20 years ago today - Day 286

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Saturday, December 14th - Shikh Wasil to Quetta, 15,329 km

What a cold morning! I am so weak that is a struggle to crawl out of my sleeping bag. If I was at home I wouldn't be getting out of bed, except to go to a hospital emergency. I feel like Death warmed over. I feel like a sick and abandoned child but I have no choice. Not only do I need to re-pack all my clothes into my panniers and roll up and secure my sleeping bag to my rear rack, but I need to change my bike's leaking rear tire. It is well below freezing and the work must be done with bare hands. I am so weak that it takes several tries and all the effort I can muster to pry the tire off the rim, and once the inner tube is patched (the glue on the patch has either dried or frozen instantly), all my effort to get the tire back on the rim. All of this takes me half an hour.

It is about 8:30 am when I am finished. Several people have passed me on their way to their work. They glance at me with curiosity while I struggled pathetically with the tire. I really doubted that I had enough strength but now that it is done and I have finished pumping up the tire I feel much better - a touch of pride but mostly a sense of relief. I rest for a minute on the frozen ground. At this point I can put my gloves back on.

Carlos appears while I am still resting. He is on his own, wheeling his bike with him. He is full of concern for me and helps me mount my rear wheel into position and load my panniers. Then he guides me as I struggle feebly to roll the loaded bike back to the road. Stephen and Kate have already left for Quetta, he says. They did not want to wait for me, using the excuse that they need to get to the bank in Quetta before it closes. I understand their financial concern. It's their lack of concern for me, knowing that I am seriously sick and spent the night sleeping on frozen ground. They could have dropped by to check on me before heading off but they just don't care about me, even though they have been using my limited cash to buy their cigarettes.

But Carlos promises to stay with me. He tells me that he and the Brits were offered a dry, unheated place to lay their sleeping bags, and then kept up most of the night by the townsfolk who used this as a reason to party all night, insisting that they drink with them. Probably they just wanted an excuse to stare at Kate in her cycling tights. Dumb bitch! I hope she is miserable today.

At first I can barely move my half-frozen legs fast enough to maintain a walking speed on the bike. Carlos stays close to me all the way until my strength improves incrementally. Beyond the town, there is a tea house and he suggests that, even though I cannot stomach food, we stop for a hot tea. The tea house is above the road, which has been rising as we leave the town. From its windows I have a partial view of the town we are leaving.

I am very fragile today. This is my lowest point of my whole trip. I cannot even focus on the seemingly unattainable goal of reaching Quetta by tonight. I am making it through this day minute by minute, hour by hour. I am on survival mode. I cannot remember ever being this low before.

After warming up for half an hour in the tea house, Carlos reminds me we must keep moving to reach Quetta. Unlike Kate, he makes sure I am ready to move on first. I am thinking I must have a guardian angel who introduced Carlos to our group at the last minute to save me from this crisis. I am also thinking that I would have been better to stay with Coen and Vincent in Nushki instead of attempting to cycle with the incredibly uncaring and selfish Brits. When I think about them my blood boils, which is probably a good thing on this cold morning.

So we are moving again. I am starting to feel human again, slowly, but it is still a struggle. I haven't digested any food for a day so I am not surprised. Carlos is still staying fairly close to me but at least I am able to get up to 15 km/hr. And so we continue for the next few hours as we draw closer and closer to Quetta, where I will be able to rest for a week while we wait for Coen and Vincent to arrive.

By late afternoon, we are nearing Quetta. Carlos feels more comfortable with my ability and is now riding 300 m ahead of me. Suddenly, I see two youths, about 15 or 16, chase after him and try to grab his bike. He bolts to get out of their range, barely escaping their grasp. One of the picks up a sizable stone and hurls it at him, narrowly missing his head. He disappears around a bend in the road having safely outrun them. They shrug and laugh and turn to walk back to where they started from. Then they see me.

They each pick up large stones and stand by the road, their faces filled with mischief and excitement as they wait to attack me as I pass. They are right at the side of the road and there is no way to safely get past them. The rocks they have picked up are large enough to knock me unconscious and I have to pass the youths at a very close range. I have no helmet for protection anymore, having given it to the Iranian cyclist in Esfahan. I cannot turn around for there is nowhere for me to return to, and if I don't continue, Carlos may return for me and be attacked again. I see no alternative but to proceed, with the probability of being seriously maimed or worse.

My strength is still seriously compromised but I give it all I can. I crank up my speed to 25 km/hr. They ready themselves to pounce at me as they prepare for the challenge, their broad smiles laced with determination. Ten metres before I reach them, I veer off the road to go behind them. They step back quickly to adjust to my maneuver, only to find that they have stepped right into my path as I am barreling towards them. They leap back out of my way, falling off the road backwards into a steep culvert. I veer back onto the road and keep moving without looking back. They scramble back up the embankment after I have passed. A few seconds later I see the fist-sized stones they held bouncing along the pavement beside me.

I continue around the curve and out of sight. I find Carlos waiting for me rather anxiously half a kilometre further along. I stop and explain how I outwitted my attackers and we share a laugh. The rush of adrenaline from the close encounter is all I need to carry me the rest of the way into Quetta. From this point onwards I can keep up with Carlos. The sign for the city limits appears two kilometres further along. Incredibly, I have made it, just barely, to my destination city at the end of the valley. Since I have not seen the bodies of Kate or Stephen lying by the roadside along the way I assume they have made it too. Now we only have to wait for Coen and Vincent.

Quetta, a city of a million people, is the capital and by far the largest city in Baluchistan. It sprawls endlessly. The streets are wide. Even the core looks like a low-rise suburb, but there are trees and some attempt at urban design in places, making it much more pleasant looking than Zahedan. It is doesn't look anywhere like its actual size, other than that it goes on forever. This place and the Khyber Pass north of here marked the western end of the British Empire in India. The British reached here in 1876. In 1931, a massive quake leveled the city, including all of the multi-storied buildings, killing 40,000 people. I suppose the city has felt safer with low-rise buildings since then.

I see the post office and Carlos watches the bikes while I go in to ask where the Boys and Girls Club is located. They give me the address and directions how to get there. Again, it turns out to be a clean, comfortable looking place. I see on the registry that Stephen Brown and Kate Simpson have already arrived here. I make sure Carlos and I are assigned to a different room. Hopefully, I won't see them again, or at least for a few days. Perhaps by then my anger will have settled down.

I am still weak but I feel the need to eat something. Carlos accompanies me to a local store where we buy groceries to make a couple meals on our own. I buy myself yogurt and juice to ease my bowels back into digesting food. So far my Imodium has settled my stomach since last night. After eating our simple meal, I crawl into my sleeping bag and spend the rest of my evening there. Carlos goes out and I do not hear him when he returns.