NEW HIGHWAY FOLLOWS THE PATH OF MARCO POLO’S SILK ROAD

Ever since adventure-travel writer Marco Polo introduced the Silk Road to the Western world at the turn of the 14th Century, armchair travelers have dreamed of following his fabled route.

Parts of the Silk Road in far west China have opened in recent years, but only to travelers who arrived from China’s east coast. In the United States this would be the equivalent of requiring Asian visitors to Yosemite to go through New York or Washington, D.C.

On May 1, however, the first door swung open on international access to the Silk Road.

China and Pakistan have agreed to allow foreign tourists to travel the new Karakoram Highway along a southern arm of the Silk Road. The way is now literally paved for travelers to cross the Himalayas by vehicle into Chinese Central Asia from Pakistan (or vice versa).

Several American adventure-travel firms are offering such journeys this summer, and it is also possible to travel on one’s own. A tourist who does not use the transport supplied by government agencies can save money, but at the expense of a vehicle switch at Khunjerab Pass on the 16,000-foot Pakistan-China border.

“Expect the unexpected” is a byword of Asian travel; travelers who are not in groups are advised to bring sleeping bags and extra food.

The Karakoram Highway takes its name from the Karakoram Mountains, a 300-mile Himalayan sub-range that has the highest mean elevation of any region on earth.

The highway starts on the plains in the city of Havelian just outside Islamabad, capital of Pakistan. For 737 miles it runs through some of the most wild and rugged land imaginable before joining the central Silk Road in China at Kashi (formerly Kashgar), an oasis on the edge of the great Taklamakan Desert.

Aspiring Marco Polos join caravans of rainbow-colored Pakistani buses, Toyota Land Cruisers and Ford vans along a silk-smooth veneer of asphalt set into the chaotic landscape.

To thread this modern counterpart of silk through the zone of the high peaks cost a toll of one human life per kilometer of road. More that 400 lives were lost as 25,000 men worked 20 years to convert a dream born during a Pakistani-Chinese conference in 1964 into reality.

Pakistan Army engineers labored side by side with crews of Chinese workers to hack a pathway through the vertical gorge of the Indus River, the ice of Manhattan-size glaciers and the homelands of primitive peoples.

To call these lands a Shangri-La is more than idle speculation. Those who read James Hilton’s delightful 1933 novel, “Lost Horizon,” which introduced the fictional Shangri-La, will find many similarities, but also one major difference: In the novel, roads were conspicuously absent.

Hilton described how passengers in a DC-3 that eventually crash-landed near Shangri-La saw a valley that appeared to be the upper Indus River, and a range of peaks with “a chill gleam, utterly majestic and remote” that “must be the Karakorams.”

Once in Shangri-La a lama pointed out a peak higher than 28,000 feet called Karakal. In reality there is no peak with such a name, but indeed there is a lake called Karakul next to the new Karakoram Highway on the Chinese side, and a peak higher than 28,000 feet called K2, the world’s second highest, about 70 miles east of the road.

Not all the residents of the real-life Shangri-Las along the route of the highway have welcomed its coming. Hunza was an independent kingdom until President Bhutto annexed it to Pakistan in 1973 in the interests of democracy. Hill farmers there have traditionally led long and healthy lives in emerald-terraced villages set beneath the glittering ice and snow of the Karakoram.

They long ago figured out how to channel the constant flow of meltwater from the heights to irrigate their barley fields and fruit trees, but many Hunza residents were not in favor of adding a constant flow of tourists to their simple way of life.

Despite bribes of food, clothing, cigarettes and money, a Hunza monkey wrench gang ripped out survey markers and phone wires and urged their kinfolk not to join the work force.

That unrest has disappeared, and on my last visits to Hunza in 1984 and 1986 tourists were greeted with open smiles and offers of hospitality similar to those in Nepal.

A traveler feels safe on the Karakoram Highway, where arms and violence are scarce in contrast to regions near other Pakistani borders where the war in Afghanistan to the west and the Sikh conflict in India to the east create considerably greater tension.

Hunza entrepreneurs have opened hotels, restaurants and tour agencies, but given a choice, not all of them would choose such life styles.

Black-bearded Nazir Sabir, co-owner of a trekking agency called Mountain World, was born in a roadless Hunza village a third of a century ago. When education was brought in from the outside, he excelled. He found himself moving ever farther from his roots, first to Karimabad, the central village of Hunza, then to college in the lowlands.

With physical gifts as well as mental ones and an excellent command of English, Sabir was selected to become a government liaison officer for foreign treks and expeditions. He performed so well that several expeditions made him a full member of their climbing teams.

Sabir became one of a handful of men in the world who have climbed K2. With Reinhold Messner, a noted high-altitude climber, Sabir climbed two of the world’s 13 other peaks above 8,000 meters (26,247 feet), equaling the number of 8,000-meter peaks climbed by anyone in the Western Hemisphere.

Yet in a private moment, wearing a business suit at an international tourism convention, Sabir said: “My education led me here. I did not choose this life. I often dream of being a farmer with a plot of land in some village far away from the road and none of the frantic things that now pass through my head.

“But I am here, and I will do the best I can in this life that has chosen me.”

To travel the Karakoram Highway even for a few days is to have a glimpse of the changes in that lost world of which Nazir Sabir dreams. Buses and hustle and bustle are now the norm along a pathway that a British explorer in 1948 described as being unchanged over 15 centuries.

In one major way, however, there has been a return to the simplicity of old times. The complex permit procedure, so characteristic of Himalayan journeys in the ‘60s and ‘70s, has been greatly relaxed. Prospective travelers can simply obtain visas for Pakistan and China and show up at either end of the highway. On the Pakistan side they can stop and take side trips almost at will, because trekking is now allowed without permits except in a few sensitive areas.

Valley Site--at 5,000 Feet

For those who do not wish to drive the entire highway, Pakistan International Airlines offers a government-subsidized flight from Islamabad to Gilgit for $11. This cuts off more than 300 miles of driving through the rugged Indus Gorge.

The city of Gilgit lies in a deep valley between the Karakoram and the western Himalayas at an elevation of just 5,000 feet. Summer temperatures are in the 80s and room rates at the modern Serena Inn hover in the low $20s, depending on the fluctuation of the dollar. A clean, adequate hotel room can be found for $10 or less.

As with other towns along the highway, Gilgit has plenty of gas and food for tourists. It is the political seat of Pakistan’s Northern Areas and the best place to rent a Jeep and driver or buy a place on a bus bound for the border. The Northern Areas Transport Corp. operates weekly service between Pakistan and China, and the Pakistan Tourist Development Corp. conducts package tours in clean and powerful diesel buses.

Three hours’ drive from Gilgit is Karimabad, the chief village of Hunza, where several small hotels offer rooms for about $10. Summer meals include fruits such as apricots, cherries, peaches, apples and grapes, mixed with Hunza cuisine of lamb and potato dishes.

Three more hours--barring road damage from rock slides--puts one at the border, where the checkpoint of Sust converts currency and maintains a medical facility as well as a customs and immigration office.

Tour groups regularly cross the frontier in buses supplied by either government, but individuals can make their way to the border at their own pace, then hire transport of the respective country on the opposite side.

Seeing Marco Polo Sheep

On either side of the border near Khunjerab Pass, visitors have a chance of seeing Marco Polo sheep.

These out-size Himalayan relatives of American bighorn have the largest horns of any sheep in the world, great curls that sometimes exceed six feet on a side.

On the Chinese side of the pass the road traverses the high steppes of the Taghdumbash Pamir, rolling country that leads to the fabled city of Tashkurgan, first described by the Greek geographer Ptolemy in AD 150.

A few miles beyond Tashkurgan the terrain changes abruptly into what Marco Polo called “the best pasturage in the world, with grass so lush that a lean beast will fatten to your heart’s content in 10 days. Wild game of every sort abounds.”

The modern traveler will find the same green meadows set below two white apparitions in the sky, the 25,000-foot peaks of Mustagh Ata and Kongur. Unfortunately, one sees few if any large mammals except for the domestic camels, yaks and horses.

After another 60 miles of mountains and gorges the road suddenly emerges on a flat plain that leads to Kashi, the major city of China’s Wild West. In the United States we have no analogy for the degree of difference between Kashi and eastern Chinese cities such as Peking. Boston and Denver, New York and Seattle, Newark and San Francisco--all these comparisons pale against the reality of a town so un-Chinese that it seems to have been transplanted from somewhere in the Middle East.

In fact, Kashi is near the end of a strip of arid, Islamic lands that stretch from North Africa through the Arab world, across Soviet Central Asia and finally into China. Kashi is a city of mosques, black-veiled women and men who speak in a Turkish dialect. A Saturday bazaar attracts tens of thousands of people who sell and trade their wares in timeworn fashion.

Eric Shipton, a great explorer of Asia and the Himalayas, was the last British Consul of Kashi just before Mao Tse-tung formed the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Shipton’s consular mansion still stands in a state of disrepair on the edge of a bluff overlooking the desert.

Shipton left Kashi knowing that he might well be the last Westerner for many decades to travel in that part of the world. He departed by caravan back over the mountains to Hunza, following much of the same route as the new Karakoram Highway.

Today’s travelers have an option. They can make a similar but motorized overland journey to Pakistan or fly via Urumchi to China’s eastern seaboard and points beyond.

The opening of the Karakoram Highway will not provide future generations access to what Marco Polo saw. The sudden onset of the 20th Century into lands still locked in the Middle Ages will change them beyond recognition.

Veteran travelers know that the exciting time is now, a fleeting period of months, of perhaps a year or two, when a glimpse of the past still remains along with the ease of access that has made the rest of our world what it is.

Inner Asia, 2627 Lombard St., San Francisco 94123, (800) 551-1769 or (415) 922-0448 offers a trip on the Karakoram Highway from China to Pakistan June 24-July 13. The cost is $4,885 plus air fare.

Mountain Travel, 1398 Solano Ave., Albany, Calif. 94706, (415) 527-8100 has sold out a June 22 trip on the highway from Pakistan to China but has a few openings left for a June 15-July 7 journey on the highway from China to Pakistan. The cost is $4,375 plus air fare; $3,990 if the group totals more than nine.

Private journeys from Pakistan to China can be arranged through these Pakistani agencies:

Travel Walji’s Ltd., P.O. Box 1088, Islamabad, Pakistan, telex 5769 WALJIPK.

Mountain World, P.O. Box 1421, Islamabad, Pakistan, cable Climbing, Islamabad, Pakistan.

Pakistan Tourist Development Corp., H-2, St. 61, F--7/4, Islamabad, Pakistan, telex FH PK 5620.

Air travel distance to Islamabad is roughly the same across the Pacific or the Atlantic. Many American tourists choose to fly to Tokyo, spend a night there, and continue to Islamabad on a Pakistan International Airlines flight that stops in Peking.