It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  If you've been kidnapped the world record is fucked!

  * * *

  I penned my suitably caustic reply, thanking them for their concern.

  We had finally arrived in the city earlier that afternoon, driving through the black smoke of the makeshift brickworks that lined the roads. We had swapped our one-man escort for a ten-tonne truck loaded with soldiers in front of us and a pickup crowded with police behind us. After following them through the growing conurbation, and past a sprawling Tent City and a faded and chipped Pepsi mural daubed on a crumbling wall, we arrived at the Hotel Bloom Star. The desk clerk had smiled serenely at my attempts to haggle on price but knew he had us over a barrel – where else were we really going to go?

  'Of course, do not worry, you will be quite safe here in Quetta,' he told us as he led us through the gardens – a pleasant oasis amongst the dust and heat. 'But make sure you do not leave the hotel after dark.'

  That left us very little time to look around, so after finding a cafe for dinner, we ignored the stares of passers-by and had a look around the city, before checking in with Paul and Leigh online.

  The tiny Internet cafe was packed with teenage boys somehow looking at the sort of material that teenage boys worldwide like to look at, and that was definitely censored under Pakistan's strict filtering system.

  'Ah, Facebook!' they murmured as we got our communications lifeline up on screen. I looked squarely at my new buddies but they simply stared right back.

  'Add me as friend?' asked one, leaning forward.

  'Look, I'm terribly sorry, I really do need to check these messages, they're very important, do you think you would mind giving me a little privacy for a moment?' I asked him, never feeling more English in my life.

  He looked mortified and barked something to the others in Pashto. His cohort moved back all of an inch then returned to their gazes. The leader smiled at me triumphantly.

  The good news was that Leigh and Paul had suggested meeting us the very next evening in the town of Sukhor, a mere 250 miles south. We quickly agreed on a hotel to meet at and I logged off to hurry back to the Bloom Star before the sun went down.

  The following morning, Leigh and I found ourselves on an Emirates flight from Dubai to Karachi, flirting with the Glaswegian stewardesses to get free beer (which turned out to be futile – all flights in and out of Pakistan are dry). Eighty people were killed in riots and violence the day we arrived in Karachi. We didn't fancy hanging around as there was a definite tension in the air, so we headed straight to the bus station. It was a million miles away from the subtle civility of Iran or the brash cleanliness of Dubai, with mountains of rubbish piling up against every flat surface.

  Driving along the main highway out of the city, a man was squatting in the central reservation taking care of his business in full view of everyone. 'Welcome to Pakistan', we quipped.

  I woke with a spring in my step. Today would be the day that I'd hopefully reunite with my buddies. The reassurance that comes from a group of trusted friends (especially when one of them is your mechanic) couldn't be overstated.

  Craig and I negotiated our way out of the city along the road that hugged the winding path of the spectacular railway line south. Every bridge bore a nineteenth-century date and names like 'Mary Jane' and 'Windy Corner' hinted at the story of their construction under the British 200 years earlier.

  When we reached the hotel we had agreed to meet at, we found that the owners had capitalised on their Westernerfriendly reputation by jacking up their prices. We had seen plenty of other hotels just around the corner so we went to find one more suited to our pockets.

  Every place we entered seemed empty, but all presented us with the same stony response: 'No vacancies.' After five almost identical responses we were starting to get exasperated.

  'Is it because we're white?' we finally asked, feeling a little like Ali G.

  'Well, er, yes!' came the surprising reply.

  After begging an owner and promising we would be discreet and leave first thing the following day, one hotel finally relented and allowed us stay. We popped back to the first hotel to leave a message for Paul and Leigh, telling them the address of our new hotel.

  Half an hour later we were sitting on the beds in the tiny room, wondering if the note had worked, when the door crashed open and two familiar figures burst in, huge grins on their faces.

  'Alright, wankers!'

  CHAPTER 28

  NO TENSION

  I woke up wet, lying on a thin, bare mattress that was also soaked through. The windowless room I lay in was arid and airless, and the fan was silent. Another power-cut, I guessed, as I struggled to un-stick my back from the sodden mattress. It was early. We had agreed to meet the chief of police at nine – he insisted on giving us another slow and pointless escort out of the city, which would only manage to make us a larger target – so we decided we would be long gone by the time he called at our hotel.

  After following the advice of the Red Cross's How to Stay Alive book and checking underneath the car for bombs, we set off, heading north towards the border crossing with India. I was feeling good to be back behind the wheel again, but the novelty soon wore off as the sun began to reach its full height. Soon wet through again, my black T-shirt became stiff with the amount of salt that had been deposited on it, leaving crystalline circles for all to see. The car was struggling in the heat, too, but not as much as Johno, whose sweat poured down his beard and dripped down his front, giving him the air of a dog drooling for his dinner.

  We had all grown substantial beards by this point, in an attempt to blend in. As it turned out, the itchy, monstrous merkins on our faces were pointless because it appeared that generally Pakistani men only had moustaches. Who were we kidding though, we looked like lumberjacks on a day out. Beard or no beard, we were driving around in a London black cab, which was covered in stickers of Western companies. Hardly the subtlest vehicle to drive through Pakistan a month after Osama Bin Laden had been killed.

  Every mile closer to the Indian border was a mile safer and according to the Red Cross the threat level for our next destination, Multan, was merely Very high, rather than the Severe rating given to Quetta.

  What we had discovered so far echoed the experience of overlanders and travellers the world over: things usually aren't as bad as people with no direct experience make out. It can be easy for keyboard warriors in wooden-panelled government offices to release cautious travel advisories, but the only way one can really learn the true nature of an area is by visiting it themselves. Although the area undoubtedly had extreme dangers, it was one of the most unforgettable experiences any of us had ever had.

  With Paul and Leigh in the taxi again it became clear just how much I had missed them over the past few days. Problems shared between us were now problems halved; difficulties finding places to stay, car problems and navigation worries weren't so bad with two others to help solve them.

  The streets were packed full of people, animals and produce, and as we crawled along at walking pace it seemed the entire population of the city got a good look at us.

  Eventually we found where the hotels were, but inexplicably every place that I tried told us they had no vacancies, despite all looking deserted. Puzzled, I headed back to the car and found quite a crowd, the lads looking stressed and Craig on the verge of getting shouty. Again.

  'There is too much attention here, you are in danger – people will come for you,' a respectable-looking man told us, before adding, 'You should leave.'

  We started to feel the mood around us change and wholeheartedly agreed. But leave to where?

  Our saviour appeared in the form of an excitable young man who promised that he knew of the home of a local Englishman who would be sure to accommodate us. After quickly weighing up the scant options, and the risks, we decided to trust him.

  We pulled up to the home of a lovely Pakistani girl who spoke perfect English. She informed us that none of the hotels would let us stay becaus
e we were targets for the local Taliban. If we got kidnapped (or worse) the hotel owners would lose their licence. There was a heavily armoured Holiday Inn for Westerners in the next town, but it was almost dusk and we would never make it (let alone be able to afford it). She began to curtly interrogate our new friend and after lending him her telephone he started to shout into the mouthpiece in rapid-fire Peshwar, before hanging up and announcing he knew a hotel that would take us. We double-checked that the owner understood our situation and upon receiving a confirmation we accepted our new friend's proposal to take us there in exchange for a few rupees.

  'Go straight!' he shouted directly behind my head. I set off down the road and just as we reached a turn off, he yelled, 'Go right! Go right!'

  Instinctively I slammed on the brakes to make the turn and he jolted forwards, bashing his head on the roll-bar.

  'Oww,' he groaned, 'go slow on the corners.'

  We twisted though the side streets as he constantly screamed last-minute directions that grated more and more with each passing minute.

  'Do you want to meet my friends?'

  'No. We are very, very tired. We want to go to hotel now, please.'

  'OK, OK, go straight!'

  'Hey, look at me, I'm in the crazy Westerners' car, look at me, look at me!'

  It felt like we had been going around in circles. Checking the satnav, we had. He was making sure none of his friends missed this big event. He had already taken us on a 30-minute detour to show us his gym (called, believe it or not 'The Muslim Jim') and everyone in the car was beginning to get very tired of his games, as well as feeling more and more nervous as we drove around the city at night. Our increasingly irate protestations were simply met with, 'OK, no tension! No tension!'

  Tension was building.

  'Go straight… LEFT TURN, LEFT TURN, LEFT TURN!' he screamed into Johno's ear at the last minute.

  'I don't think we'll fit down there, we're very high. Are you sure?'

  'No tension, it not problem for height,' he replied.

  Driving down a lane barely wide enough for the cab, we found that it was actually a very big problem for height as we came to a low bar we couldn't fit under. Traffic quickly backed up blocking our exit and although we got out to try to direct our escape, No Tension rapidly intervened and told the other drivers to ignore us and pull into the wall. With little more than half-a-metre of clearance on each side, there was no chance our 2 m-wide car could squeeze past a pickup truck, no matter how loudly No Tension was shouting at the driver.

  Eventually we managed to get everyone to ignore him and reverse far enough for us to pass. We backed up and let the assembled queue past, and each of the drivers shouted what I can only assume were polite welcomes to their country, accompanied with some welcoming hand gestures I didn't understand.

  Yet again we were drawing even more attention to ourselves. Obviously we were grateful for the local assistance but we were growing increasingly nervous about the situation: all it took was one guy to get on the phone to his local Taliban mate telling them that he had spotted a slow-moving British cash-cow doing circuits of the city (and local gyms).

  We started going again but took a speed bump a little too fast, causing No Tension's head to crack against the roll bar.

  'Owwww, go slowly, go slowly on bump.'

  We went over another one and the same thing happened.

  I could have sworn Johno had sped up.

  The road turned into a heavily rutted sand track and we finally pulled up to a home-stay hotel with big gates and a perfectly Hannah-sized garage. It was just what we needed and No Tension beamed as he introduced us to the owner. Malik was tall and spoke excellent English, which he used, excellently, to tell us that there was no way we could stay.

  It appeared that Malik, understandably, wasn't willing to take the risk for foreign guests and Craig, Leigh and I had reached breaking point. We were all very tired and scared, although nobody had mentioned it at the time, and possibly in the most danger we ever had been on the trip.

  'I'm gonna fackin' kill you…' started Craig to No Tension, just as Paul casually sauntered over and closed the window, cutting him off.

  Paul was our master negotiator whenever we sparred with hard-nosed border officials or tight-fisted hoteliers. So far today he had kept a calm exterior, but now it seemed that the friendly but firm owner would be the ultimate test of his negotiating skills.

  We were desperate and I tried every single kind of persuasion tactic I knew. Eventually he broke and hurried to hide our car away in his garage in case anyone saw it. It was a genuine act of compassion, a huge risk for him and he didn't even charge us extra.

  In the room Malik told us we were to lock ourselves in and not come out for anything; a motorbike bomb had gone off just over the road only the week before so everyone was especially jumpy. He told us outright that we shouldn't trust our new buddy; this was almost immediately proven when No Tension accidentally-on-purpose pocketed my phone after we paid him – biting our tongues at demands for extra money for the trip to the gym and other detours – and said what we thought were our final goodbyes.

  'I come tomorrow. At seven, yes?'

  'No thank you, we'll be fine.'

  'OK, I come at seven.'

  'No we don't need you, and we're not getting up until nine.'

  'OK, seven.'

  Ever the diplomat, Craig chipped in: 'If you come 'ere at seven, I'll fackin' rip your head off.'

  'OK OK, no tension, nine, OK.'

  At dead-on seven the next day there was a rap on the door and Craig had to be physically restrained from carrying out his threat. It didn't help when he discovered that a broken air conditioner had leaked all over his bags during the night, ruining the assortment of pristine banknotes that he had collected from every country that he had travelled through. Fortunately his anger was mainly directed at No Tension who, being brighter than we gave him credit for, had taken this moment to make himself scarce.

  We navigated out of Multan and to the final stop before the Indian border: Lahore. It was the night of a huge religious festival; everywhere was a whirling tumult of sights and sounds, with men and women, and men dressed as women, spinning around to live music and dancing under showers of banknotes, thrown over them for luck. Hardly being inconspicuous, we were spotted by the organisers of the Suficelebration and ushered up to take pride of place on the large stage erected in the town centre. The Foreign Office advice for Pakistan – 'Avoid large gatherings, avoid religious celebrations and do not draw attention to yourself' – flashed through my head as we nervously sat down, in direct view of the thousands of attendees, but it was soon pushed to the back of my mind as we were immersed in the celebrations. It seemed a world away from the pious Islamic rules of Iran.

  Across the border and safely into India we said our goodbyes to Craig and headed towards Manali, a high hill station where the British Raj used to retire in the depths of summer to cool down. Hot, tired and relieved that we had finally conquered the hardest part of the expedition, we rewarded ourselves with a few days' respite from the incessant heat by driving into the low Himalayas.

  But we weren't the only ones who had had this thought. Hordes of hippies with flowing robes and questionable haircuts had also made their way to Manali, but for them it was all about the spirituality of the Vashisht temple and spiritual healing of the hot baths; nothing to do with the pleasant temperatures. And it certainly had nothing to do with the fact that the best hashish in the world grows naturally and abundantly in Manali…

  The hippies banged tambourines late into the night, improvising songs about fairies and their fellow travellers. Bangles and body hair replaced personal hygiene (ironic for a place famous for its hot baths) as they passed around chillums, and one adventurous soul broke out the sitar he had just bought but had yet to learn.

  Leigh had been struck down by a nasty stomach bug, which unfortunately meant his sojourn consisted of trips back and forth to the toilet, where he w
as terrorised by the spider that lived there.

  By a stroke of luck, one of my very good friends was also in Manali. Ellie was a trainee medic, who had somehow blagged the position of expedition doctor for a number of sixth-form trips that were exploring the area. It was nice to catch up with an old friend and even nicer to not have to go through the basics of getting to know someone in order to have a conversation. Meeting new people was my favourite part of travelling, however, after six months, it was nice to just talk rubbish to someone I knew so well who wasn't Johno or Leigh. But soon our time in the hills was up and we had to get going. As I gave Ellie a hug, it never occurred to me that within the week she might be responsible for saving my life (or at least saving me from a horrible stint in hospital).