Swat, Pakistan
The Swat valley’s apple orchards are in blossom even as the snow still lies thick on the mountains. It’s been the harshest winter in memory. I came here on the trail of my late friend Carlos Mavroleon, an extraordinary man who had many of his adventures in this part of the world. The ancients thought Swat was paradise. It must still have been lovely 30 years ago, when Carlos — just 17 at the time, on the run from Millfield and following the Magic Bus route East — descended the Malakand Pass to see the valley open out before him.
Today, from the Grand Trunk Road turnoff to the town of Mingora, it’s unremitting concretised bazaars selling everything from false teeth to rocket launchers in choking dust. My driver Mushtaq leant on his musical horn for hours as we dodged auto-rickshaws, flying coaches and garish trucks with galleon-like custom bodies. Only in Upper Swat did this Asian purgatory give way to picturesque scenes of mud villages built into the hillsides, rivulets bubbling between green wheat fields, lilies, yellow mustard and peach blossom.
I stopped in Madyan because Carlos had. ‘My formal education is over,’ the prodigal youth wrote home to his distraught family, leaving no forwarding address until a whole year later. He worked as a cook in a guesthouse for his keep. He learned Pashtu and converted to Islam, taking on the name Karimullah — an identity he would use in future while fighting the Soviets in the Afghan Mujahideen.
Mushtaq and I crashed at the Caravan Guesthouse, run by the Khan brothers, and it was like being teleported back to the 1970s. Two Swiss hippies with long, knotted hair sat smoking roll-ups on the veranda. Inside, the divan was devoid of furniture but strewn with carpets.
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