In and out of Isloo
I have waited, walked and sometimes slept… the reluctant memories of lounges live with me
By Raza Ahmad
When I think of an airport, I envisage chaos, delays and inefficiency. Travelling across Asia teaches one to be patient. This is why I keep a book or two, a writing pad and of course my laptop that can be great companions in any circumstance.

The trek from Shimshal village to the summer pasture of Shuwert follows the narrow gorge of the Shimshal River. This tight and claustrophobic chasm is a series of sheer slopes of fine talus that heave under one’s weight as one traverses them. To negotiate them downward is dangerous and upward sheer murder. It was on such a slope between the camps of Pust Furzin and Uch Furzin that I met him. Having climbed up from Pust Furzin to the top, I was making my way down to Uch Furzin when I saw him struggling -- struggling ever so slowly against the scree that dragged him down reducing each upward step to a mere few inches.

I had met three of his mates half an hour earlier on the plateau above Pust Furzin. Doctor Ahsan, they said, was following up behind. Almost casually, they mentioned that he went rather slow. Looking at him from my vantage on the slope above him, I thought this was an unfit young man. We met, spoke for a bit and parted. Only about a month later did I learn from one of his friends that the man I had mistaken to be terribly unfit was, in fact, a bit of a superman: what his friends had not told me in the Shimshal gorge was that Dr Mohammad Ahsan Akhtar’s right leg was all but useless from a bout of childhood polio. Here he talks about his first taste of mountain walking and how it resulted in a flurry of treks thereafter…

Born into the well-off home of an automobile engineer on the seventh day of June in 1974 in Faisalabad, Ahsan Akhtar was still a baby when his parents realised there was something amiss with his right leg. When polio was detected, it was only extensive medical care involving prolonged hospital admission that just about saved the leg from lifelong dependence on a prosthetic. However, the stricken leg is about 50 cm shorter than the good one and with about 10 per cent the normal muscle strength. It is scarcely better than a crutch.

If nature had taken a small part of him away, it had bestowed a greater gift on Ahsan: an indomitable spirit. This was evident from his early years in school where he tried his skill in every possible game. He grew up struggling to play hockey that proved an impossibility because that required running bent over the stick. So he took to football. But when he failed to meet the very high standards he had set for himself, he trained to be a goalkeeper and did quite well in that position.

Table tennis, cricket, swimming and badminton followed. He had a problem, he says, he had to make the best of it by trying very, very hard. And this is exactly what he did from the time he took his first stumbling steps on the playing field. As he grew older, he had a mini golf course laid out in the garden of his home and there he played the game to near perfection.

Meanwhile, in 1987 a very peculiar event occurred. A friend received a tent as a gift. But neither Ahsan nor any of his friends knew what a tent was good for -- so they set it up on the roof and the four of them slept in it in debilitating June heat. "For one year we worshipped this tent. We put it up either on the roof or in the garden and sat before it admiring it,"’ he says. From time to time, they slept in it.

Now, Faisalabad in the late 1980s was hardly the place where mountaineering and mountain walking were everyday sports. Consequently, when Ahsan and his friends asked around about tents, they were told that their toy was army equipment and of no use for ordinary folks. They were advised to dump it. But they simply could not get over it.

In the summer of 1988, Ahsan and three of his friends lied to their families about going on a scouting trip. Surreptitiously packing their tent and with very little money and no proper clothing in order not to raise any suspicions, they took off for Murree. There they put up their tent in the grounds of Cecil’s Hotel without permission. Understandably, they were soon ousted from the premises unceremoniously. Not willing to give up, they next took over a secluded spot in town and settled into life in the tent. But not for long.

First, they had a crowd of gapers. Then came the police that, true to form, attempted to terrorise this group of tent lovers. It was illegal what they were doing, they were told. Tent and all, they were taken off to the police station where the boys spent a good few hours before being hustled to the bus stand for the return journey to Faisalabad. But when the escorting policeman left, the boys got on a bus for Muzaffarabad instead. Just short of town, they got off at the Domel Bridge and setting up the tent by the river, spent the next three days in it. Since the money was limited, there was little to eat and without proper equipment, they had some miserably cold nights. But they were delighted they got to use their tent in an outdoor situation.

The next year the group took off for Kalam in Swat. Mountain walking still being unknown to them, Ahsan and his friends were looking for a place to pitch their tent in town when they were told of Mahodhand Lake far off to the north. Hitching rides with jeeps part of the way and walking the rest, the bunch made use of their tent for the first time, as it should really be. "That was the beginning of an addiction worse than that of any known drug," Ahsan says. "Antidote works for a druggie, but for someone afflicted like me, the antidote of taking me away from the mountains will kill me."

The next year in 1990, Ahsan got his first taste of real mountain walking when he and his mates went up to Kaghan. Their they walked up to Batakundi even when jeeps were available, went up to Lalazar and down on the other side to Lake Saiful Malook. The nights on the trek were heaven under their famous and much cherished tent.

The years thereafter were a flurry of treks -- and flurry it certainly was with as many as three or four major trekking routes in a single summer: Rakaposhi base camp, Deosai, base camp of Masherbrum, Concordia and Shimshal, Snow Lake and the traverse over Hisper Pass to Nagar, Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, Chapursan to Chilinji and Karomber to upper Chitral. The list goes on.

It took great courage and belief in himself for Ahsan to organise a climbing expedition to Mangalik Sar in Shimshal in 1999. Ahsan felt his handicap for the first time: the stress on the good (left) leg in lifting his weight on the upward grind caused severe muscular cramps in the thigh resulting in excruciating pain. As he lay in his tent nursing his injury, he had the satisfaction of seeing his team make the summit and return safe.

Preparation for his post-graduate dissertation in microbiology brought a hiatus in 2001 in this blinding spell of adventure. That year Ahsan became a specialist in probiotics to couple his doctorate in veterinary medicine acquired three years earlier from his alma mater, the Agricultural University of Faisalabad.

With a number of the ‘easier’ treks under his hat, Dr Ahsan Akhtar was now ready to try the harder stuff. A return to Concordia in the summer of 2002 prepared him for a traverse of the Gondogero Pass between Hushe and the Baltoro Glacier. Reckoned to be among the most gruelling treks in the Karakoram region, Gondogero was the test Ahsan set himself and sailed through in the summer of 2004.

The supreme test of endurance and tenacity was the 2010 traverse of the Biafo-Sim Gang-Lukpe La-Braldu traverse from Askole in Baltistan to Shimshal. Once again, Ahsan was the major financier of the expedition with the three other members chipping in with what they could. As treks go, this traverse is arguably the ultimate because of the number of variables involved. For one, it is the longest (115 km) continuous glacial traverse in Pakistan and, having been done only by a handful of people, is not a frequented route. The snow and ice conditions on the 5800-metre-high Lukpe La, virtually unknown, change constantly and the Braldu, Pakistan’s only major glacier north of the Great Asiatic Divide, is known for the most peculiar ice formations that alter from summer to summer. And then there are the treacherous talus slopes of Shimshal.

For three weeks, Ahsan and his party were cut off from the rest of the world. En route, they had two bouts with foul weather: The one at the very beginning as they made their way up the Biafo Glacier and then again on the far side of Lukpe La. The new snow having covered the crevasses turned the going dangerous on Biafo and Sim Gang (aka Snow Lake), but the party struggled on to make it across the heart of the Karakoram Mountains to Shimshal.

Though they may not have seemed as such as they unfolded, the adventuring life was not devoid of its comic moments. In 1996, then only 22, Ahsan hefted a heavy backpack and set out of Skardu to do a solo crossing of the Deosai Plateau en route to Chillam Chauki. In a country still accustomed only to noisy groups of holidaying yahoos, he, a lone traveller, was an oddity. Somewhere in the desolation of Deosai, he was picked up by the army and held on suspicion of being an enemy spy. They destroyed one roll of film and it took earnest and desperate pleading to save the rest. Ahsan does not know what it was that eventually made them let him go. "I do not care what it was, as long as they let me off in the end without further damage," he laughs.

In the West such activity is commonplace, but in Pakistan even most of those who began young could not remain committed to the principle of Outward Bound beyond their 20s. Ahsan Akhtar now 36 looks forward to many more years of adventuring in the high places of Pakistan. Having seen all the major trekking routes in the Himalayas-Karakoram-Hindu Kush region, he now has those couple of dozen minor treks in his sights. As of now, he is arguably the most accomplished trekker in the entire country. When he is finally ready to hang up his boots in two decades’ time, he will be miles and miles ahead of his peers.

There is yet another thing that sets Ahsan apart from many of his peers. Young men set off into the wilderness with imbecile notions of gaining fame and winning medals by doing some trek or the other. There is no commitment to the spirit of adventuring; only a desire to be famous in a world where renown now comes only for the most outstanding activity to men and women who care naught for recognition. Ahsan Akhtar is one among the latter. He is driven by nothing else but the desire to see a world he had once read about as a little boy.

It was back in 1983, that Ahsan, then only 9, read a series of stories in an Urdu magazine. Titled Kaghan ki ser, these tales turned on a switch that is now impossible to turn off. But as he returns again and again to the mountains, he feels a transformation coming over him. As the celebrated British explorer Francis Younghusband was crossing the Gobi Desert in 1887, he felt the first stirrings of spiritualism awakening in his soul. Like Ahsan, he too was unable at that time to identify this faint emotion -- four decades later Younghusband turned sufi.

Ahsan says, his lifestyle has brought on a heightened consciousness of the reality of death and, at the same time, taken away the fear of it. It has also roused greater appreciation for life and for his fellow humans. Moreover, as he travels and sees more and more of the world he has grown to love, he becomes aware of an increasing thirst to explore what yet remains beyond.

As a young man, he had found no guide or mentor in his native Faisalabad. The only trekking handbooks were in English and thus out of the grasp of many of his kind. With his knowledge now, Ahsan has begun work on a guidebook in Urdu. Seventy pages of notes in long hand wait to be organised. But there yet remain a couple of dozen treks to be done before he will be ready with the manuscript. But the task is set: he owes it to those who may wish to follow to make their going easier than it was for him.

What amazes about Dr Mohammad Ahsan Akhtar is the way the man has crammed so much into his life. Having earned not one but two post-graduate degrees when he was annually taking off for long periods to lose himself in the mountains, he now runs a successful veterinary pharmaceutical business that keeps him travelling. He is now a husband and a father, yet the summers are spent walking in the wilds of the north. What amazes yet again in the utter lack of arrogance. Humans with far modest achievements learn first of all to swagger and here we have a man whose first noticeable trait is humility.

"I do not look at myself as handicapped. In seven years my wife has never heard me say that I am afflicted with polio," Ahsan says. "It could have been worse. I could have been crippled and needed a prosthetic."

When I think of an airport, I envisage chaos, delays and inefficiency. Travelling across Asia teaches one to be patient. This is why I keep a book or two, a writing pad and of course my laptop that can be great companions in any circumstance.

Last five years have entailed excessive travel, mostly involving airports. From the sleepy airstrip of Thimpu in Bhutan to the snazzy Chang Mai airport in Singapore, I have waited, walked and sometimes slept… the reluctant memories of airport lounges live with me. Of late, my travel has concentrated within Pakistan.

The recent memories of airports in Pakistan are not all that pleasant. The vulgar VIP culture and the way the overstaffed Pakistan International Airline treats its customers is disconcerting. Before entering the airport, the first thought that crosses one’s mind is about the inevitable delay. God knows how many delays I have suffered along with several others.

I am a frequent traveller and therefore my experience with flight delays is nasty and brutish. Last year, I waited at the Lahore airport almost the entire night. Every half an hour, the flight was further delayed. After all those hours of torture, flight cancellation was announced. These are extreme examples.

In general, an hour’s delay is a matter of routine. Small ATR aircrafts are used on the Lahore-Islamabad route; and they happen to be vulnerable to the elements. For instance, during the monsoons and winters, an ATR cannot land if there are strong winds. Twice, I have also experienced that after all the hassle of checking-in, waiting, suffering delay; the flight turns back from the destination.

I am not saying that the pilots should take risks but at least the airline must analyse the data of the flights and decide accordingly. When you wait around, the staff at the lounge is hesitant to give precise and useful information. Refreshments are rarely served and when they are, it is not a pretty sight. Each time this happens I question why did I not opt for travel via motorway?

Considering how uncertain life has become in Pakistan, it is almost impossible to predict how long it would take to reach an airport. For instance, if the maddening traffic does not hold you, a VVIP cavalcade can emerge from nowhere. Our idea of security to the high and the mighty is to stop all movement on the road and to trap the ordinary civilians until the masters of our destiny have made their way.

If the roads are relatively fine, then the security barriers and extraordinary searches at the airports can make you report late at the check-in counter. I distinctly remember the day Hillary Clinton, United States Secretary of State was visiting Islamabad, I could not leave the city as all the exit points had been closed for traffic. I had to catch an eight am flight. The driver was inventive and he took another route via Rawalpindi and as we were close to the airport, we found out how that entry had been blocked as well.

Finally, I arrived with a few other travellers only 20 minutes before the flight departure. At the PIA counter we were told that the flight was ‘closed’ (whatever that means). A few minutes earlier, a politician from the Rawalpindi district had been issued a boarding pass and we therefore kicked a little storm as the staff was clearly giving preference to those with the right connections. After much ado and few histrionics we were able to get in. Sadly, the staff was completely insensitive to the events outside the safe precincts of the airport.

Recently, a similar incident happened at the Islamabad airport where many pilgrims returning from Hajj were stranded due to PIA style royal mismanagement. The passengers created a storm and ultimately PIA bigwigs had to step in.

On the other hand, the travellers at our airports are equally problematic. For instance, all the washrooms are flooded due to excessive use of water. Littering is common and violation of no smoking signs a norm. Above all, there is no concept of making a queue.

A few months ago when I politely advised a man not to break the queue he was furious and wanted to physically assault me. His psychosis was perhaps a normal occurrence so his family was beseeching him to shut up. His children were on my side but the man with a wounded ego thought that I had perhaps dented his "honour" which entails breaking the queues.

I can continue with my ordeals at the airports but I would not bore the readers anymore. Like other public institutions, services at Pakistani airport leave much to be desired. Public accountability is the only solution. Until, then I am reverting to the Motorway and will only be at an airport if there is no other option.