Pakistan revisited

Entry eight

Time fly’s when you are having fun. The rainy days I wrote about previously are forgotten and we are actually glad that it is not flyable today.

Last Sunday, the 27^th, dawned bleu and promising. We drove up to launch early to take full advantage of the day only to find a strong wind blowing from the north.

Birmogh Lasht, the local name for out launch site, means Walnut grove which is part of what once was a huge walled palace where the royals of Chitral would spent the hot summer months. Not much is left of the original structure and there is only a small part with a roof. A caretaker lives there with his family and grows a few crops on the surrounding fields. The palace is situated on the edge of a flat spur which plunges steeply down to the valley a thousand meters below. Behind the palace the spur becomes narrow and runs up to some dramatic limestone cliffs which make great thermal triggers.

Hopeful that the wind will die down, we send the taxi on its way down and I go for a wander around. In front of the palace is an abandoned hotel where the Irises are the only plants in the garden that have survived the rigors of the winter cold. They are in full bloom and their dark purple blooms make a great contrast with the snowy mountains and the cumulus filled sky.

Irisis at the old hotel.

caretaker familie weeding in the fields

By midday the wind has abated and the thermals are well formed. As seems to be the rule, I launch first with the others following once they see me go up. The weather forecast is good for at least the next three days so we all fly with our bivi gear. The plan for the day is to fly to Zani pass, about 60km to the North East. In the past this has been a great start point for cross country flights and Pakistan longest distance was flow from there.

From flying together doesn’t come much but somehow four out of five end up on Zani pass. Alex and I land near a little Sheppard’s hut where a spring bubbles out of the ground and supplies enough moisture for a few willow trees to grow. We are about three hundred meters below the pass and, judging by the spring growth, below the level of night frosts. Grey is not so clever and lands a few hundred meters higher where he passes a cold night. We see Dimitry land well below us half way down to the valley but he is lucky enough to run into the only Jeep on the mountain and gets to us just before dark. Glen doesn’t have any bivi gear and after a flyover he glides into the valley to land in Booni where the local pilots look after him.

Zani pass to the left, the plateau in the middle and Booni to the right in the distance.

Grey walks down to socialize, scrounge some food from us and do some Para talking before he climbs back up to his gear for the night. We are at 3200 meters and every movement takes an effort, if you stand up to abruptly your head spins. We enjoy a great cloud show on Booni Zoom Mountain where the last of the day’s heat rises into over- developing cumulus that implode on themselves in the setting sun.

Alex coming in to land.

As soon as the sun leaves our slope the catabatic flow sets in and chills us. My efforts to get a fire going with the dry wood from the willows are not very successful so I have to use my gas cooker to get hot water for my instant noodles. After a hot energy drink and some dried fruit it is time to hit the sack, it is 8pm.

28^th May. The night is balmy and we are all too hot in our down sleeping bags, except for Grey who is more exposed to the wind. At 5.30am the sun peeps over the horizon and into my little hut. Alex has a super duper bivi tent and sleeps outside as does Dimitry who snores with the sound of a Russian tank and was therefore not allowed in my apartment.

After a few quick photos I dive back into my sleeping bag to stew a little longer in my warm cocoon but at 6am we hear voices approach, which announce the start of the new day. These are the people from the village below us that come up to the snowline to harvest the fresh leafs of the wild lily- like plants that grow all over the slopes. While we are packing away our high tech gear those people walk past on slippers and dressed in rags to fill their old fertilizer bags with lily leafs to sell in the market. Sometimes the contrast is just too much for me and do I have a hard time making sense of what we are doing here.

Glen is driving up with the Booni pilots and is bringing some breakfast stuff. Unfortunately their car breaks down halfway up the mountain which leaves them with a big walk up and us with the fantasy of fresh chapattis.

We don’t have a common goal today. Dimitry is happy to fly to Mastuje and back to Booni, Grey has big ideas about flying to Yasin and I have a flight on my wish list that the policeman from Chitral has forbidden me to do as it is too close to the Afghan border. As for Alex, he has never had to look further than the next sand dune so he depends totally on us to give him directions over the radio. They are a dependent lot those aussies, they can’t do without the kiwi labor and expertise at home and rely on you during your leisure time as well. He is a bloody good pilot though but I'm not going to tell him that.

I decide to leave my ambitious plan to fly along the Wagan corridor to Iskomen for another day and join Grey and Alex on a flight East over Mastuje and the Shandur pass towards Gilgit. It is a cracker of a day with cloudbase at 6000meter and excellent thermal activity.

On a big glide over the town of Mastuje I have a sip of water and put the bottle back into my flight deck. At the other side of the valley I fly into the mother of all thermals and get propelled up at an alarming rate. The pressure buildup in the bottle gets too much and the first thing I feel is a trickle of water running over my seat board into my bud crack. By the time I get to the bottle it is half empty and the water is slowly dripping from my flight deck. It is like I have just wetted myself and that is exactly how it looks when I land a few hours later in front of a crowd of spectators.

I'm wearing enough clothes to stay warm and the rest of the flight is an awesome spectacle of snowy peaks, glaciers and endless scenery. By 3pm the sky ahead of us becomes fairly over developed with showers all around us. Grey radios in that he has landed and when I try for the third time to push across a ridge where I get hammered by rotor from a valley breeze that is setting up, I decide that it may be time to call it a day.

I fly back a few kilometers and land on the road, right next to Grey and all the inhabitants of the village that clap and whistle when I touch the ground. As we are packing up a gust front comes ripping through the valley which makes me happy with decision to land and also chills me to the bones as I'm walking around in my socked clothes. Luck is with us, as the only Jeep in the valley is parked right in front of us and the driver willing to take us to the nearest rest house for an exorbitant fare. We are not in a good position to bargain and pay the price.

Alex has landed ahead of us so we pick him up on the way and then get dropped off at a nice guest house. I'm near hypothermic and have to strip off all my clothes and crawl into my sleeping bag to warm up again. The initial enthusiasm about a hot shower turns into disappointment as we closer inspect the water pipes. We are at 3200meters altitude and it must get pretty cold here in the winter. Obviously someone didn’t empty the system some years ago and the pipes burst.

The caretaker brews up some hot milk tea and a basic dinner of rice and chicken, we feel like kings in our palace, even without hot or cold showers.

May29th. From where we are it is probably a four hour ride with the bus to Mastuje, from where it is another six hours with a Jeep back to Chitral. The bus doesn’t come through till 1pm which gives us plenty of time to walk up the nearest slope and try and fly at least part of the way back. Grey has organized three porters in the evening and agreed on a price. The young men are there at eight o’clock but more bargaining needs to be done, as the price has gone up overnight. In the end we give in as there is no way Grey and Alex can carry their own gear up the hill and I think I would have suffered a fare bit trying myself. The thought of the torture of the bus ride makes us hand over the money

We walk up along a small stream through irrigated meadows with spring flowers. Then we come upon the main irrigation channel and follow that upstream for a few kilometers before we go up a steep scree slope for a few hundred meters. As soon as we touch the scree the thermals start to work and by the time we reach our launch site there are regular cycles. We are about 500 meters above the valley floor which doesn’t give us much height to play with; we will all get one shot at it or glide down and wait for the bus.

We all needed multiple attempts to launch, we had cleared most rocks but the tiny woody plants that cover the ground were real line grabbers, that combined with the shifty wind conditions made that I had to have three attempts. With all my warm clothes on I was sweating like a pig and with the thin air I was totally out of it. I got away on my third attempt and turned left to a rocky spur. I get not a single blip on the vario, turn right and slowly slide down the scee slope. My mouth was dry and my thoughts racing through my head. Don’t go down, don’t go down. Then there was a slight rise in the slope and the rock was a shade darker. I flew away from the slope and my vario sprang to life. First I did a few figure of eight turns and then full turns; I climbed back up to launch height and hang on to the same thermal all the way to cloudbase at 5000meters. Before I go on glide I look down between my legs and see Grey and Alex still on the launch 2000metres straight below me. Alex has a tense moment as well when he sinks down to the channel before finding the lift. In the end we all get away and don’t lose any time heading back the way we came. I have a short hesitation when I look East, we could just keep going……

It is a near perfect day with 6000meter base, light winds and beautiful cumulus all the way. We fly over the Shandur pass, across the valley onto the bulk of Booni Zoom which is an imposing six thousand meter mountain which is in our way to get back to Chitral. I fly into one of the hanging valleys that come down from the summit and get hovered up to 5500meters. I glide into this glacier filled basin and get swallowed up into this awe inspiring landscape.

As a climber I feel that I have no right to be here without all the effort of walking in and climbing up, I feel like I'm cheating the mountain now that it is revealing it selves so easily. I don’t do big climbs anymore and therefore it is only a fleeting thought. It is awesome to get so close, so quick, zoom around those glaciers and then glide back into the valley to catch the next thermal.

The cold plays havoc with my camera so I don’t get many images, I will just have to remember each moment. I glide through a pass that divides the main ridge from a side spur and fly into the next hanging valley. The next thermal takes me high enough to cross the main ridge and fly along the East side of the mountain. I can now see the launch site of the previous day, the village of Booni and the way back to Chitral. A slight head wind makes the going slow and it takes another three hours to fly the last 60km.I have been in the saddle for 5 hours with no food or drink so Im thoroughly exhausted, hungry and thirsty and can’t face the prospect of having to deal with another big crowd landing. I land on a little field next to the palace which is some distance away from town and only get a crowd of ten. The heat on the ground is crushing after spending hours at near freezing level temperatures. I pack up and drag myself to Farhads place where I dump my gear, as I just can’t carry it up the hill right now. I must be getting old!

The watermelon I buy in the bazaar tastes divine and lifts me out of my zombielike state, the cold shower afterwards brings me back to a semi normal state. We are all reunited again, Grey and Alex land shortly after me and Dimitry and Glenn are back at the hotel. They both landed in Booni the previous day and took the taxi back home to have a flight around the Chitral area today.

Three days of flying and we are all tired and hungry. I have a bad head cold that is sapping my strength and we all need a break. Just as well the weather forecast is for non flyable weather the next few days.

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Irises around the old hotel