Braving the unknown

Post-swamp, Gabon

Mohammad Amin Rather, owner of A-Z grocery Store in the Rajagh area of Srinagar, said: "People are buying rice, edible oil, pulses, eggs and other essentials in bulk. We are busy and supplies are running out."

…

The owner of Raina Medicate in Srinagar's upscale Jawahar Nagar area, Mohammad Hameem, said people were rushing to buy anti-cancer, hypertension, diabetic and other vital drugs.

--New York Times

 

I am scheduled to fly to Delhi, and thence to Kashmir, in just over three weeks.  Any day now, final trip details and meeting instructions should be arriving.  Imagine my joy at learning that the region is apparently headed into chaos.  After terrorists -- allegedly supported by Pakistan -- launched a February 14 suicide bombing in Kashmir that killed forty Indian security personnel, India has been threatening severe retribution against Pakistan. 

 

The fury is partially political -- Indian elections are coming up soon -- but that does not rule out the possibility of military retaliation.  Indian forces have been rounding up activists who support either independence for Kashmir or Kashmir's actual union with Pakistan.   The news today is full of reports of Indian military aircraft and helicopter flights over the Kashmir valley.

 

I assume my trip is going forward, having heard nothing to the contrary from the trekking company that is running our trip.   I signed (without really reading seriously) pages of documents waiving all liability by the company and assuming all conceivable risks.  But the company is one of the best known "adventure travel" companies in America, and I'm convinced that they will weigh the dangers before going forward with the trip.

 

Newspaper photos of their clients' heads, mounted on poles, being borne about the streets of Srinagar would seem to be bad publicity for an adventure company.

 

At least I hope they will consider it bad publicity.  The same company did an "exploratory trip," down a river in Borneo in the 1990s.  The trip turned out to be a disaster, as portrayed in Tracy Johnson's book, Shooting the Boh (1992).  But I suspect that, once the trip was over, the survivors considered it to have been the experience of a life time, and lived off its stories at many a social function.

 

In fact, one of the survivors was a member of a trip that my nephew Denny and I took to Gabon, in West Africa, in 2000.  This guy got pretty good mileage off the Boh fiasco even with us "hardened adventurers."  Especially with us, in fact, once our own Gabon trip began to disintegrate.

 

The Gabon trip had been advertised as an introduction to the world of pygmies, as well as an exploration of Gabon's back country, stretching back to the Congo border.  Our first intimation that not all was going as planned came when we were told, on arrival in the capital of Libreville, that the pygmy portion of the trip was canceled -- there had been recent mysterious disappearances of European travelers in pygmy country.

 

But the remainder of the trip proceeded.  After traveling up-river by boat and camping in the bush, we began a hike back to the coast.  The jungle hiking was interesting, especially when we encountered a large herd of elephants.  (The elephants were less interested in us than we were in them. But they could afford to be.)

 

Our native guides turned out to be incapable of guiding us to the coast -- where we were to reconnoiter with vans and civilization -- because they had never actually visited the area before.  We had an early model GPS which showed us the direction to go, but that direction led through a large swamp.  I dived in, fully clothed and shod, and swam for dry land.  Denny and others found a way to work around the swamp, remaining on relatively dry land.  Denny and I covered ourselves with DEET, once past the swamp.  No one else bothered; everyone but us was plagued with horrible bites and rashes for the rest of the trip.

 

Toward the end of the trip, our vehicles were stopped on their way back to Libreville by anti-government demonstrators of some sort.  We had to drive over a hundred miles on dirt roads through one tiny settlement after another to get around the blockade.

 

It was a trip where nothing went right, but where everything was memorable.  I think I can speak for both Denny and myself when I say we wouldn't have missed the experience for all the tea in … well, for all the cashmere in Kashmir.

 

But of course we weren't exposed to actual hostilities.  If our heads had been separated from our bodies, the trip would have seemed less a success.  

 

But I place full trust in the company that has my money, trust that they will get us both into and out of Kashmir safely -- or cancel the trip if they feel sufficiently uneasy.