20 years ago today - Day 298

Thursday, December 26th - Islamabad

The phone office opens at 8 am so I make sure I am there when it opens. I call to my parents home in Toronto. It is still Christmas evening there, about 9:30 pm. I chat with both of them for about 5 minutes each. I thank Mom for rescuing me financially and assure her that I am healthy now.

When I return to my room, there is a note from Vincent saying that he and Coen are going to travel agencies to check on prices for a flight to Delhi from Lahore, so they won’t need to rush to meet their girlfriends. It is too cold and windy today to want to hang around outside so I stay in my room and read my novel.

It is late morning. I have been reading for about an hour and a half when Vincent and Coen come into the room looking for me. “Ken, we have a Christmas gift for you!” “Thanks,” I say. I sit up, expecting them to produce some sort of package wrapped in used newspaper. Coen beams sheepishly and opens the door. To my surprise, a young, hunky German lad steps into the room, a brunette glowing with so much vitality and wholesomeness that he might have just stepped out of a milk commercial. I am caught speechless.

“This is Frank,” Vincent announces. “He’s cycling to India! We ran into him in the travel agency.” Ah, I get it. They want to make sure I have someone to travel with so they can feel better about parting with me here. Well, I totally approve of their gift so far, but Vincent keeps talking to explain how they met him.

“We met Frank in Kerman in Iran when we were cycling without you. He and his buddy Eric were cycling there. Eric is about to fly home from here. Frank wants to continue on to India but he was on his way to buy a ticket home too because he couldn’t find anyone to cycle with. We told him about you and he wanted to meet you.” Then, Vincent and Coen are off on another errand, leaving Frank to chat with me.

Frank tells me more of his story. He and Eric had cycled from Germany and arrived in Tabriz in north-west Iran seven weeks ago. In a village near Tabriz, both their bicycles were stolen. They went to the police and filed a report. The police, angry that this had happened to two foreigners, went door to door in the surrounding neighbourhood and threatened to kill anyone found with the bicycles. After that, there is no hope that anyone would come forward with a tip. They took a train from Tabriz to Tehran, much as we had, and bought two cheap substitute bikes there. They continued their cycling trip on to Qom, Quetta, Yazd and Kerman, keeping in contact with the police in Tabriz from time to time.

In Kerman, the same day they had met Coen and Vincent, they got a call from the police who related that one of their bikes have shown up and was now in their hands. They didn’t have enough information to determine if it was Eric’s or Frank’s so they returned to Tabriz together. The bike was Frank’s. He ditched his cheap replacement but Eric had to continue on his piece of junk.

They returned to Kerman, cycled across eastern Iran to Taftan (arriving after us), caught a bus to Quetta (arriving before us) and then cycled through the North-West Frontier States to Peshawar. On there way there, they were fired at by a solo thief trying to kill them for their belongings. Somehow they managed to outrun him without being hit. The reported it to the police and they have closed the area to foreign tourists two weeks ago. From Peshawar, near the Khyber Pass, they cycled down out of the mountains to Rawalpindi, where Eric decided he has had enough.

Being shot at, now that’s hard to top, but he is pretty impressed with my stories about the war in Croatia, the mastiff guard dogs in Turkey, my robbery and internal bleeding in Iran, the stones that greeted us in every town and our night in the snake pit. There is no doubt we will get along. He is obviously a kind, considerate man who is filled with positive energy. He’s only 22 but he feels very much my equal, only taller and hunkier.

He cannot stay and chat though. He is leaving in two hours to go to Murree, a town in the hills to the north-east of here, near the border of Kashmir. A European diplomat he met at the German embassy has invited him and Eric to spend a post-Christmas long weekend in his lodge up there. He is anxious to go snow-shoeing as Murree already has lots of snow. He excuses himself to go back to finish his packing. He says he will return on the morning of the 29th.

In a flash he has gone, like a wet dream that is prematurely interrupted. Thank you Vincent and Coen. This is potentially the best Christmas gift I have ever been given. Wow, India is going to be a very different phase of my trip than the one from Istanbul to here, but I am sitting here tonight, the others having disappeared somewhere, unable to concentrate on my cheap hetero Harlequin romance. I am feeling very restless and alone, and for the first time very eager to get on with my journey to India. I feel like a child who has opened a delightful gift for Christmas, only to be told that he cannot see of play with it for the next three days. Bummer!