Our visa is expiring, for the second time.
And we can’t decide if we want to go back to Islamabad or keep on climbing mountains and rolling down into valleys.
We decide that time will decide for us, so 3 days before the expiry date of the visa we turn East along a road that shouldn’t exist. The Indus at the bottom of the valley flows so grey, so thick and fast that it seems solid. I’m aware of its liquid nature only in the vortexs that suck the air dragging it inside that rolling mass of water.
The road is stuck into the mountain, dag into the rock: a vault was carved and we are under it, inside it. The mountain surround us. To our left, solid and humid, above us massive and real, under us one lane of broken tarmac that dives, on the right, in a precipice of a couple of hundreds meters from where, from down, climbs up the constant rumble of the river.
The mountain in front of us slides headfirst into the void. Does even our mountain look like that, seen from the other side? We are riding engraved in the mountain. This road doesn’t exist, we should roll down like stones pulled by gravity.
Hours and hours of rocks and sand. Villages hanged on unreachable prongs. I look around, I look for the paths, I look for the cableways. I don’t find them. Isolated. Still they continue, a day after another, to farm their piece of land, to see the goats getting birth and their elders die. Unaware of my world that speeds by in front of them, spitting smokes of burnt petrol. Deeply concious of the days passing and of the cycles of nature. Men and women bond to the land, while I’m carried hauled away by wind.
Skardu is Ladakh. Ladakh is Skardu. Land of silver sand and sky constantely clear and blue. We gallop across the desert. The wind starts to blow and rise the sand. The sky turns gray in one second and we can’t talk without feeling grains of sand creak in between our teeth.
I would like to go everywhere. I would like to ride all the valleys to the end, and then to come back. Just for fun, because this is my life and I cannot think on anything more amazing to do. Like a kid I choose the places where to play with enthusiasm and spontaneousness. Normal people look at me jumping from one foot to the other and shake their head. I smile indulgently.
We explore the valley of Shiger, further after Kaplu, the Sadpara Lake. We are tired, but too excited to stop. It’s going to be Serena to ask for a break. She’s loosing oil and petrol. [ Video ] Soon she’ll start to loose brake fluid also. “I’m tired” she tells us. And suddendly we realize that we are also tired. It’s time to go down from the mountains.
Winter is coming; the cold makes me feel alive, it reminds me I exist, that every single part of me is tangible and real. But it’s time to go, to cross Deosai Plain before the first snow starts to fall.
Deosai plain is a deserted corner of paradise. A plateau all above 4000m, where the oxygen is rare and with the rain it becomes heavy and difficult to canalize into the lungs numb by the cold. In the evening Thomas suffers a bit and I hear him gasping heavily while he tries to fall asleep.
The morning after we play, we throw ourselves in crazy rides with the bike, we park in the middl eof nowhere and we sit on a rock looking all around us. Nothing. Alone. Only fat marmots observe us passing by whisteling like crazy as soon as I start to run towards them in a clumsy attempt of hugging them.
Every 2 hours of drive we meet a police check post. A white prefabricated building made of plastic and shaped like an igloo, descended upon into the emptiness. # men left alone to take care of themselves and to take the entry of all the foreigners that drive by,
“How many foreigners pass by?”
“Few”
“And what do you do then?”
“We fish.”
We continue our run, across the pleatueau, go down to a valley, we ride it until the end along a river with the bottom made of round rocks and the clear water of a deep night-blue color, we cross the river, go up in a side valley which turns out to be a dead end, we turn back, enter in another valley, ride it all in between ups and downs and landslides, we cross another river, not a simple river: the Indus.
The tires touch the black and smooth tarmac of the KKH Highway.
“It’s time to go home.”
We laugh.
“Where is home?” asks Serena while she happily slided on a surreal tapis roulant spread out in a breathtaking landscape. I hug Thomas and I hold him tight.
“Home” I whisper to myself.
