the channel. The day was fine, clear and clean. I marvelled at the opportunity I have been given to get right in with this kind of grass-roots engineering. This is where its at, where engineering and social responsibility and real needs come together and one person can observe all three aspects of development work and quickly evaluate how well they come together for a certain project. Today, as we sat around in a circle with the institutional development manager for the region and about 10 village notables discussing the feasibility of widening the current channel for the hydel site, I was further struck by the integration of engineering and social responsibility at this level. Previously, I wasnt sure if such was possible. The merits of development work are dubious at best in most cases, it seems, and the merits of large-scale commercial engineering projects are rarely even that well established, beyond their immediate profitability. Im not saying there are no problems at this level, just that its more clear what they are and how to resolve them responsibly and sustainably

The discussion around the water channel emphasized to me the utter dependence of these people on secure water supplies. This must the case in any arid area. In the west, especially Canada, we take our supply of fresh water completely for granted. Here one channel can be the life-blood of a village. If it ceases to function, the village cannot exist.

As I walked up through the market town where I am staying, today I marvelled at the water flowing along the road (which became a strangled, rocky path and then a road again), neatly guided by a series of channels. Large, healthy trees overhung the path. Neat dry stone walls ringed private property and agricultural land. At one point the water overshot the path landing in a channel on the opposite side and continued down through the village. Despite the poverty that exists everywhere, the village is quaint and picturesque. And its livelihood is on display. Available resources are visible. When they are depleted, their loss is painfully obvious. A barren, boulder-covered field stretches out above the village, where water has not been channelled. And higher up, where there is water again, trees cling to the sides of vast piles of ancient glacial moraine.

From atop the pile of moraine I looked down into the valley and across to the foot of an intersecting valley. There, as is the case everywhere where settlements exist in these valleys, the irrigation channel supplying the underlying villages charts a straight line of green across barren, rocky, vertical slopes of grey boulders, red and white granite and yellow deposits. Below, where gravity takes the water, things grow, above the land is dead and hostile.

Higher up, in winter, snow covers the high ridges. In spring it melts and feeds the hungry valleys.

Im encouraged by the work that AKRSP is doing. Perhaps the greatest asset of the programme is its people, they are the same people as those they serve. Their villages are down the road, perhaps beneficiaries of the programmes they work on. When discussion concerning a development project takes place, as it did today, AKRSP staff and the villagers discuss the matter in one cultural context. I feel like an invader, an unnecessary, expensive exhibit from an alien place.

Day 3 in the Valley

2006-10-13T11:18:00.000-05:00

Today I made a third visit to the area my project is focusing on.

On the way, along the Gilgit River, I saw a man balancing precariously atop a telephone pole anchored to the river's bed. I was straddling the top cross bar and held a phone receiver in his hand, apparently trying to make a call.

The sky was overcast today and rain briefly washed the jeep we drove in. The wind picked up when we reached the main town of the district. An engineer from the area office there joined us and we proceeded back towards Gilgit for a short ways and then turned onto a stunning new Chinese-built suspension bridge. Once in the project area we started the process of finding the person we sought, one of the village organization leaders. First we asked a group of men on the street (men generally group on the street or in a chai shop or somewhere, doing nothing in particular, ready to be asked about anything). They told us to go back a ways and then up a side road. We stopped the jeep at the intersection and then engineer took off up the dusty street. He was gone for about 15 minutes. In the mean time, another villager approached us, engaged my driver in animated conversation (in Shina, the local language of the Gilgit and Ghizer districts). He seemed to know where the man was whom we sought. Presently, the engineer returned with the man and we got back in the jeep. On the way up into the side valley, we picked up two more "notables" of the village. And then there were four people crammed into the back of the jeep, all talking at once, in great earnest about the channel we had come about. The conversation was all in Shina. Shina incorporates quite a few Urdu words, but other than these I understood nothing.

Suddenly the engineer pointed out that I knew Urdu so they tried to switch to that. The VO rep talked to me at length. I understood about a 1/4 of what he said which reflects only the poor state of my Urdu. But he did get his message across to me. We stopped at a couple of places along the road and it was explained to me where the village proposes to build a new water channel which will irrigate as well as supply water for the proposed micro-hydel. We eventually arrived at the point upstream where the current channel starts. A weir is built there to divert some of the river's flow into a channel that rises up out of the river and then continues parallel to the river but at a shallower grade. We got out of the vehicle and all four men tried to explain to me why they require a new channel. The current channel passes through a number of private properties and those property owners demand compensation. Providing this compensation is problematic for the village. So they want to re-route the channel around these properties.

We followed the proposed course of the channel around the back of the village through a huge boulder field, up against the ridge that borders the river on that side. The sky looked troubled and the wind picked up, kicking up dust. When we rejoined the road, I could see dust billowing along the Gilgit river bed, obscuring the main town on the far side. The clouds had descended into the mountains above the Gilgit river.

Once we got back to the vehicle, the VO rep explained again to me why the channel was important and that everyone would be happy and eternally grateful if the channel was rerouted. I told him we'd perform the survey as planned and do what we could. He was sure that as an engineer I'd know what to do. I was not. But it will be fun to play civil engineer. That will probably start on Monday. Actually probably just be holding the stick thing (if I was a real civil engineer I'd know what it's really called) while the real civil engineer determines at what level the new channel will flow based on where they village wants to start it, upstream on the river.

Speaking of the stick thing, I know what the other part is called: a theodilite. In my senior year of high school, after exams, my physics teacher gave me and my classmate (there were just two of us in the physics class) a lesson on how to survey manually. Out of an ancient wooden box, he produced a manual, optical theodolite. It looked like something George Washington used on his first job. Along with the precision optical instrument, we used an equally ancient tripod (equipped with a plumbline for levelling) and the aforementioned stick thing. My classmate and I, using a pencil and black leather-bound notebook took measurements in a circuit on the hillside on which our school was built. We managed, to our great delight, to come within 10cm in our final measurement. I couldn't think what use the exercise had been.

To and from the project site I observed the corn harvest that is going on in earnest these days. Most of the corn is cut and stands on the fields in shooks. In circles, in the middle of the fields, women sit husking the corn and throwing the liberated cobs into a huge pile in the centre of the circle. Golden corn dries on the flat roofs of the village houses. The scenes are quite picturesque. The men are nowhere to be seen. They're off standing in groups, in the bazaar, waiting to be asked anything.

Day 47 Reflections

2006-10-12T12:03:00.000-05:00

Ive been in this town for about 12 days now and Im finally getting comfortable with being here, totally transported from my life in Southern Manitoba to a place where I get to do what Ive wanted to for so long, but doing it alone and in a strange and familiar place. Part of that comfort, let me call it peace (I know I'm at peace when I can listen to Sparklehorse without becoming melancholy), comes from getting the hang of my job, becoming a bit more autonomous and feeling like Im getting something done. On my contract Im called a consultant, which is flattering, but not at all the case. Im a student. I know nothing and Im here to learn. How many times have I been reminded since I attended the calling of the engineer ceremony nearly 3 years ago that I know nothing? But Im also learning and I continue to learn. I will start to worry when I stop learning.

Sometimes I have the sensation of being transported to a high place where I can look back on parts of my life to places Ive been and see them in a different light. Sometimes a novel takes me to that place, an especially good novel. And sometimes an experience does that for me; this is the case now. What Im looking back at is North America, a place Ive become much better acquainted with over the last 8 years. I see the order and ease and cleanliness and insurance of my own society. And I see it as a bubble floating, oblivious, above the rest of the world. Everything we take fore granted in our civilized societies is anomalous; it's not normal or common. Weve hoarded a huge percentage of the earths resources and have constructed a haven for ourselves and we live in it and think that it is normalcy or that weve earned it; it is completely justified in our mind, we believe the lie that it's sustainable, that it will keep on getting better. Without tearing myself out of that context, Im caught up in the same illusion. As soon as I go back in December Ill slip right back into it, too ready to complain about violations of my rights, my small paycheck, long waits for healthcare, crumbling infrastructure, corrupt and ineffective government not having a clue what Im talking about.

So here I am in Gilgit and the Northern Areas, getting a feel (again) for what most of the world knows as life. In ignorance and with more than a hint of arrogance, I wonder how these people can bear to live like this, in such isolation, in such small spaces of the world with so little. A foreigner I met here, well meaning, having given up a significant income in his own country, said, If only theyd change their worldview, theyd be able to get the same comforts that we enjoy in [my country]. Im guilty of the same kind of patronizing simplification in my own mind. Its we who need to change our worldview.

One reason why I feel the urge (an urge that is quickly being solidified as I spend more time here) to work in this part of the world longer term is to keep a more balanced perspective of the world; this is a selfish reason, Im aware. I have other reasons, but this one keeps coming back to mind.

If you read my blog regularly you will quickly point out a contradiction in my thinking: on the one hand I say that to survive here I need to be pampered and on the other I look back at my compatriots and criticize them for an insulated outlook on the world. I dont deny this problem. I hope that one of the things I continue to learn is how to live as a rich person of privilege in this place or another thats part of the rest of the world.

In saying the things Ive said I dont want to discount the reality and the hardship experienced by too many people in my own country, people we treat with as much indifference as the poor across the world weve never seen and whose presence we dont really feel. Experiences similar to mine are to be had not three hours drive from my hometown.

Hunza

2006-10-08T11:52:00.000-05:00

On October 5 I went on my second field trip, deep into the Hunza valley on the KKH towards China to a town 10km south of Sost, the virtual border town on the KKH (the Kunjerab pass on the Chinese border is another 100 km or so away). The day was perfectly clear and so all the big mountains along the way would be visible.

As we started out from Gilgit and turned north into the Hunza valley, through a town called Danyore, I tried to remember everything about the road that I could. My last trip up the valley corresponds to my last trip south on the KKH. It's been a while. And things have changed, too. And I had forgotten how big all the mountains are. The day before leaving Islamabad, I bumped into Isobel Shaw's traveling companion, Ruth. She had come back to ISB early and was flying out in the next few days. Her impression of the Karakorum and Himalaya had been the shear size of the mountains. The ridges visible on along the KKH through Hunza are probably 10-15,000 ft high on average. And the big mountains visible from the road, Rakaposhi, Ultar & Passu, are all above 7000m.

The village up near Sost has a micro-hydel that is no longer used, though it is operational. I wasn't sure why it was suggested that I go up there, but the ride was nice and each visit to a site gives me a better understanding of how this technology works. The second visit, back along the road, in central Hunza, however, really demonstrated the skill and determination and ingenuity required on the part of the village organization to actually build a micro-hydel.

The second village was Ahmedabad. Along the road to Karimabad you turn off onto a jeep track that winds its way along a vertical cliff, 3 or 400 ft above the Hunza river for 8 km. The road in and of itself is a remarkable feat of the mountain engineering. We stopped at the site of the powerhouse. Three villagers were working, one filtering larger stones out of a pile of sand and the others worked on the dry stone masonry to surround the powerhouse. I saw a green nylon rope stretching off up the hill, the path that the penstock will take. One of the village activists agreed to take me up to the site of the forebay, 400 vertical feet above us and out of sight.

I adjusted my aluminum, shock-absorbing, Austrian-made trekking poles to length and started up behind him. He reached out and broke off a poplar branch to assist his walk up the hill. I don't think he really needed it. Slowly we wound our way up through the arrow-straight poplars typical of the valley now turning a brilliant yellow, dramatic against barren, vertical rock faces and the snow-capped peaks behind them. At one point we came close to the edge of a gorge we were following and I realized that on our right, the ridge we were following dropped vertically some 200ft to the glacial stream below, the source of the power channel we were approaching. Things got a little scarier as we reached the powerhouse site. A crude staircase of flat stones had been built the last 50 feet to the the forebay site, balancing over the edge of the gorge with little in the way of security.

The forebay is currently a hole blasted into the vertical rock face of the gorge, 200ft above the stream bed. A wall is being built on one side of the hole and gravel fill to line the reservoir is brought in from the stream bed by wheelbarrow along the irrigation channel, which my guide and I proceeded along. The channel is also blasted out of the shear rock. Fortunately, the water irrigates the gorge side of the channel and dense thistles grow along the edge giving on a false, but necessary sense of security. My trekking poles also helped ease my mind.

Far below, a wooden footbrigde crossed the stream. "The glacier used to come down to the bridge," my guide said. He remembered that from when he was very young, maybe 50 years ago. At the end of the channel where water was diverted from the glacial stream, the view opened up to two towering rock faces, maybe 2000ft higher than the point where we stood and close. The scene was rather breathtaking. And the understanding of the determination and courage required to build such a channel was equally impressive.

I kept taking photos, perhaps to the annoyance of my guide, but I didn't know if I'd be back there.

Soon we were back to the forebay. My legs felt a little more steady as we picked our way down, back to the jeep track.

As we headed south on the KKH, the sun was setting, highlighting the Eastern side of the valley. We stopped for supper at the point on the road where you can look from the point where you're standing all the way to the summit of Rakaposhi. The site is over-run by tourist-trapping tack, but the view is unadulterated. The perspective looses some of the immensity of the scene, but it's impressive non-the-less. The sun set. Rakaposhi's southwest shoulder glowed brilliantly pink and orange and then went dull white.

The near full moon made the mountains glow. Across the valley, as we drove back to Gilgit, lights blinked, testaments to the determination of these people to survive in these dramatic, isolated places of the world.
___________

It took a while to actually post the above because of this skittish internet connection, hopefully things will improve in that department.

Thanks for your comments, those you have posted on my blog and those you have e-mailed. They encourage me to keep writing. Again, if you have any questions, let me know.

where "it's" at

2006-10-04T07:15:00.000-05:00

Day 38

I repeat, internet access is very slow, but I'll try to keep posting.

Yesterday I went out on my first fieldtrip. The organization I'm with operates a fleet of 2-door Toyota Land Cruisers. Their sturdy, efficient vehicles that can go almost anywhere. Another engineer joined me and the driver shot off down the Karakorum Highway, south, toward Islamabad.

The last time I travelled south on the KKH was in late July, 1998, it could even have been August, I forget. It was early in the morning and still dark. I don't know if we had stopped for breakfast. I was sitting in the back of a Toyota coaster with a number of people who will likely read this post. We'd finished a post-graduation excursion into Hunza. It had been a magical, unreal time. Time stood still, as we wanted it to and we basked in the moon-glow of denial. It was great. One day we hiked up a glacier, imagining we could cross a 5000m pass and then return to our guesthouse, but that didn't turn out to be possible. Still, it was a most exhilarating day capped by stunning views of the origin of a big glacier and the ice-covered peaks surrounding it. That night we camped beside the glacier in an open and roughly level space. Three of us lay outside in our sleeping backs gawking at the millions of stars visible through the thin, clean air.

And then we had to leave. At one point we rounded a bend in that grey dawn and there was Nanga Parbat shining in the morning sun. One of the imagines stamped in my mind. I was listening to U2's song, "Where the Streets Have No Name" and so when I play that song, I can relive that moment, although many details have faded.

So that's one of the things I was thinking about as we raced south for a ways and then turned East, off of the KKH and onto the Skardu road. I'd driven by that intersection many times, but never turned there. There's a bridge to start out with, a single-lane, steel, prefabbed military suspension bridge. Our driver butted ahaed of the waiting transport lorries (they'd take forever to cross the bridge anyway) and raced on, into the northern Indus valley. The valley is immediately different than the Hunza valley or the lower Indus valley. It's even more desolate, strewn with blackened bolders at first and then narrow, with towering ridges on both sides of the river. The ridge-lines are jagged. Between them higher peaks are visible. There was new snow on some of them. Some were shrouded in clouds. The Indus boiled at their feet. I wished I knew more about whitewater so I could gauge the difficulty of the rapids. Some looked ruthless.

Early in the afternoon we reached our desitination, a small village with a brand new mini-hydel installation (300kW). Mini/micro hydropower is a remarkable form of power. It's about as low impact and sustainable as you can get. In this case, a stream empties into the Indus through the village, dropping it's last 50 feet in a stunning water fall emitting from a high, narrow, smooth gorge; tapping into the streamto create power and the returning the water to the stream is straight-forward. The penstock (pipe that delivers water to the turbine) snaked up and out of sight, above the water fall to the point where water from the stream was collected in a large, open tank called the forebay (the report says the penstock is 1000ft long). The other engineer and I had a look at the turbine and generator, both humming like mad. Then we took a walk up above the village to the forebay, roughly 400 vertical feet above the powerhouse. And there we stood, on the edge of a small ridge overlooking the power channel, discussing the merits of small scale hydropower and the benefits it had brought to the village.

Once down, a local farmer offered us fresh pomegranetes off of his tree. They were sweet and perfect. The sun glistened off the rock face across the river and to our right (back along the road) a towering snow-bound peak was visible bewteen jagged spires. That's how engineering should be done, I say.

Unfortunately I didn't have fresh batteries in my camera, but tomorrow I'm off again, up deep into the Hunza valley to visit two more micro-hydro projects so there will be pictures.

This morning there was a live mouse on my kitchen counter which somewhat reduced my appetite for breakfast.

Getting my Bearings

2006-10-01T11:53:00.000-05:00

Signor Ros is a great nordic band from Iceland. My friend got me onto them. The music is: sitting in candle light at the end of the day with a good beer and muted conversation behind a window that looks out into the forest; wondering what will come next; dreaming of something elusive; waiting; falling asleep and dreaming about tomorrow and yesterday at the same time.

I'm waiting for blogger to load up on my ultra-slow dial-up connection here in Gilgit, capital of the Northern Areas, Pakistan. At least I have an internet connection. I'm thankful for that. But life is slower up here. Cell phones are rare, gaurded by the government. Electricity is sometimes on. I have to clean my rice before cooking it. The market is a half hour walk away. But I've managed to rent a small house on the compound of the Vision International eye hospital here in town. I'm right by the river, which is turning blue as it settles into its winter course. On my little lawn down by the river I look almost straight up at the 10,000ft high ridge to the north of Gilgit, rising up out of other side of the river, 5500ft above where I stand.

Gilgit is hemmed in by mountains, bare, rocky, brown ridges towering above the town on both sides of the river. If you go up the alluvial fan on which the town is build, towards the south, and a bit to the east you can see the south ridge of the Rakaposhi massif marching up to it's peak above 7000m. Gilgit is just a taste of what is to come should one travel up Hunza valley or to Naltar or back down the road and east to Baltistan, home of the 8000m peaks in Pakistan.

This is a different world. Now I'm where I'm supposed to get serious and get some work done. I write more about that as I know more.

Yesterday I went up to the market and tried to recall how to shop for basic items in Pakistan. I have forgotten the Urdu words for so many things. The main bazaar road is crowded, of course. I was up there about two hours before the breaking of the fast. I stopped by a stand, greedily looking at the pakorras. I bought 1/4 of kilo for 40 cents, picked up some other necessities and went home. I made some chai and sat down to enjoy.

The sun sets early behind the high ridges. First the eastern slopes light up in darkening shades of gold and then the sun bursts up behind the opposing peaks, through the clouds and is gone. And the valley begins to cool and the wind picks up weaving through the roar of the river.

The stars are bright and unhindered by smog.

"there are cracks in everything. . ."

2006-09-24T06:48:00.000-05:00

On Friday Aziz (alternate name) took me on a whirlwind tour of Kabul. We saw Babur's garden, under restoration by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. It was crawling with young Afghan men, but otherwise a beautiful, walled in green space-rare in Kabul. I got some semi-reasonable pictures there. We moved on through the city, between the hills that jut into it, past the ancient city wall and into the old bazaar. Aziz kept up a string of commentary. He had just finished translating a book of Dari short stories. The stories mostly focus on tales in the alleyways of old Kabul - modern stories about an old place. He showed me the ruin of a large complex where the British held court in their day in Kabul. "This is the real Kabul", Aziz kept saying as we drove through the crowded bazaars. "Musicians and other artists work in that building", Aziz said pointing to a dilapidated, multi-story white complex nearly falling out into the bazaar. He is working on a book about culture in Kabul. He had interviewed a musician - an arrogant chap who felt his musicianship trumped all in the city. We passed many old and renowned Mosques. "I want to do a book just on the old mosques". And he could, if he had the time. We criss-crossed the Kabul river on our way through the city. The river is a channel sunken in the Kabul dust. A mere trickle wanders through, seemingly disoriented by the size of the otherwise empty channel. It waters the grass that grows on the river's bed. Famous bridges cross a confused trickle of water. Discarded cranes from the 1950s sit atop ghastly grey blocks of concrete the Soviet's thought passed as apartment blocks. Communications towers dot the skyline at the beginning of the Jalalabad road. New road construction equipment sits in the dust on contractors' compounds afraid to venture out and construct lest they are blown to pieces by a wayward bomb or IED.

We race down newly paved streets between heavily fortified walls of embassies, Camp Agar (the US forces base), the NATO base, the UN and other agencies under seige by threats of violence. "The walls keep getting thicker and higher".

Dusk and dust combine warping the waning yellow sun, creating an eerie glow around the mountains, giving wireless phone towers and minarets fuzzy edges. The city is softened by the haze. It glows like a dusty gem. Police men stop cars to check for bombs? They wave us through.

We drive between a huge mosque and the stadium where heads fell, drenched in blood, under Taliban swords. Beside the stadium is a huge exhibition ground where a thousand children play in the cool of dusk.

Then we're in a crowded street next to a city park. Kebab shops line the avenue. Families by sweets and barbequed me. There's a stand selling tapes of soundtracks to the movies that play in the cinema just behind it. "This is what Afghans want" Aziz said as we drove on, waving his hand at the seen of normal life with good little things. Five years on, the Karzai government has been hobbled by security issues. Money pours into the country only to sit in vaults. And development is slow. People are again discontent.

Suddenly we're out on a broad highway. Hundreds of private wedding plazas are under construction here. Huge three-dimensional grids of concrete and steel waiting for walls and lights and the shimmer of unreal nights, long speeches and too much money and somewhere a (happy?) couple waiting to leave. The streets are too wide. We pass a yellow monstrosity - a Soviet bread factory: centralization - what's wrong with naan available on your street corner.

It gets dark. Cars stream into the city from a weekend desitination. We race up a small hill to the Intercontinental Hotel and watch the city from above. Then we're down again in the direction of the point where we started our wild ride. I'm feeling the allure of Kabul settle in around me.

"There's something different about Kabul", I say, implying a comparison to Pakistan (where I've spent a significant amount of time).

"Go on," Aziz says with a gleam in his eye.

"It's so subtle, there's something softer in this people."

We talk about the extreme courtisy of the Persian culture.

"They outdo us entirely in hospitality."

And yet the paradox persists unparalleled hospitality and brutality in the same people. Beauty and brokenness in one city. Dust and rocks and bombs and hot tea and warm naan and broad smiles, Babur's garden and bullet-riddled walls crumbling onto the street.

Night falls. We stop at the gate of Aziz's friend. I sit in the Land Cruiser, a cacoon in an empty street, wishing I could stay just a little longer.

worlds are spinning by my window

2006-09-20T01:24:00.000-05:00

Worlds are spinning by my window. Landing in Kabul on Monday (18 September) was not surprising, but what is these days? More than anything we are surprised by joy, by warmth, by sincerity. These are rare finds. Cultural noise and drama are ubiquitous. Wars and killings are common place. Political upheaval and despots are old news. Policemen are shot on the street corner. Imperialism is the new colonialism. Modernization is the lie that freedom has replaced tyrannical oppression. Democracy is the illusion of order and choice where despots once ruled. This is the world we live in. I've been suprised by the warmth of the people I've come to Kabul to visit.

What can I say about Kabul? Not much, I haven’t really experienced much yet. It’s an economic capsule struggling to take off from a ruined place. It’s a city in a mine field. There’s a minefield in the city. The UN and the embassies are barricaded for war. There’s a dirty street with gleaming shops. There’s an underground, expat party scene, an Indian restaurant behind a wall, dust and dung. Traffic looks like chaos, but people get where they’re headed. Streets run nameless in grids and in tangles. Streets are dust. Modernization is trying hard to rear its ugly head. Progress is progressing too fast and too slow.

I’m trying to take in so much. I’m trying to see around the corner of my life.

I’m starting all over again and I’m a different person than when I last set foot in South Asia. I’m still trying to grow up, I’m still wondering what I’ll do then.

I’m really enjoying myself here in Kabul, metaphysical analyses aside. This is turning out to be a true holiday, a quiet place to meet old friends and make some space between Canada and Pakistan. I’m staying at the guesthouse of the International Assistance Mission, an NGO that’s been working in Kabul for 40 years, focusing on community development, sustainable energy, healthcare and teaching English. The guesthouse is a large, sprawling building behind a wall (all houses are here). The house looks like it’s been around for a while and survived the wars of the past 20 years. It’s well run and homey. Interesting people flit in and out. And it happens to be located in the part of Kabul where most of the people I’m going to be meeting with live.

Here in Kabul life goes on despite security concerns. Parts of the city do look like a war zone. Big the big NGOs (or BINGOs) and the Afghanistan Government persist despite strict security measures. Commerce goes on. Buildings go up. Foreign investment is desperately courted.

My exposure to development theory and thinking over the past few years now informs my perspective of this part of this country. The pace of progress in Pakistan and Afghanistan and India is staggering (never mind China). The all-important middle-class is rising and consuming. India’s economic growth rate is one of the highest in the world. Pakistan’s is also strong. Afghanistan is desperately trying to catch up. The drug of the promise of capitalism flows strong through government veins. No one seems to be questioning the model of economic growth through government liberalization and industrialization that proselytes from the rich countries have been pushing for years. Fossil fuel consumption must be increasing almost as fast as pollution in the cities of South Asia. More cars fill the poorly planned roads and streets, more highways plow through scarce green-space, more shops sprout up through overcrowded and staggering market complexes. I’ve seen some numbers that suggest poverty rates in South Asian countries have been decreasing over the past 20 years. This may be, but the sheer numbers of poor and vulnerable, must be growing.

Poignant analyses of the effects of the October earthquake point out that the areas affected were economically insignificant to Pakistan. In other words, the fact that 10s of thousands died and 100s of thousands are homeless doesn’t impact Pakistan’s economic outlook . Any shortfall is taken up by the 10s of millions pouring in as foreign aid.

the car that didn't fall apart

2006-09-17T00:06:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning, I got up early and caught a taxi to Faisabad to catch a van to Muzuffarabad, the capital of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (or Kashmir). Muzuffarabad was devastated, along with Balakot in the earthquake. I went to visit a friend who has been working with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a division of the UN.

My adventures began about 30 minutes after arriving in the town. My friend and I had driven in an IOM vehicle to meet another staff member. We were going to take a short trip around Muzuffarabad and then go for lunch. We were backing out of a driveway and had stopped for a second. I was sitting in the back of the brand-new 4-door Toyota pick-up and saw a large, local jeep ambling down the road, going quite slowly and easily far enough from our vehicle to stop in time. But the driver didn't slow the vehicle. I said to the driver of our truck, "He's not going to stop." And then it was too late. The lumbering jeep connected with the truck, caving in the front passenger-side door.

So for the next hour or so we sat around. First the IOM staff discussed what should be done and assured the driver of the vehicle at fault (it's breaks had failed) that the IOM truck was covered by insurance. Shortly after the incident, a traffic policeman arrived. He argued loudly with someone on a radio and assured us he couldn't do anything. But he did threaten to arrest the driver of the jeep. Eventually the district police showed up and looked at the damage. They needed to write a report but said it would take 3 hours.

Finally, we left in another IOM truck. My friend took me up to a camp for earthquake survivors up above the city. On the mountains all around the city, huge sections had slid down during the quake. Chasms had opened up. The mountains looked broken. Many camps had already been shut down, their occupants returning to their villages. But this camp we visited persisted. Little shops made out of corrugated sheets of steel had sprung up: a tailor, a shop selling chickens and a shop selling essentials like milk, tea, sugar, oil and candies.

We had lunch in a large hotel. The interior had been badly damaged in the quake and construction was underway everywhere.

Finally, it came time for me to leave. I wanted to travel back through the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and stay the night in Abbotabad with friends. My friend, I and three others traveled to the bus stand in an IOM vehicle. They were going to help me get on a van to Abbotabad. But vans were scarce and large crowds waited for them, swarming around each one as it pulled in. So one of the national IOM staff persons offered to try and get a taxi to Manshara, a transport and commercial centre on my way to Abbotabad. A taxi that far was going to cost Rs1600 - more than I was willing to pay. Then our man phoned back and said he had found a taxi going to Abbotabad. It would only charge Rs600, but there was another person on the taxi. That was fine with me.

A few minutes later, the "taxi" pulled up caring not one passenger, but three. The vehicle was an ancient Toyota Corolla literally coming apart at the seams. It rattled badly and bottomed out on every bump. I was uncertain. The three passengers were serious-looking Pathans (Afghans, as it turned out). The driver was Pakistani. My friend speaks Pushtu and so he handled the negotiations. The large Afghan in the front seat agreed to give it up for me. He didn't look very happy about that. But off we went. From inside, the car seemed even more dilapidated. The transmission protested every gear change. The muffler thudded against the underside of the car ominously. The car seemed to flex noticeably at every shift in momentum. The first town on our route was Gardi Hubbibulah, about 20km from Muzuffarabad. The large Afghan argued continuously with the driver, urging him to get another car-it was not clear from where. 45 minutes, later, however we reached Gardi. And, surprisingly, our driver pulled up at some random place and said we would use the Suzuki van parked here - he knew the driver, it was his cousin.

Here the driver demanded the Rs.600 we had agreed on as my fare to Abbotabad. This startled me, but there seemed no way around it, so I shelled out the bills and boarded the Suzuki van with the Afghans. This second vehicle was luxurious compared with the first and we started off confidently up the hill and over to Manshera and then Abbotabad.

Just after 18h00 I sent a text message to my friend, letting him know I had arrived safely. He called me back and said he was relieved. The Afghans urged me to eat with them that evening. One of them had also tried to convert me to Islam during the journey, the one that knew some English (and no Urdu apparently) who had a relative in Vancouver (he showed me his address on a scrap of paper carried in his wallet). I declined both invitations.

I was thankful that I knew the latter part of the route we traveled that day. Once in Abbotabad, I breathed a sigh of relief and boarded a Suzuki along the main road toward the house where I would stay that night. I've always felt completely safe in Abbotabad and that remained the case as I would my way up the back streets to my destination. I called my friends once I arrived at their gate and they let me in. I joined them in their kitchen where they were preparing supper.

We talked easily about eggplant, my adventures and the earthquake.

Taxi

2006-09-15T13:09:00.000-05:00

"Your country?" my taxi driver yelled above the din of Islamabad's Power 99 FM screeching through his worn out speakers.
"Canada"
"You are Christian?"
"Yes"
"I too!"
And he points to a little picture of the Pope taped to the inside of his windscreen, in full view of the passenger (I had failed to notice). And that was it. I wasn't sure where to the conversation should go from there.

Before that I had been eating at a new Thai restaurant, Royal Orchid (food gets about a B, if you're reading this and might be eating in ISB soon, a B means don't bother, not at the prices they charge) here in ISB. The waiter couldn't stop smiling and ended all his sentences with "yes, please".

Pictures and a Soiree

2006-09-15T00:53:00.000-05:00

Day 19, Islamabad, Rain

It's Friday and the house I'm staying is empty. I thought I'd make the most of my good internet access while I'm here and upload some pictures. I've opened a Flickr account and will post selected pictures there. So have a look from time to time. I'll keep including some pictures on my blog postings as well.

Is soiree the right word? If so, I probably mis-spelled it.

Last night I did partake in a dinner party put on by my host for one Isobel Shaw. She's a guidebook writer who has done general guides of Pakistan as well as a trekking guide. She's out here to update the trekking guide. It was neat to meet her. Her demenur is airy and easy. Her British sensibilities complement her vivacious, confident character. In Pakistan she's a bit of a celebrity.

But I'm not good at the dinner party scene. Those of you who know me understand my reserved, sometimes awkward character in a crowd of strangers. I don't have much time for small talk and sometimes that's my loss. I am beginning to recognize the value of networking, as much as I dispise that word. But I felt like a kid, last night, interrupting a party for grown-ups. My stories seem empty and boring. Stories are rather highly valued in this context. Isobel, of course, has great stories of her hundreds of days trekking in Northern Pakistan. A Brigadier-General, ret., told of crossing a high pass between Kaghan and the Indus Valley. He and his soldiers made the crossing in winter, on foot. It was the first such crossing. He had asked a mullah to pray for their company before they set off over the pass. But the mullah refused to pray for such a foolish endeavor.

The food was quite good, prepared by the Indonesian-Pakistani cook who commands the kitchen here.

Boy Standing on Mountain

2006-09-13T22:29:00.000-05:00

Day 17 - Qalandarabad, Pakistan

I took this picture yesterday in a small village about 5000ft above the town of Balakot, one of the large centres near the epicentre of the October earthquake in Pakistan. A small road winds up the mountain, broken in many places by the earthquake and narrowed in others by mudslides due to heavy rains this summer. At one point, an even smaller road breaks off and continues to climb up to this village. Here every house was flattened by the earthquake. I don't know how many people lost their lives. In November last year, construction of temporary dwellings was well under way. Many of these dwellings were semi-cylindrical shelters built of rolled steel tubing and sheets of corrugated galvanized steel. The person driving me up and I stopped to have tea with the owners of one of these dwellings which my dad helped to build while he was out here shortly after the quake. Afterwards we walked around the village. Somehow they have pressed on. Another corn crop was planted and has developed well, it seems. Construction of new permanent dwellings has begun, but slowly. Government bureaucracy and corruption slows everything, even more than the narrow, often-blocked jeep track that links the village to Balakot.

In Balakot, I marveled at the way life is pushing up again through the rubble and between mass graves of students trapped in schools when the earthquake struck just after 9am in the morning. Entire new rows of shops have sprung up alongside the main road. Other rebuilding has commenced. I can't really understand. People move around en mass. Drivers try to run each other off the road.

In the evening, yesterday, I visited with two old family friends. These were very warm experiences, akin to meeting family.

On I go, trying to fill the days until I travel to Afghanistan on Monday.

The Pakistan government currently debates whether or not they should amend a set of laws that generally result in rape victims going to jail for the crimes committed against them. There is much opposition from a conservative wing in the government. Everyone is trying to define the "true spirit of I----" is.

Dark Nights and Mad Drivers

2006-09-11T23:19:00.000-05:00

Slowly I'm venturing into the wilds of Pakistan, back to the places where I spent most of my time here as a kid. Islamabad seemed messy and loud to my placated mind, but I forgot what it's like once your off the grid of streets under the Marghalla Hills.

The first stage of the journey was a taxi ride of Islamabad's twin Rawalpindi. They're unidentical twins. Rawalpindi is an ancient web of streets and a confusion of houses ringed by slums. Off we drove. You could see the city hovering in the smog, shimmering in the setting sun. I had hired a taxi together with an older woman who did not where the customary scarf on her head. She knew English well and we had both missed the shuttle from the bus station in Islamabad to the central station in Pindi. The first question she asked was: "Do you feel safe as a foreigner in light of developments since September 11?" I said I felt quite safe. She went on to tell me about her work as a peace activist in Pakistan - gutsy woman. Her organization is working for peace in South Asia, particularly between India and Pakistan. I commend her for that.

The bus ride was uneventful. Pakistan has a new bus network featuring clean, spacious, air-conditioned coaches. The network takes bookings and issues tickets (I'm sure this has never been the case for a bus service in Pakistan before). It's great, though the seats are a bit close together for me (did I mention I have a problem with that).

We made our way up to the town where my parents lived for 10+years, Abottabad. As we neared the town night set it. I tried to orient myself based on lighted shops and intersections I recognized. The town is overflowing its bounds, it seems to me. We careened by the lights forcing smaller vehicles off onto the shoulders as we pushed back into our lane just in time to avoid an on-coming transport truck. I saw an amazing manouver. I've seen a lot of crazy stuff on Pakistani roads, but never two large vehicles (our bus was one) passing a slow-moving transport simultaneously on a single lane road around a blind corner. The other vehicle took the shoulder and we the on-coming lane. Fabulous!

Living Like a King

2006-09-10T05:17:00.000-05:00

Pakistan's alright if you live like a king. This I already knew in the back of my mind. In my previous life here, we lived modestly, but still received preferential treatment because of the colour of our skin and the fact that my dad was a doctor, a Sahib.

This is a ridiculous carry over from the Raj. Pakistan is independent, but the white man is still considered special. This saddens me.

Of course legitimate relationships can be developed between Pakistanis and foreigners. I marveled at my father's and mother's abilities to walk the line between sahib (and memsahib) and a local. Their language skills and cultural sensitivity were probably as well honed as any white person's.

Last night I was out with the family I'm staying with. They are essentially foreigners, well educated with significant experience living and working in Pakistan. We drove up to a chic cafe in one of the markets in Islamabad. The ubiquitous security guard (blue uniform and shotgun) opened our doors with a "Good evening Sahib". Up we went into the cool space, espresso machine steaming behind an ornate bar.

After dinner, one of the children in our party asked why his mother tipped the security guard, who with equal servitude had closed our car doors. "He's poor", his mom replied. "He doesn't look poor", shot back the child. "Anyone who stands outside and opens doors for other people as a job, is poor, honey." And we were gone into the night, just cool enough to allow us to turn off the A/C and open our windows.

Today we went to church, gliding through myriad security barriers in our sealed Land Cruiser. Bow, bow, open the gate, step back and sit down again in the hot sun.

People have lived here as foreigners but tried to avoid this kind of lifestyle as much as possible. I don't envy them. I don't think I could do it. So I'll go on living like a king and enjoying the diversity and rich culture of this country from my airy throne. I've got my escape plans all laid out. My passport, money and status pave the way for me while I'm here.
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NB. My limited experiences in the Northern Areas, the district of Pakistan where I will spend October and November, have been different than what I've described above. The people there seem more independent, more confident in their regional identities and more open.

Blog Title Yields No Charm

2006-09-09T02:08:00.000-05:00

Day 13, Islamabad Pakistan, 29.5 degrees inside.
Smoggy.

The more I travel through Heathrow, the less I'm inclined to write a positive word about the airport. It's too big, too smoky, too spread out, too messy. And it's airline employees have not been kind in my seat assignments. I did get a bulkhead seat on the LHR-ISB leg, but some guy across the aisle got moved to the next compartment (World traveler Plus) because his seat was double-booked! Grrr. More than half of that compartment was empty during the flight. So, I've resolved to put my Canadian modesty aside and blatantly ask for an upgrade on my next flight in December.

That said, I'm here. Stopping in Finland essentially eliminated jetlag so I'm back to normal.

Pakistan has even begun to feel normal, though the contrasts between Canadian society and Pakistani are glaring. 6 years away is long enough to almost completely slip into the mindset that North American society is the global norm and worldvision adds are a made-for-tv movie designed to instill some guilt, or something.

But it's life here that's the global norm, crowded, hot and, in some senses, hopeless. And (many of) you and I certainly don't deserve more comfort, but we're obscenely lavished with it, living in North America. And the math works speaks for itself. 10Xconsumption = 10Xwaste generation = 10Xcomfort level. Yay!

You can see I'm having a bit of culture shock. There seems to be no cure.

Day 9 Ramblings

2006-09-05T14:16:00.000-05:00

Calvin: "A bushel is a unit of weight equal equal to four pecks." What's a peck?
Hobbes: A short smooch.
Calvin: You know, I don't understand math at all

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What I'm really doing here in Finland is having a holiday. My days have usually started with a couple of cups of excellent Finnish coffee out on a little balcony overlooking forest, the forest that the city maintains within its limits for the enjoyment of its citizens. Then I've travelled into the city centre where my friend (call him Travis) works teaching english to Finnish business people. Helsinki feels entirely European to my now North American centric perspective, though the city is only 150 years old (a young'un, by European standards). Coblestones and coloured stone buildings built in polygons corresponding to the angles of intersection of the streets around them are commonplace. Yesterday I took the elevator up the tower at the stadium built for the 1952 olympics. It was misty at the top, but the city was visible, a small, unassuming town dotted with treed granite outcroppings and subdivided by meandering inlets of the Baltic sea.

Tomorrow I leave Finland, travel back through London's Heathrow (where my bag will probably get lost again) and take a direct BA flight to Islamabad. I'm trying to anticipate what it will be like to step out of Islamabad International into the hot, thick, loud morning for the first time since April 1999. It's been a while. I keep running useful Urdu phrases through my head trying to get the grammer right, deciding whether or not to try them out on unsuspecting customs agents. I think I'll stick with English.

There the real adventure begins. Finland has provided a much needed lull in my life. Conversation has often involved my and Travis's shared experiences in Pakistan. Travis's parents still live there and I'll be spending my first few days in the country with his uncle and aunt. So there's some continuity between my stay here and the next phase of my journey.

My gastronomic experiences in the two countries will lack continuity, but I'll be sure to report on them just the same.

I realize I tend to ramble on in these posts. If there's something you're not hearing about and would like to, let me know.

Cricket, for example, has not graced my posts for a while. Those of you in North America especially are feeling withdrawal, I'm sure. Pakistan is asserting herself in Enland after a dismal performance in the test matches. The first one-day match (that's right, as I've mentioned before, the short version of cricket takes a mere day) was rained out. In the second, England appeared water-logged, despite the improved weather and in the third England finally showed up, but Pakistan was able to hang on for the win.

Finns Start Talking on the Weekends

2006-09-02T16:42:00.000-05:00

Talk turns to Politics, old times, makes of beer, families, music, what was and is and will be and how and why. The sky is grey but yields no rain. The sun is out but limits its heat. Drunks stagger home on Saturday morning, make scenes on the metro, drink beer out of paper bags in public. Finns start talking on the weekend. Goat cheese and basil-soaked feta sold by a Turk who adds chocolates to our order. Grey cobbles and coffee in a communist(-like) square. Smooth trains and buses that run on time in the middle of the forest. Stair-case up a granite shelf and lunch on a lake with ducks in the water. Talk turns to online match-making services, divorce, basketball, babies, Ben Harper.
Day 6.

Rissotto and Smoked Salmon

2006-09-01T04:44:00.000-05:00

I just checked my blog stats and noticed quite a few new hits in recent days. Thanks for your interest. Thanks Rachel for your referral. I'll see what I can do to live up to your claims about my blog.

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Days 4 and 5
Helsinki, Finland

Those of you who know me and read my blog, know that food is one of my favourite things. And so far, food experiences have been notable here in Helsinki. On Wednesday, I met my friend in the city centre and we stopped in one of his wife's favourite cafes on the street Pohjoisesplanaol. I'm on a wheat free diet so I had to pass up the tantalizing sandwiches. Instead I ordered a bowl of salmon soup on my friend's recommendation (although this cafe serves only the second best salmon soup in the city). I enjoy salmon, but I live in the middle of a large continent, hundreds of kilometers away from the sea, so good, fresh salmon is an expensive rarity, a foreign food. The soup was nearly perfect. It was fresh and hot, light and creamy, thin, with dill and black peppercorns and something sweet underneath, maybe cinnamon. Pink chunks of flaky salmon and pieces of new potato bursting with flavour floated in the broth. I've rarely enjoyed soup so much.

The next day, my friend, his wife and new baby lunched at a small French cafe in an area of the city called Ullanlinna (or Ulrikasborg, in Swedish). The cafe is perfect. Such establishments don't, to my knowledge, exist in Winnipeg. Lunch consists of a hot dish and a choice of eight tantalizing salads. Again, I had to pass on the two fine looking pasta options. I chose the Wild Forest Rissotto and a salad of mixed greens, sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese topped with red pepper dressing. The rissotto was excellent, well done and accented with oyster mushrooms (or a near relative).

Yesterday evening homemade pizza toppings included smoked, pepper-crusted salmon fillet with sauted mushrooms and shallots.

So much for food. It's a fleeting thing.

Heathrow and Helsinki

2006-08-30T13:55:00.000-05:00

I don't remember much of my last trip through Heathrow. I think it was sometime in the early 90s. Later trips between Pakistan and Canada ran via Frankfurt and Zurich. So I didn't know what to expect. I got off my plan at around 6am London time on 29 August-with about 5000 other people (not all on the same plane, of course). But we did all go through the same security check, forming a long, zigzagging line demarcated by green webbing. Green seemed the colour of the hour. Some clever designer had fabricated delightful green outfits for the security attendants. The ladies, "manning" the x-ray machines wore dreadful, plain knee-length skirts, ill-fitting and tasteless, topped with some ancient print vests. They all seemed roughly the same age and displayed the same complete lack of interest in anything. The grudgingly faced the screens displaying the contents of thousands of handbags. Shoes and belts off, march through the metal detector, get frisked, move on to your terminal of departure.

Heathrow (terminal 1, at least) is busy, messy, smoky and bored. But I survived the 7.5 hour wait for my flight. Then it was off to Helsinki, crammed into a BA commuter jet filled with ruddy British business men. And once at the airport, the pilot pulled in about 5 feet past the jetway, delaying us for about 15 minutes while we waited for a push back into the correct position. . .details.

My friend, from who's computer I write, picked me up and we bused back to the city.

Finland is a small country, set off in a quiet corner of the world. Education standards are sky-high along with living standards reflecting a social-centric system that works extremely well. Like the Gauls, they have only one fear, that Sweden will fall on their heads. Similarities between Finland and Canada run deeper than this. I look out the window of my friend's apartment (located in the city) and see only thick forest on pre-Cambrian shield. The weather is never far away in conversations. Hockey is the new religion.

No pictures today, but I did take some. Maybe tomorrow.

5

2006-08-23T18:25:00.000-05:00

What's a trip around the world without a good visa scare? Procrastinator that I am I left my visa application for Afghanistan just a little too long. Fortunately for me, when you call the Afghan Embassy in Canada, someone answers who can help you, within minutes. And so I was able to express my concern and they were very helpful. So my passport is once again in the air, on it's way back to me.

This past week has been obscured by a flurry of e-mails sorting out whom I will stay with in the places I will be traveling to in September. It's finally registering that I will see all of these people in just a short time. Now that I'm not fretting about my visa, I can focus on what's ahead.

I look at this trip as one of the first independent things I've done in my life. I don't really feel like I've been very stretched in terms of asserting my independence as an adult up to this point. Of course I'm "independent"-I have my own car, a real job and have had my own place to live and I have an education, etc. . .but during the last few years I feel like I've been lulled into a comfortable place, too comfortable, almost numbing. And so I look forward to taking this trip, having my consciousness roughed up a bit, being forced to stand on my own feet and being allowed into a different space from which I will have the privilege of looking back at my life here and imagining it in a different way.

5 days to go.

flavour

2006-08-15T11:40:00.000-05:00

So Heathrow has loosened its security restrictions somewhat. Passengers are now allowed one small piece of hand luggage each. That's a relief! I was imagining the 20 hours between London and Sydney (scheduled for the end of my travels) with nothing to amuse myself but my pocket-sized wallet, keys, passport and ticket.

Recently I've given my blog address to two people who had never heard of a blog before. I guess the form is not as pervasive as I had thought.
_________________________

My palate had a renaissance of sorts at the find bistro "Cru" on West Broadway in Vancouver. I tasted, for the first time, goat's cheese in a sweet dish, cheese cake to be exact. It was sublime. I continue to scrounge for new flavours in the bit of cooking that I do. Last night I concocted a tomato sauce: sauted onions, garlic and mushrooms, tomato puree and vegetable stock. Then I added paprika, red chili powder and grated chocolate. The chocolate gave the sauce a rich, mellow quality, taking some of the edge off the tomato acid. Later I garnished the plated pasta and sauce with goat's cheese, toasted almonds and larger flakes of the same chocolate. A mouthful of all of that, the chocolate and goat's cheese melting together, was a rich experience. Almost too rich, but fascinating, something new and tantalizing.

I've become a flavour fiend, interested, but never satisfied, searching for more complexity, more suprises.

The parallel with music is strong. I respond in much the same way to the flavours in food and the textures, harmonies and rhythms in music (particularly jazz). A musician can be great, the trio melding perfectly and I'm bored, because I've heard the same sound a hundred times before. And then I hear something new (to me): Bill Frisell turning "Tennessee Flat-top Box" upside down through dissonance and electric distortion with his trio.

Why is it that humans continue to seek out perfection (as each one interprets it)? We can't stop creating, layering and rearranging, always seeking something more beautiful and intoxicating.

ravioli lessons

2006-08-10T11:43:00.000-05:00

18 days to go.
passport en route to Ottawa again.

It's been a while since I've written, but people keep visiting the site. Thanks. I saw there was a hit from Kabul this past week.

When Rachel and I sat down to determine a date for our second meal (for a description of the first, click here) we found there was only one day that would work for both of us before I left: Sunday, August 6. So that's what it was.

We decided that the entree would consist of three ravioli courses. Rachel had been to this amazing restaurant in Woodstock, NY and wanted to re-create the meal, which included ravioli stuffed with ricotta and served with grilled pear and toasted pine nuts. But of course, one ravioli would never do, so we opted for three, continuing on the fruit and meatless theme. By Sunday was had decided on two more combinations: sauted eggplant and cilantro filling with tomato cream and cardamom sauce and walnut, fig and blue cheese filling with a balsamic reduction sauce. This menu, we realized, was quite ambitious, not only because of its breadth but also because neither Rachel nor me are ravioli experts.

The first thing we learned about ravioli involved the pasta dough itself. Although the Naked Chef is right about most things, he seemed to have erred when recommending that the sheets of pasta be spaced with damp tea towels after rolling. He didn't mention that the dough might stick to the tea towels (he didn't say anything about spelt pasta dough with seemed to have a strong desire to fully integrate itself with the tea towels that sandwiched it). So off came the pasta, back into a ball to be rolled again.

Finally we had our sheets of pasta layered with wax paper ready to go. Once the fillings were complete we started filling, ending up with 18 of each type.

The next lesson was: watch out for overly moist fillings-they tend to render your ravioli unfit to boil. So out went the 18 ricotta-filled past pockets. Thankfully Rachel's quick thinking saved us. She substituted wanton wrappers for the next attempt and they were deemed successful by our guests.

A few of the pockets opened, but for the most part we were able to produce, in total, 27 plates of ravioli for our 7 guests and us.

Following the ravioli came another rip-off from Woodstock (well done Rach), a great salad featuring chevre, diced mango and candied pecans. For dessert (the course where Rachel's knowledge, creativity and experience far exceed mine) we experienced fresh basil puree on strawberries and cream over shortbread cookies and, to close the meal, small scoops of olive oil and vanilla bean ice cream with black peppercorn biscotti. Our Italian-Mennonite friend provided the espresso. Wine was selected for each of the ravioli courses by the good staff of Banville and Jones here in Winnipeg.

I was going to write something about post-modernism and watermelon, but I'll save that for next time.

no idea what to title this post

2006-08-02T11:37:00.000-05:00

It's nice to know I have some regular readers. Feel free to comment. For example, you could write: "boring post, if this is a travel blog, why are you writing about other stuff?". Or you could write: "good point, but I think your dead wrong." Or, you could ask for clarification on some point like: "why isn't the horizon level on the telephone post picture in the "Under the Big Sky" post?". You could even write: "if you posted more often, I might read your blog." Finally, you could take Rachel's cue and post some very kind words, if you particularly liked something.

So 26 days remain. It's really hard to focus on what I have to do at work these days. I have my weekends booked up for the rest of August doing this and that: wedding, cooking, cooking, breakfast, lake, etc. Lot's of cooking.

Last weekend I was out at Hecla Island with my dad's family. Our trip there to car camp at the provincial park campground is an annual tradition. And it usually involves food. Food preparation and eating it, of course, is one of the things we do for entertainment. My group cooked up a 3-dish Thai meal: green mango salad with cilantro; yellow curry with squash and sweet potato and spicy eggplant with Thai basil. It turned out great and kept us busy for a good 4 hours.

one world, one beer

2006-07-27T11:40:00.000-05:00

31 days to go. I will send my passport off to the Afghan high commission in Ottawa this week. Australia has an online visa application for certain types of applicants from certain countries. That's a great idea. And Finland requires no visa at all for Canadian tourists, an even better idea.

I was listening to an interview with British/Italian author Tim Parks on Monday night. I wish
I'd heard of him earlier. I'll definitely pick up one of his books. He's written novels as well as non-fiction (termed travel writing, but as he pointed out, he never left Italy after he moved there and began writing about it). He read a short section from "A Season With Verona". The short section Parks read describes a scene on a train after a football match (football is the setting for the book) in which a young man simultaneously curses policemen out the train window and soothingly reassures his mother, via his mobile, that he'll be home by the time the pasta's ready.

The book explores is the phenomena of the space cut out for football in Italian life. It's a wild place where passions sore and men scream and cry and shout blasphemous things. It's the stadium-turned cathedral from the World Cup adds. . ."these are our anthems. . .this is our worship. . .this is our holy grail" etc. He admits that football is nothing, it means nothing, it's empty, but people are willing to stake their life on it because the game and the culture make them feel like there is something. That's kind of depressing, actually.

Maybe that's why Budweiser adds are so over-the-top. It's promoters are desperately trying to believe that there's anything of value in the bottle.

under the big sky

2006-07-23T00:18:00.000-05:00

I still feel like a foreigner on the prairies after having been back for 8 years (or it will be this August). Before that I lived in the Himalyan foothills. I'm starting to fully appreciate the beauty of these flat lands. Tonight I drove just outside the town where my mom lives to shoot some pictures of the sunset on my Canon A520 4.0MP camera. These are some of the results.

"Imaginary Homelands"

2006-07-21T11:41:00.000-05:00

So Salman Rushdie titled his first collection of non-fiction works. Rushdie also deals with this idea in his second collection of non-fiction titled "Step Across this Line". He's speaking of boundaries, frontiers, identity of place. He rightly claims that these are imagined entities, they are products of our minds and cultures. They are valid and necessary, but I think he also cautions us not to elevate these entities to the status of immutable, universal fact.

What brought this theme to mind, was the central character is Foer's book. The boy invents obsessively. He imagines. It disturbs him. Towards the end of the story, he starts to realize, however, that not everything he thought was concrete and fact, was as it seemed. Others invented as well to create their own reality. I understood this revelation to imply that everyone, to some extent, imagines to fill in the holes in their own reality or to bridge the gap between two concrete experiences.

This resonates with me because I continue to imagine my own homeland, to build my own identity of place in this world. The classic question supposed to stop third culture kids (TCKs) in their tracks is this: "where is home for you"?. The reason that question is a problem, however, is that it's almost exclusively asked by people who have few or no gaps in their concrete experience of home. Their physical home is their imagined home. If they haven't realized that about themselves, they ask the question, ignorantly, not realizing it's the wrong one.

"Strauss Defends Declaration Delay"

2006-07-18T11:41:00.000-05:00

Pakistan drew with England in their first test. This pleases me as England set out with a high total in their first innings. Pakistan came back nicely to force the draw. If you think soccer is boring (if you call the sport soccer, you're more likely to think it boring) with the possibility of a scoreless 90 minutes, think about test cricket. After five days, each side having scored around 700 runs, the result can be a draw - that's right, no one wins. And then you have the reporters, the next day (day 6, in essence), criticizing the captain of the English side for waiting to long to declare. Because, in cricket, you can declare- you say, "we've scored enough runs and we're going to stop batting now". And if you wait too long to declare you might not leave your side enough time, after the other side's innings, to win the game. It's a 5-day game and you can still run out of time. And I'm a big fan, just so you know, although I find the one-day format a touch more engaging.

By the way, I got my visa for Pakistan. So, with 41 days to go, that's another major thing out of the way. Now all that's left is to decide whether or not to by a GPS receiver.

If things could go backwards

2006-07-13T21:19:00.000-05:00

In this information age information itself is enough to entertain. The more information the more entertaining. I monitor activity on this blog through my free account on www.ewebcounter.com. and I can see who enters my website and how they found it and for how long they stayed. The site even tells me what country the hit originated in. That's how I know I've had hits in Sweden, Singapore, Norway and the Netherlands. The person in the Netherlands found my blog by searching for "karimabad+baltit" on google's blog search. I was happy to see that my blog was number four on the list of search results. Viewing hits on my website is almost more entertaining than writing posts for my blog (except when I'm posting about viewing stats on my blog!). Wow! Enough of that.

In my last post I almost got to the point where I could transition to talking about a great book that I just finished: "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." I finished it a couple of weeks ago and am still reacting to it and processing the whole experience. The book has the same elusive quality as other books that have, for various reasons, resonated with me. I think of Mistry's "Family Matters". A great novel, in my humble opinion, gives takes you, for a fleeting moment (sometimes longer) to a vantage point where you see humanity from outside of it and suddenly encounter a truth about humanity or a facet of humanity, be it love, loss, hate, sorrow, injustice, redemption. It shines up at you like the flashlight of a familiar person on the street, far below, letting you know she's there.

bombs and numbers

2006-07-12T11:45:00.000-05:00

In her breathtaking book "For the Time Being" Annie Dillard wonders at numbers. How can a human fathom the vast numbers of things that surround us: the number of stars, the number of grains of sand, the number of people killed by other people and by nature? The train bombings in Mumbai yesterday make my eyes gloss over and my brain switch to another topic. Western news media create their own world. It seems to have little relation to ours. In their world only about 100 people die a month. And those one hundred deaths produce bold headlines and we are all supposed to wake up from our number-induced trance and take notice and get angry or sentimental or something.

One soldier in the Canadian military dies in combat. It's what he could have expected (and I say that with no disrespect to him or his grieving family) and there is a hue and cry: "It was a waste!", "Bring home the troops!".

1426 people are trampled to death in Mecca during the Haj in 1990 and it's a one word statistic on some link buried under 1000 pages on BBC's website (it happens every year).

And 160 (and counting) die in "co-ordinated attacks" in Mumbai. It's those terrorists. And since terrorists first appeared on earth in 2001 we must all sit up and start to analyze and run back to our podiums to root for our side in the conflict of ideas and ideologies where hundreds of people (188 in Washington D.C. this year already) are murdered in cold blood, unnoticed.

What Dillard points out is this: our experience now, in the 21st century is nothing new-humans have been killing each other in vast numbers ever since we've been around. Live in the present, go where you must. Exercise common sense. And live free of fear.

lost and loving it

2006-07-11T11:48:00.000-05:00

I've searched blogs for the word "hunza" and also for the phrase "batura glacier". Neither search reveals much. Since a number of countries now have Pakistan on their "not advised to travel" list it's even less likely that travelers will seek out this remote valley.

I did, however, find this pair of world travelers, American's who found their trip to the Northern Areas a challenge to Western medias' portrayals of Pakistan. Here's a sample of a picture (of a view from the town of Gulmit along the Karakorum Highway (KKH) on their flickr site.
I've also come across this website. It's a journal of a British couple on a marathon trip through central and south Asia. I found it when searching for the phrase "Batura Glacier".

Northern Pakistan certainly seems lost on the Western world apart from the elite climbers who make their way there to attempt one the 5 8000m peaks in the area. It's rugged and relatively inaccessible and likely daunting to many perspective Western travelers, if they even hear about it in the first place. And personally, I like it that way and I count myself prevailed to be able to return there this fall.

!!. . .

2006-07-09T17:46:00.000-05:00

I just finished writing a post and then tried to perform a spell-check on it and ended up loosing the whole thing. So I'll try again later.

blue

2006-07-07T16:15:00.000-05:00

Here's a random picture I found online. I can't remember what I was searching for. It's a picture of somewhere in Rawal Pindi, in the 80s. I think it's quite evocative.

id fotos

2006-07-06T17:41:00.000-05:00

(NB. The picture on the previous post depicts a vista that I will soon see for myself once again: Baltit fort, Karimabad. I found the picture on a great site by Dutch photographers. Take a look for yourself www.terranomada.com)

Having an i.d. photo taken for a passport (or visa application in my case) should be a routine procedure. So I thought, but the poor kid at Shoppers Drug Mart could not get it right. The problem was that my nose reflected too much light. And people who review passport pictures dislike reflected light (apparently) off any part of the person who's identification is in question. People who grant (or, more often deny) visas are ultimately picky (at least in certain countries) so no light must reflect. And he got all flustered, because he assumed I would be embarrassed by the fact that my nose reflected too much light. It could imply my skin was overly greasy! And that would be unfortunate - devastating, actually. But I was quite confident this was not the case, as I had showered hours before.

I ended up having to go to the cosmetics section and get some makeup product to dab on my nose to flatten the light. This worked. So after try three he got the photos right and printed me two copies, one for my Pakistan visa application and one for Afghanistan. And now those pristine photos are in the mail. And hopefully the official at the HC in Ottawa will look kindly on my face, take my money (I'm sure he/she will do that anyway) and stamp my passport with ink worth more than it's weight in gold (I do not exaggerate).

Cheers.

coming soon

2006-07-05T12:03:00.000-05:00

soon I will be off on a trip around the world. due to my considerable height, I always make an effort to obtain exit row seating when travelling by air. this is my pre-occupation. when I think of this trip, my mind seizes on that ellusive exit row, tortured by the possibility that some petite 5'5" person will have secured that last seat by random chance and I will be left to reflect on the proximity of my knees to my face for the following 14 hours while the Pacific slips beneath us.