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June 15. We wake up to a grey sky. Dimitry is in a bad way with the squirts so we all have another day to recover. With a copy of Dimitries computer programmes we figure out a way to download Greys track logs and the day is spent eating, washing, sleeping and a few hours on the internet. It’s a tough life! Have I told you yet how delicious the Mangos are around here? We eat kilos of the fruits and are now officially addicted to Mango shakes.

June 16 Mukrim has been away for 4 days now without news and we are starting to ask ourselves what can be the matter. Im of the opinion that there is nothing we can do and going to the police would only complicate matters for us. These mountains are so vast and rugged, a search is totally futile. We have demanded the opinion of the local pilots one of which has connections with the police. We have decided to formally sound the alarm on Sunday when he will have been away for a week. It is another non flyable day so Grey and Dimitry go to the hot pools a few hours drive from chitral. I need some time on my own away from every body so I stay at home.

June 17. The lost son has been found alive. Mukrim flew deep into the northern territories and will need a few days to get back. The police passed on a message by radio to the local pilot here to say that he was safe. Today is the finals of the polo tournament. It is a big event with thousands of spectators. It is free style polo so everything is permitted. It is a rough bunch of tartars but their riding skills are superb. They swing their polo sticks while riding at full speed and manage to either hit the ball or stop the opponent of doing so by hooking their stick behind the opponents one. The horses do get a beating, with the ball hitting their legs and the stray polo sticks flying in all directions. The crowd goes ballistic and the live music does its bit to excite them even more. The remarkable thing is that there is thousands of people but there is not a word of discontent.
Afterwards everybody walks home and there is no yelling or shouting or anti social behaviour. Im sure dying for a beer sometimes but a society without alcohol makes for very different behaviour. Now that Im remarking on the differences, here is another one.
There is no women on the street!!! And if there are they are covert up from top to tow. Now that I think about it I may already have remarked on this “no women” thing but it is so remarkable for us I have to say it again. It may have its positive sites as well. There seems to be no competition for women and so there is no jealousy or macho behaviour by the men. When we spent the night at the summer palace last week we only got a glimpse of the girls there and when I asked if I could take a photo of the family it was a definite NO.
Later the husband explained that if I took a photo of his wife the Imam in the village would be very upset. I guess it has to do with being vain or something. Now that we have been up there a few times and have drunk their thee and showed our good behaviour, the veil is slowly coming of and we are now allowed to see the women folks faces. It sure is different.

June 21. Time fly’s when you are having fun. I don’t remember what I did on the 18th. I think it was not flyable and I went for a walk around town. Met some trades people, sewing machine repair shop, woodworker, timber mill, and bakery. Had a cup of thee with the woodworker and tried to find out where the timber comes from. The forests are miles away and only accessible by foot. I guess the trees have been cut from the lower slopes long ago and now they have to walk for days to get their fire wood and timber. With the growing population in all the valleys it will not be long and they will have cut the last trees. Wood is still cheaper then gas so there is no incentive to move away from it. Last week we drove back to our hotel on sunset and got a good look at the smog that hangs over the valley at night. Now that Im sitting on my eco horse anyway I will tell you about the way they dispose of their rubbish here. It is nothing new really, it goes on everywhere in developing countries, but it keeps shocking me. The main shopping street has an open drain on both sides. All the rubbish gets dumped in those drains and once a day they open the flood gates at the top of the street and flush everything to the bottom of the street where it flows onto the river. With my European mind I just cant see how anyone can do that without any feeling of guild. In the back streets this system doesn’t work so well so there is piles of a mixture of plastic and paper and mud just sitting right in front of shop doors. I think this river eventually empties into the Indus and I wonder how the delta of the Indus looks like. We, in the rich countries, try to be clean, recycle, save energy, have carbon footprints and have emission control on our cars. It really is a joke when you realise how few we are in those rich countries and how many there is in the developing countries. 164 million in Pakistan alone. What saves the planet for the moment is that those developing countries don’t have much in the way of chemicals to dump in the rivers I think. Although the places to get your oil change done around here are conveniently close to the water……

On the 19th we went flying but the air was stable. With all my warm clothes on as usual I did sweat like a horse and gave up after a couple of hours scratching at low altitude.
Saturday looked great and I was feeling good, ready for a big flight. However, the wind aloft was strong which put us in the rotor of the big mountains behind the launch site. It made for unpleasant flying with Dimitry getting drilled into some canyon after which Grey and I decided to cross the valley and try the windward side. It worked much better but the conditions stayed unpredictable which made for frustrating flying for some and great flying for others. Me being the some and Grey being the other.

I set Sunday apart to take the Prince for a tandem. He is quiet a character by the way. In 1989 he was probably the first Pakistani ever to fly on a Para glider. In that year some Austrian tourist started doing flights from the hills here and Farhad, the prince, was quick to invite him to come and stay at his home. He ended up getting some ground handling lessons of this guy and doing his first short flights. It wasn’t till ten years later that he got his first wing and flung himself of the mountain. By then his mate had been to Islamabad to get some instruction and together they tried to kill themselves. He has spiralled out of the sky 3 times and has managed to survive all 3 without injury, falling on steep slopes or wrapping his glider around a huge rock and falling on his feet. There is about halve a dozen pilots here now which are sharing a few wings that are so old and trashed you look straight trough them. But it is all they have got and they do their top to bottoms with it, without reserve parachutes and no back protection what so ever. Allah must be with them.
It was a great looking day and Grey, Mukrim and Dimitry decided to have another go at the 7600 metre high Tirich Mir. I didn’t have a plan really but once we were in the air the conditions were so good that I decided to follow them. The approach is pretty straight forward. Get high, 5500, glide across a valley onto ridge and follow this ridge to the enormous mass of snow and ice. I was probably half an hour behind Grey and Dimitry, Mukrim having disappeared into some canyon, and the cloud base was at 6000metre. A cloud street over the ridge made for easy flying and I ventured into the clouds a bid. MISTAKE!!! The cloud was much bigger than anticipated and we got sucked up into it. For some reason I was not able to keep a straight course so that we spiralled upwards. Here I must clarify that I have been in cloud a few times and know how to deal with the total whiteout condition. It got bitterly cold and we got covered in hoarfrost. In eight minutes we climbed 1400 metres and popped out of the clouds at 7455 metres. The view of the mountain was obscured by masses of cloud so the sight seeing was over and we needed to get down into warmer air to defrost anyway. The blood circulation in my hands came back soon enough and with it the pain. Farhad, in the front seat, was in a worse way and had the shivers for quite a while. One of his fingers refused to come back to life and he said he was happy to make a b-line for the valley. That was still a long glide away though and with some exercise and time his digit started working again. There was still plenty of hours in the day and I was keen to try and make a tri angle out of the flight so we kept going. The scenery is out of this world on the east side of the chitral valley. The barren lower slopes turn thinly forested with altitude and then into snow covered peaks. Deep side valleys cut in, some with beautiful meadows grazed by herds of goats, with glaciers at higher altitude. We flew south till were the valley does a big S turn and the ridge drops away. We soared along the summit of the highest mountain of the valley and then did the long glide back to the launch site were we arrived with fifty metres to spare. Awesome!!!!!!!!!!

June 22. Grey landed in Booni yesterday so he is travelling back this morning and we have no news from Mukrim. The flying conditions look like a repeat of yesterday so Dimitry and myself try to be on the launch site an hour earlier. The plan is to get to Tirich Mir before the clouds develop so we can get a closer look at this beast of a mountain. I hope to fly a tri angle with Booni Zoom as a third turn point. The thermals are strong and some what erratic at first which results in a surprise frontal collapse that leaves me a bid shaken. Then we get in the groove and make good time. We stay together till we get to the mountain and then we loose each other. The landscape is so immense, if you take your eye from the other for a few turns it is very hard to connect again. I struggle with my camera to get a few photos and that is enough to loose sight of Dimitry. I push on alone to Booni Zoom and have a very enjoyable scenic flight back to Chitral where I arrive after 6 hours in the air. We are clocking up the hours, Grey has 39 hours of airtime in 10 flights, more then he would do in a year of free flying back home. I think it is going to be a rest day for me tomorrow, unless Grey wants to take me for a tandem. It’s a tough life this Para bumming.