Rawalpindi - the beginning

Everyone arrives

We take the bus instead of the uncertainty of the Skardu flight.

16 June 2004 - Meeting the team

Apologies for the "Rum Doodle" influenced humour. The book "Rum Doodle" sends up traditional large siege-type expeditions - like us - and should be essential expedition reading.

Send company t-shirts immediately!

On the 16th everyone arrived and some even emerged to reveal a variety of Hawaiian and 60's Polynesian shirts, plain boring travel shirts (the writer included), even a leather waistcoat and as for the French climbing pants - nothing natty, suave or debonair... We realized why the Russian face climbing team had matching logo t-shirts.

Our five French are by language necessity a group within but beyond that individuality is a theme with our team.

17 June - Send clean underwear

Veterans of Pakistan pray fervently that the Skardu flight runs, instead with the day before cancelled our flight was pushed back a day and logic dictates that we had to drive up.

Adventure Tours Pakistan (ATP) provided two excellent buses and less than suicidal drivers, but it is still a long, tough, two day drive, and other drivers rival the Shumachers; Ian has previously been in two bus accidents.

Leaving the plains behind the heat doesn't relent. We climbed over the first hills and dropped into the Indus River valley which turns into one of the most forbidding gorges there is. Formidable in every sense of the word.

From an altitude of 1000m peaks soar to over 5000m, sheer, imposing faces, utterly impossible to trek thru with a raging, muddy Indus below. Ugly and sinister and on a utterly impressive scale, but fascinating in the impossibility of the terrain; a true barrier here that puzzled the great game explorers for more than a century.