Riding the Karakoram Highway Part 3: Police Escorts

There is also a bureaucratic side to Pakistan, where the problem-solving attitude we had so often experienced disappears. We encountered it at the end of a long day on the bike. We left the small town of Besham (furnished with the Marriott, Hilton, Ramada and – suspiciously – Continental hotels) expecting an easy day, with only 50 kilometres to Battagram, where we were planning to stay the night. It turned out in that short distance there was a preposterous 1,000 metres of climbing, so we slogged our way up at a snail’s pace for hours on end up gradual climbs. Our easy day turned into an ordeal. After many hours of riding, it became dark and  the call to prayer filled the valley; we still had at least another hour to ride. Upon reaching Battagram, the evening took more challenging turn as were told by our police escort that there were no hotels and we would have to cycle another 20 kilometres to a place called Chinarkot.

Tyre troubles as usual

The uphill slog continued. And then we got our second puncture of the day. In the headlights of the police escort we fell into a routine that had become disconcertingly well practised: TJ fixing the hole of the damaged inner tube whilst I put in a new tube. It was late, dark, I was hungry and tired and I just hoped that we would be able to get to our night’s destination soon. The traffic police had joined our little roadside gathering and were offering “advice” and questioning us about the trip – the curiosity was nice to see, but I really wasn’t in the mood to answer questions! Luckily, TJ had more patience than me and chatted with them as I grappled with the bike.

We set off again and had gone two minutes when a gushing sound came from the back wheel. I was as deflated as the tire. Flat as a pancake. It was 9:30pm and we still had another 5km uphill to go; on top of this our spare tube now had more patches than rubber and I wasn’t optimistic it would hold. Above all, I dreaded the rigmarole of replacing the tube (all bags off, trailer disconnected, bike upside down, gears and wheel separated, wheel removed, tire levered off, tube stripped out – and then the reverse) for it to be unsuccessful.  

Our police escort came up beside us. There was a compound next to where we stopped which seemed a promising night spot.

“Can we stop in here? Can pitch our tent in this place?”

“No, no, it’s closed and unsafe, we’ll take you to the hotel, you can come back here tomorrow.”

“We can’t camp?”

“This is a terrorist area! Very unsafe, you must go to the hotel.” 

It didn’t seem like we had much choice. Unable to face fixing the flat tire, TJ and I lifted Chris and our bags into the police pickup truck. We sped off fast covering the final few kilometres to our hotel.

Yet we didn’t stop and soon had gone far past it.

“What’s going on?” I asked TJ. TJ had no answer.

The police team spoke almost no English and couldn’t tell us what was going on. But to our surprise, a couple of kilometres further on we did stop. But there wasn’t a hotel, only another police truck.

“Aren’t we going to the hotel?” TJ asked the officer of the new truck.

Speeding away in the police truck

“Yes yes”, he said, laughing as if at some joke that we didn’t understand. “Just at the next town.”

We loaded our things into the next police truck and this one drove us on another 10 kilometres, to the edge of their area. It stopped and another police pickup was waiting. Whilst we were baffled, they assured us the hotel was nearby and they would take us there. Dubious but without much choice, we loaded up the bike and bags again. This process repeated itself twice with other police trucks as we gradually realised they weren’t taking us to any hotel.

Soon we were 50km away from where we started and at our wits end. What was going on? We had passed several hotels, which apparently were “unsafe” and now we were next to the city of Mansehra. There didn’t seem to be an end in sight and we didn’t know where this chain of police cars would take us. Our Urdu was non-existent and their English very limited so communication was a struggle.

We asked to be taken to a certain hotel in Mansehra. “It’s closed!” announced our policeman. I phoned them. It wasn’t. “We just take you to the next place – it’s a great hotel, very safe, very nice. Just a bit further,” our police officer assured us.

I doubted his hotel existed and TJ by this point was pretty annoyed that the police had been continually misleading us. After some wrangling, we persuaded the police officer to take us to the hotel of our choice in Mansehra. Or we thought we had. Instead the Kafka-esque evening continued as he drove us along the motorway, past the city and hotel. “You’re taking us in the wrong direction!” I griped. “Look, there’s a sign,” he said, giggling.

10 kilometres later, we ended up at a motorway service station where another police escort was waiting. The promised hotel had not materialised. How far were they going to take us? To Abbottabad? To Islamabad?

It had become clear this night-time journey was not going to end. TJ and I decided to make a stand. Actions would speak louder than our words.

Our service station campsite

We pitched our tent in the service station car park. “You said you wanted to spend a night under the stars,” I joked to TJ. “I didn’t think it would be next to a motorway,” TJ grumbled, not unreasonably. Ignoring the requests of the police to get in the next truck, we went into the 24 hour café and settled down to a late dinner at 1am. We polished off the egg-fried rice and vegetable curry in minutes.

By this point the police, who had been waiting half and hour for us to finish, began to get a little desperate. They kept asking us to get in the car, saying they would take us to Mansehra. In the end, we didn’t get back in the car because we couldn’t trust the police to take us to a hotel.  As long as we kept off the police trucks we could be in control of our fates. So, feeling a little bad, we ignored them and got into our sleeping bags, at nearly 2am. The police slept in their truck in the car park next to us.

Thankfully, the story ends well. The police had been following orders to take us to a place of extreme safety – probably some barbed-wire compound in Abbottabad or Islamabad – which was totally unnecessary. Each group was also probably quite reluctant to take responsibility of safety for a couple of foreigners, so they were keen to pass us on as quickly as possible, and telling us an area was unsafe was a good pretext for moving us on quickly. By driving us far away they were doing what they’d been told and didn’t have the authority to question it.

TJ doing a late night debrief

The next morning a specialist police squad arrived; their purpose was the safety of international visitors and they spoke enough English we could happily communicate. Although it took us a while to trust their promises that they would take us into Mansehra to get the bike fixed (they watched patiently as I struggled for two hours to do the repairs myself), they were as good as their word. The flat tires that had beleaguered us were sorted by experts in a shack of a repair shop, but the men there worked with deft and sure hands, their skills honed through countless repetition. The repairs were soon done. We then drove for an hour back to the point we stopped the night before. With relief we disembarked, knowing that our journey would be complete – there would be no gaps through Pakistan. And there was the compound we had seen the previous night – and we saw some Chinese workers being driven into it, which was odd for a compound that was closed. Before we set off we got chatting to one of the Pakistani men working at the compound, telling him we had broken down here last night, and had been driven far away for somewhere to stay.

He looked at us in confusion.

“You should have stayed with us here! We would welcome you!”