PAKISTAN

This story first appeared in Surfer's Path magazine in 2001

"....Alexander was in great distress for the whole journey because he was marching through such a dreadful terrain", but for sixty days the armies of Alexander the Great pushed on, across a desert that burns with heat and sucks away at the desires and hopes of both conquering armies and wistful dreamers. Alexander was the ultimate dreamer and the most accomplished conqueror and his final challenge lay in these shifting sands. It was a battle against Mother Nature herself and never did he come closer to fear and disaster than in the desert of the fish eaters. "

Our own footprints were as temporary a scar on the surface of the sands as Alexander's, our passing now as hazily forgotten a memory as his. This desert cares not who you are or what you want. A demi-God with a blessed army can be left feeling as insignificant and helpless against this power as any other man, both are fearful in the knowledge that the sand, sky and rock of this land can make life evaporate in an instant. There were others before Alexander, mythical characters spoken of only in ancient texts, Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian empire and Semiramis, the Queen of Assyria and architect of Babylon and its hanging gardens, a woman, or maybe even a god, of such beauty that anyone who gazed upon her unveiled face would be forever her slave. Their conquests are the stuff of legends and their armies undefeated but in the desert of the fish eaters all paid their heaviest prices. And after them came no one, for more than two thousand years silence lay over this land.

It was Alexander who inspired our own journey, an aerial photograph of the coast in a book about the Macedonian King revealed an image that set my heart racing. Through apricot coloured dunes wound a long dead river bed that snaked down to the Arabian Sea, where thick right handers could be seen breaking into a deep water channel. It was a picture that would stay etched into my mind for months and slowly, almost subconsciously, an idea was born around it until one morning I woke up and realised that I had to go and surf in this desert of myth and mystery.

The desert of the fish eaters was the name given to the Makran desert by Alexander and his mapmakers. It covers 62,000 sq. km of southern Baluchistan and stretches over a large part of Pakistan and on into Iran, to the north is Afghanistan, to the southwest Arabia and to the east India. It has always acted as something of a barrier between the colours of Hindu India and the classical world of the Mediterranean and today it's almost as remote and unknown as when Alexander trudged over its desolate wastes at the end of his history changing expedition. The images of this region we see today are ones of terror and repression, first their was blood shed over the partition of India, which in turn gave birth to a simmering discontent between Pakistan and its huge neighbour over Kashmir. Then the Mullahs of Iran showed America that they couldn't always have their own way and now, once again, we are being left to pity the blood soaked nation of Afghanistan whose Tailban fighters were born from the tribes of Baluchistan and then finally there is Pakistan itself, which has for much of its short life, teetered on the brink, ready at any moment to spiral into violence and depravity.

The logistics of organising a surf trip to the Makran turned out to be immense, as I started to research the trip I realised that I wasn't going to be able to just grab my board and some wax and hop on the next flight to desert perfection. This was going to be a major expedition involving numerous people in several different countries, a huge amount of expense and some meticulous planning and that was before we even got close to Pakistan. Firstly a suitable crew of guys needed to be rounded up, Guethary charger Antony Colas was there from the very beginning and he was followed shortly afterwards by Ben Clift, a bodyboarder from the depths of west Cornwall and finally came another Cornish local Dan Haylock. Over the course of the next few months we received the help and advice of numerous different people and organisations all of whom placed their faith and support behind us, but despite this encouragement the trip wallowed and failed to advance beyond the drawing board. The problem was with obtaining our visas and the necessary permits, the Pakistani embassy just weren't interested, near enough laughing in our faces when we first went to them with the idea of traveling and surfing through the Makran desert. And on the face of it you could understand their reasoning, the Makran is one of the worlds most fearful environments, no roads wind across the searing salt plains and there are no air-con hotels at the end of a long day. The whole region is utterly shut off to casual foreign visitors and even if it weren't few would want to come. Day in, day out the thermometers reveal coastal temperatures of 45 degrees, head inland a short way and you're up to 50 degrees. The sun is of an intensity I have never before experienced, it sears through everything and leaves you feeling as if the bones inside you are being melted away. And even in this age of the Internet when instant communication is possible with men circling the planet in space suits the Makran has retained its centuries old reputation as a formidable and utterly impenetrable barrier between the Pakistani heartland and the rich waters of the Arabian Sea, and it might just be that more foreigners have looked down on it from inside the safety of a space ship than have stood in its savage heart. Officially these were the reasons why we couldn't be allowed to visit, but the real reason may have been more sinister, rumours speak of nuclear bombs being tested deep in the Makran's hidden recesses and certainly no rumour were the stories of smugglers traveling down from Afghanistan in huge camel caravans to remote beaches were their priceless cargos of heroin and weapons are loaded up onto boats and filtered out to our more developed world. We should have given up at this point and channeled our energies into somewhere else, but we couldn't let go of it now, like Alexander before us, we found the challenge too much to resist.

It wasn't until the Pakistani tourist board put us in touch with a man they thought might be able to help us that our luck changed. Haroon Pirzada turned out to be as enthusiastic about the venture as us, but more importantly he had friends and contacts throughout the Pakistani administration. "Leave it to me, I'll sort it out", were his highly optimistic words, and so in anticipation of the imminent arrival of our papers we booked our flights and counted down the days, but as the weeks passed the Pakistani immigration service seemed to become more and more suspicious of our motives; surely we couldn't really want to go to the Makran at the hottest time of year just to go surfing? The day of departure came and went and still their was no news on the permits, it begun to look as if Haroon had bitten off more than he could chew. Another departure date was set and with crossed fingers we waited on news from the embassy. As the eleventh hour for our next deadline approached the telephone rang, "We have received authorisation from Islamabad, allowing you to travel to the Makran". The trip was on.

After a night in Karachi we boarded a small Fokker plane and flew westward to another world. From the air thick lines of swell were visible wrapping around headlands and into undiscovered bays and with them came a huge sense of relief, after months of planning and dreaming we now knew it was going to pay off, there were waves. Gwadar, the main town in the Makran, was our base for the first days. From here we drove westward to within touching distance of the Iranian border, across a landscape where silence was the only feature. Somewhere along the way we found a point where right handers peeled in clean unison into a softly shelving bay, the waves were small and some we rode almost to the sand and on others we fell straight away, but that didn't matter as out here there was no-one around to impress.

On another day we felt like heroes. From the summit of a high cliff we could see overhead waves rolling across sandbars or maybe a reef half a kilometre out into the ocean. At a nearby village we tried to rent a fishing boat to drive us out to the take off zone, but it proved to treacherous and the boat almost overturned. Instead, and to the astonishment of the village, we paddled out to the waves. In the heavy seas of this time of the year most fisherman stay firmly on land, rightfully scared of their normally placid oceans change of mood. Convinced we were going to be killed the entire community gathered on the cliffs to watch us surf, it was the first time they had ever seen surfers and when we returned to shore unharmed we found ourselves surrounded and mobbed, a hundred excited voices all shouting questions to us. In the end the crush grew so intense that the armed guards the government insisted we travel with had to intervene and push the crowds back.

It was a sizable convoy that left Gwadar for Pasni, our next destination and a hundred and seventy kilometres to the east. Aside from ourselves there was also Haroon and Shaukat, who worked side-by-side holding the whole thing together, a cook, the three drivers of our jeeps and the two gunmen who were to provide us with protection from possible smugglers. We checked several potential spots on the way, heavy, close-out beach breaks or points that weren't quite doing it, none left any kind of impression. Instead all I can remember is the monumental beauty of the desert and its overwhelming sense of peace. It was a barren and shattered landscape with no signs of human interference, nothing surrounded us but rust red waves of dunes and empty mountains that stared mockingly down, as if trying to tempt us into challenging them. In this vast amphitheatre of nature it is easy to fall under the deserts timeless spell, there is nothing around to clutter or distract the mind and you find yourself thinking with a clarity that is not possible in the hectic lives we lead at home. And despite the heat, dust and discomfort of the journey I was sad to arrive in Pasni and be surrounded by noise and confusion again.

As it was I should have been happy, Pasni turned out to be something of a highlight. We camped in dunes out of town on the edge of a beach, but most afternoons we would go into the small bazaar where people would welcome us and call us over to talk, it was all so unlike the anti-west militarism we're brought up to believe in. The waves where we were camping were once again messy and frustrating beach breaks, it was starting to seem as if all we'd find were perfectly tiny points or onshore beach breaks and a depression started to close over the camp. Each day we'd get up at dawn and jolt our way to a beach that was usually many hours away, occasionally stopping to dig ourselves out of a sand drift or pausing to find our whereabouts on a map and at the end of it all we'd find just a mushy close out. It wasn't just us surfers having our energy and enthusiasm drained away, the rest of the team were suffering from the heat and hardships as well, one of the drivers seemed always on the brink of revolution and another one, when Dan asked him what he thought of the Makran said "Very beautiful", "Will you come again?" "No, never!" And I know that Haroon and Shoukat, when not worrying about where we'd find our world class wave, thought constantly of their families, left behind in the cool hills of northern Pakistan. On some days the heat reached such a pitch that it was almost impossible for us to find the strength to lift our heads from the ground where we slept. We did find a beach break nearby though that probably saved our sanity, it wasn't what you traveled to the ends of the earth for, but at the close of another long day of suffering in the jeeps it could at least be relied on to ease some of the tension. And then, just as we came to the ends of our tethers, came one of those strange twists of fate that life so often throws at us. Six hours offshore was an uninhabited island called Aristola, there can be few places on earth more remote. The district commissioner of the Pasni region found us a boat and a captain who said he'd take us there, but as the captain said "It won't be easy, the seas are rough and there are many sharks" He then finished this confidence inspiring lecture with the words "I'm going to take you somewhere where you'll shit yourselves". The next morning dawned with a hot wind that blew with angry passion over the desert and made the boats in the harbour seem frail indeed. Even our captain stared ominously out to sea and so we, (some of us more enthusiastically than others), took this as our opportunity to abandon the idea and head further along the coast, continuing our hunt from the safety of the jeeps. We searched in vain for much of the day, whilst the captain, who'd decided to accompany us, sat in silence. After six of the toughest hours we'd yet experienced we stopped to rest on a plateau so bleak it may not even have belonged to this world and that was when an unforgettable thing happened. Clearing his throat the captain called us over, and in a subdued voice told us that nearby was a place "with beautiful waves", and then he bent down and using his fingers drew a map in the sand.

Antony later christened the wave "Mirages"; few surf spots can have such an appropriate name. When I first saw it I thought that I'd come to the end of my road, right there in front of me was what I'd spent the last years looking for. A perfect right, so hollow, that even from the kilometre away where we stood, I could see deep into the almond shaped barrels. The sense of relief that fell over our group was tangible, people were smiling and laughing again, our discomfort forgotten. This was a desert mirage created just for us. This though is not how it came to be known as Mirages, like all creations of the mind the reality could never live up to expectations and what had appeared from a distance to be 4ft freight train tubes turned out to be no more than 2ft, though it was still perfect and on another day?...well who knows.

We surfed here for two days but on the second day we weren't to be alone. Rounding the cliffs that hid the spot from prying eyes we stumbled upon two armed men, who told us that they were coastguards and that we had just driven straight into the heat of a battle. All around us, in the hills and on the cliffs, smugglers and gunmen were hiding out, an estimated two hundred of them, waiting to keep a rendezvous with the small boats we could now see bobbing about just offshore. It had been pure chance that the coastguards had found them and now all that stood between the smugglers and another successful mission were these ten brave men, one of whom had been shot shortly before. The battle had raged through the night and now in the heat of the day a stalemate had evolved as both sides rested and re-evaluated their situation. It was a break we were able to take full advantage of by slipping inside some smooth little tubes and in the process gaining memories that will never be lost. Memories of a session that bordered on the surreal, a meeting of lifestyles, cultures and values thrown together in an uncaring desert by the addictions of heroin and surfing.

From Pasni our journey took us east towards Karachi, through sandstorms and inspiring beauty. And though the scenery became ever more heart stopping, the swell began to drop and the coast became more exposed to the wind, making decent waves rarer. There were some headlands and coves that on our maps looked promising but on the ground proved impossible to reach, even with our 4WD jeeps. Sometimes we found ourselves with naval or coastguard escorts who led us through the haze to places even they had never seen, sometimes we surfed, mostly we just watched. And then six days after leaving Pasni we hit the smooth tarmac of the road that led into Karachi, we had wanted to stop short of the city on an area of coast that looked hopeful for left points, but suspicious officials and military bases prevented us from exploring. Instead we were pushed into the centre of one of Asia's craziest cities, a place of unbelievable congestion and pollution, of army bunkers on major junctions, of bomb blasts and political strife and of poverty and extravagant wealth. Maybe it was the chance to change our clothes and wash away the grime of the desert, maybe it was the joy of a soft bed and ample food, but despite all Karachi's negative points I actually found the city an enjoyable place to hang out for a few days. And we scored waves, on our final day the city beaches served up a tasty overhead shore break and then a little further down the coast a river mouth left where the local kids played in the white water on bits of wood torn off old boats. They had never seen surfers or surfing before, but in their own way they'd discovered the simple pleasures of riding a wave. And in this most pure of surf communities we left a board and hoped that we were doing our best to keep the fire burning.

And at the end of our journey it didn't really matter what waves we had found, my memories are made up of the desert itself and it will only be a matter of time before I'll long to break free of the walls that now surround me and walk through hot sand, past nomads with camels and onwards to the desert mountain. And listen, if for just an instant, to the silence that rolls like thunder across Alexander's land.

This trip could never have happened without the generous help of many different people and organisations. Huge thanks must go to those who supplied equipment and finances, C-Skins wetsuits, (www.c-skins.com ) , Saltrock surfwear, (www.saltrock.com), Rhino bags, Rheopaipo bodyboards and Kustom footwear (all on 00 44 1566 784444), Bic boards (www.bicsport.com ) and Pakistani International Airlines (www.piac.com.pk ). But the biggest thanks has to go to Haroon, Shaukat and the rest of the Trans-Pakistan team (www.transpakistan.com.pk) without whom the desert would remain unsurfed.