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Wednesday, December 11th - the snake post to trading post, 15,083 km
We all slept well last night, without interruption. Perhaps it was the night air or the ganja. We wake around the same time, shortly after the sun rises at 8 am. Vincent, Stephen and I sit up first. We open our mouths to say good morning and our words catch in our throats. We stare at the ground around us and at each other in utter disbelief. We saw nothing, heard nothing, during the night, but all around us are slither marks made by the snakes. Every hole in and around the dune has radiating swiggle marks left by the snakes on their night crawls, like children’s drawings of the sun. The largest tracks are 20 centimetres (8”) wide and the slithers are more than a metre wide. Some of these snakes must be at least four metres long to make these tracks this size.
They came very close to us too, only a metre away. As we stand up to survey the scene, we see that our little patch of undisturbed ground under the willow is like a lone palm tree island in the Pacific Ocean. The spaghetti scrawl of overlapping snake tracks, like waves of the sea, extend at least 100 m from the dune. This is totally freaky, much more than I expected and certainly more than the others did by far. We are frightened to step off our small “island”, onto the sandy ground beyond, as if their invisible spirits are still lurking there.
I quietly collect up my gear and start packing my sleeping bag. I was right about them being afraid of us. A desert mouse, one of their favourite foods, found my pocketbook in the night and made a meal of it. The bottom edge of the book has a new serrated edge and there is pile of chewed paper on the ground a foot from my head where I set it down. The snakes would have been able to smell it, and hear its chewing no doubt, but not one of them was courageous enough to crawl into our camp to get it.
Kate and Coen sit up and stretch. Kate opens her ever-present mouth and begins to say, “Who’s going to make the…” until Stephen quiets her with a finger to lips, as if the snakes will return if they hear us. As would be my luck, when I pull out my camera to take a picture of the scene it refuses to work. The dust of the desert has clogged its wheels, preventing its moving parts from moving. The film won’t even advance. I will take it apart in Nushki or Quetta, but at the very least I will lose a dozen or more of my most recent pictures.
We all pack silently over the next twenty minutes and, one by one, move our bikes onto the far side of the dune away from the holes and beyond the sea of slithers. Kate is the last one packed. “Wait for me,” she calls to Stephen in a hoarse whisper as she tries to catch up with the remainder of her packing under her arm. She doesn’t want to be left behind with the snakes.
No one makes tea or scrambled eggs this morning. We dig out fruit, bread and goat cheese from our bags for our breakfast. Coen, Vincent and I start grinning at each other and cannot stop, knowing that we survived this craziness and have the memories to show or it. “When we get home, we’ll be able to tell all our friends and family about sleeping in a snake pit,” I say to Kate who, in her panic, has stopped beside me to complete her packing. She looks at me as though I have just said something stupid and repulsive, and I have to suppress a smile.
The realization of their unconscious stupidity about sleeping beside a sea of snake holes seems to have sobered the others up today. They stop for occasional smoke breaks, still more than I wish they would, but they talk less as they think about the snakes, and they keep their heads down and their legs moving with more consistency. They choose not to smoke any ganja cigarettes today too.
The highway continues down the middle of the valley. The railway is north of us, off to our left, sometimes only a quarter kilometre away and sometimes two or three kilometres off. We can see it whenever e climb over a slight rise, which we do as the road bends over to the south side, along the base of a range medium-sized mountains Our average pace is about 14 km per hour when I factor in our breaks, much better than our normal 11 to 12. At this rate, it takes us around six hours to reach the half way point of our route to Nushki. It is only 2:30 pm so we continue on. An hour and a half later, we find a roadside inn and market, a wonderful discovery, and we stop here for the night.
The proprietor says this part of the valley quite safe if we stay near the inn. There are more trees here too, sprinkled over the dry mountains above us. Everyone pitches in to make a dinner of dhal and potatoes with tomatoes and beans. It is delicious, and we have earned it tonight. Kate still doesn’t want to discuss the snake pit but there is lots of other things to talk about. I lie on my bed and read my pocketbook. It’s a stupid Harlequin Romance called “The Soldier’s Girl”, not my usual cup of tea, but it relaxes me and frees me from the urge to fit in with a conversation with the Brits.
PHOTO 1: the road beyond the snake pit
PHOTO 2: local inhabitants
PHOTO 3: the valley near the trading post
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