I wanted to be down at the PIA office by nine o’clock, so I was at breakfast by eight, and walking down the road toward the center of town by eight thirty. It was already hot, and the sweat was pouring off of me in no time.

When I arrived at the office a little early, instead of just hanging around, I decided to walk a little further into town, toward an area that my guidebook said was a good place to buy local handicrafts. I poked my head into a few shops, and saw enough to make me want to return to this area once my dealings with PIA were completed.

At precisely nine I was back at the ticket office, and there was already a crowd of locals gathered at the door. They let us in, and after waiting for a while to for it to be my turn, and then to get the supremely disinterested PIA agents to recognize me, I asked whether there was any possibility of flying out that day or the next. No, they told me, after checking their big black book, Sunday was the earliest, and that was very iffy.

Because Gilgit is so high in the mountains, and because the runway is so short, if the air temperature is high, the prop planes PIA flies out of there sometimes cannot generate enough lift to take off with a full load. And when that happens, people and cargo get bumped until the plane is light enough. And if the weather is bad, the flights get canceled altogether.

So Sunday was iffy, and my flight from Lahore was scheduled for Tuesday. That meant that if I couldn’t go on Sunday, I’d have to take an overnight bus that night, which would get me into Islamabad on Monday, and then I’d still have to get to Lahore somehow by the following evening for my flight to Bangkok. With the roads still in bad condition, the margin for error was pretty slim. So I aborted the flight idea, and went next door to the bus company to get a ticket out on that evening’s 4 p.m. bus.

This bus company ran air-conditioned, 20-seat Toyota Coasters down to Islamabad, and I figured that would be better than one of the bigger NATCO buses, so I paid the 330 rupees and signed on for that evening’s bus. It wasn’t the ideal plan, as far as I was concerned, but I’d be in Lahore in plenty of time to make my flight, and that was the most important thing at this point.

With my plans all settled, I strolled back through the heat to the handicraft shops and walked into a few of them and bought some Hunza handicrafts for the folks back home until my shoulder bag was pretty much crammed full.

One of the shop-owners struck up a conversation with me and invited me to have some green tea with him while I perused his stuff. He told me that he had lived the “hippie life” as he put it, for ten years in Ibiza, Spain, while he supported himself by making jewelry. Now he was back home with a wife and seven children, running a small handicrafts/antique store, and said he was very happy. “I am the most lucky man in the world!” he claimed. “I have the most beautiful wife, seven children, and people from all over the world come into my shop and talk with me and drink tea and buy my things. And I live in the beautiful mountains, and look at me”, he laughed, pointing to his big belly, “I eat very, very well, too.”

He told me that he wanted to have only two children, but the first two had been boys. “And my wife kept dressing the second one up like a girl, you know, so I am thinking that we must try to have a girl. And, God be praised; the third child was a girl! The others, you know, were all mistakes!” He laughed again. “But I am very, very happy!”

I bought an embroidered shawl from him, and thanked him for the tea. “Oh, it is my pleasure, sir” he said. “You must come again, and I will tell you about my hippie life in Spain. Oh, the girls there, sir, they made me very, very happy!” He was one happy guy.

So I walked back to the hotel with my loot, and sat out in the garden sipping cold cokes and writing in my journal. For lunch I asked the waiter to select a good traditional Pakistani item off the menu for me, and he brought me a spicy chicken dish with tomatoes, peppers and onions, which I wolfed down with chappatti bread and several big helpings of rice. I tucked the remaining chappattis into a napkin, figuring they’d be good to have along for the road. Then I went back to the room and packed.

At three, I got the hotel reception to arrange a taxi for me, and by three thirty I was waiting by the mini-bus. It seemed a little older than the one I’d seen there the day before, but it looked like it had a good chance of making it down the road.

The “crew” of the bus company began loading the roof rack at about a quarter to four, and I held up my bag for them, and watched to make sure it was secured. Though it was on top of a huge pile of bags and cargo, they had lashed it down with three ropes, so I figured that it stood a pretty good chance of making it down to Islamabad without being ejected somewhere along the way. Then I boarded the bus and sat down in my reserved seat number 9 on the left side, where the row of single seats was.

The sun shone in on that side, and the inside of the bus was like an oven. A fat Japanese guy was also inside already, and was sweating profusely. We didn’t seem to be going anywhere very soon, so I decided to go back outside where the temperature was a little cooler, but no sooner had I exited the bus than the driver climbed in and started the engine. Ah good, I thought, they’ll turn on the air-conditioning now.

The other passengers climbed in, mostly Pakistani, but a group of four Germans who I had seen earlier at the hotel sat down in the back, and the fat Japanese guy was still there, sweating like a fountain. “Hey!” he yelled, “Prease turn on air condition!” The driver and his crew up front turned at looked at him blankly. “Air condition! AC!” the Japanese guy pleaded. “No AC!” The driver yelled back over the engine noise.

Oh boy, I thought, no air-conditioning. It was bound to get a little ripe in there before darkness fell, and the temperature cooled down a bit. Ah well, it would be OK if we just kept the windows open until then. But we’d need to get going to get some ventilation in there. And for some reason, we were just sitting there with the engine idling, broiling in the little bus like a bunch of chickens in a Tandoori oven.

At last the reason for our delay became clear, as a woman with four children climbed in. The youngest, the only girl, looked to be about two, and the oldest boy, about eight or nine. They took their seats across and ahead of me, and then a couple more guys piled in and folded down the jump seats in the aisle of the bus. We were crammed in there like sardines. But at last we were moving.

The driver and his six or so buddies began rummaging through a pile of cassettes as we drove out of town, and soon found the one they liked and shoved it into the cassette player. Their selection was some Pakistani pop music, and they cranked up the volume all the way, to the point where the sound coming out of the speaker was beyond the pain threshold. The Japanese guy yelled, “Hey!” and indicated to them that they should turn it down, but they just looked at him and ignored the request, rolling their eyes and grinning. To make matters worse, the front speaker in the bus evidently wasn’t working, and in order for them to hear the music over the engine noise at what they considered the proper level, they had cranked it up full. And we towards the rear of the bus, and under the lone working speaker, were having our eardrums ripped to shreds.

Now, I try to have some appreciation for the many forms of entertainment that I encounter as I travel, and sometimes it’s more of a challenge than others. But I defy anyone to explain to me the appeal of Pakistani or Indian pop music. If I tried to concoct the most loathsome and irritating sound I could imagine, I would fail to attain the level of absolute sanity-destroying, fingernails-on-the-chalkboard screeching, aural-nerve annihilating discordance that is Pakistani pop music. It is a lethal combination of unbearable noise; designed to induce insanity, then catatonia, and then death in any Westerner unfortunate to stumble into a room filled with it. And at the level I was being exposed to it, death couldn’t come soon enough.

To those unfamiliar with the genre, allow me to explain its salient aspects, so that you may avoid the fate I had in store for me on this night. The instrumentation usually is consists of a synthesizer playing sweeping arpeggios which sound somewhat like a violin section, miked and played through an old AM transistor radio. To this you add the accompaniment of some instrument that sounds somewhat like an oboe being tooted by a tone-deaf ten-year-old, and finally a drum section, usually the standard Indian tabla, but Western drum kits are not uncommon.

Usually, a woman and a man supply the vocals. The woman, I’ll call her Minnie-ji, sings (if it can be called that) in an ear-splitting high pitch, which sets dogs howling across the countryside. There are evidently no altos allowed to sing here, only sopranos whose nasal cavities have been artificially enhanced to get the most twang possible.

The man, let’s call him Pathan Boone, is a jolly baritone, whose voice is not all that unpleasant, but because each song contains no more than four lines, repeated until the nerve cells in your brain have become cauterized with their memory, our man Pathan gets old very fast, too.

The lyrics, I’m told, always involve very passionate, but very chaste love, and are so saccharine that they make Neil Sedaka seem philosophic. Add all these ingredients together, and play them over and over at ear-splitting volume, and you have the recipe for instant brain meltdown. My brain was puddling on the bus floor before we had even left the outskirts of Gilgit, and the sun hadn’t even begun to approach the peaks all around us. I knew then, that it was going to be a very, very long ride.

At the edge of town we stopped at a checkpoint. The driver and his entourage turned to me and the other foreigners and pointed at the checkpoint, yelling: “Angren, angren!” the Urdu bastardized word for English, which is used for all us foreigners, no matter our country of origin. I gathered that we needed to get out and show our passports or something, so we climbed out and went over to the little hut to do our official duty.

The policeman there politely greeted us and showed us his big black book, where we registered our name, passport and visa numbers, our nationality, the date we entered Pakistan, the date we planned to leave, where we were coming from, our next destination, at what hotel we planned to stay next, and the recipe for toll house cookies. No, I’m just kidding about the visa numbers.

Then it was back on board, where Minnie-ji was peeling the paint off the insides of the bus.

Our driver seemed intent on breaking some sort of Gilgit to Islamabad land speed record, and we practically flew down the road, horn blaring, passing slower vehicles at every blind corner. Fueled by Pathan Boone and Minnie-ji’s urgent eros, we hurtled past boulders and washouts without our man behind the wheel ever touching the brakes. This wasn’t just an E-ticket ride; this was an H or K ticket.

The little girl across the aisle from me was wailing in her mother’s arms, but I couldn’t hear her from five feet away because of the “entertainment.” I wondered how long it was going to be before one of these kids got carsick, and discreetly picked up my shoulder bag from the floor and placed it in my lap.

The sun was just touching the peaks above us as we stopped for another “angren” checkpoint. I could have scribbled anything into their book, since the policemen on duty seemed to know only two English phrases: “Allo” and “Ow are you?” But I dutifully and correctly filled in all the blanks and climbed back aboard the bus.

Another ten minutes down the road we stopped for a potty break, with the men going off to one side of the road, and the women disappearing behind some boulders on the other. I stayed on the bus, enjoying the silence and the ringing in my ears. It occurred to me that I might be able to drown out Minnie-ji and her tandoori tablas by putting on my headset and playing my walkman at full blast, so I fished it out of my bag during our stop and turned it up to ten. It hurt a little to listen to it at that level, but at least the music was more to my taste.

But when we started up again, and the Pakistani pop came blaring back at us, it was no contest. Neil Young vanished behind a wall of noise. That plan was obviously futile. I thought that my earplugs might offer some relief, and I dug them out of my bag and screwed them into my ears. But these were only industrial-strength earplugs, designed to protect your ears from things like jet engines and diesel generators. Minnie-ji just giggled her insanely high giggle and screeched right through them. It was hopeless.

I considered using the madman strategy and stabbing at the speaker with my knife, but thought better of it when I remembered that we were in the middle of nowhere in northern Pakistan, and that the driver just might get pissed at me and dump me on the side of the road, knife or no. There would be no relief.

As darkness fell, we stopped at a roadside inn for dinner. I couldn’t see enough in the dimming twilight to check out the hygiene of the place, so I opted to sit outside and munch on the chappatti I had saved from lunch, and the little bit of chocolate I still had left over from the stash Vilma had presented me with before I left Oregon. As I enjoyed the last few chunks of Toblerone, I tried to think about how soon I’d be back home with her. But first I’d have to get off of this bus. The night of horrors had just begun.

After a half-hour at the inn, we all piled back on the rolling torture chamber, and Pathan and Minnie-ji howled their undying love for each other for the hundredth time. I believed them; I wanted them to stop. Please!

The temperature, which I had expected to decrease with nightfall, actually began to rise as we drove down toward the Indus valley. My little thermometer read 92 degrees. I tried to open my window wider, but the windows on this bus were double sliding windows, and after a certain point, opening my window wider meant decreasing the opening for the passenger behind me. He and I kept up a little running battle for the rest of the night, with him opening his side a little more when I got out at each checkpoint, and me sneaking my side back wider when I thought he wasn’t watching.

We stopped at yet another checkpoint, and the policeman asked me, “Ow are you?” “I’m tired!” I snarled nicely at him, but I don’t think my tone of voice gave me away. I scribbled the facts, just the facts, unintelligibly into the book and got back glumly into my seat.

The children across the aisle had switched seats, and the smallest boy was now trying to get comfortable in the jump seat across from me. He attempted several different positions, but finally settled on one where he was lying across the seat with his legs resting on the door railing directly in front of me, where he could kick me every time we went over a bump. Which was about every five seconds. I glared at him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

I glanced at my watch; eight o’clock. Only eleven more hours of this. Would I survive? I had serious doubts.

With the night outside, I no longer had the scenery to distract me, and the crashing cacophony from the noise generator up front was now the only focus. Even the little boy’s annoying kicks were barely registering anymore. The hours wore on. We tore down the mountains in the darkness, our ears bleeding, with the wild-eyed look of prisoners on their way to certain and painful death.

Then, just after midnight, the little girl threw up.

Her mother didn’t seem to have been prepared for this situation, and used the girl’s dress to clean off her face. She gave her some water to drink and let her lie back down on her lap, while the vomit began running all over the floor of the bus. Fortunately, little girls make for fairly small vomit containers, and it never did quite reach over to my side, but the smell certainly did, and that was enough.

I opened my window as wide as I dared and stuck my nose against the opening, but the wildly careening bus smacked me in the face a couple of times, and I was forced to retreat back into the rolling vomitorium. The little boy had switched positions again in an effort to evade the smell, and now was leaning his head against the backrest of my chair. Soon he was one of the lucky ones who managed to fall asleep (how children manage to sleep while the world explodes around them is a skill I wish I could recover), and his head kept falling off the backrest and onto my arm. I think I preferred the kicking.

Sometime early in the morning the bus slowed, and I could see another bus stopped on the other side of road. We were in the middle of nowhere, and the occupants of the other bus were squatting alongside the road in the pitch black night, squinting at the glare coming from our headlights. Our driver stopped and stepped outside to check on the situation with the other bus’s driver. Among the stranded passengers I saw a lone Japanese traveler, sitting back on his haunches, and staring forlornly at us. How long he had been there, I could only guess. But I could see that his fate was worse than mine. Even if we could assist them to get going again, he’d have to get back on that unbearable bus after this miserable delay. But evidently our driver either couldn’t or wouldn’t help them, as he got back on and we drove away.

On and on we drove, past tiny villages where the inns and bazaars were still open well into the morning. Our driver honked his horn as we drove through, just to make sure that anyone within earshot who might have been asleep wouldn’t stay that way. In several of the towns, I caught glimpses of gun shops in the bazaars, where automatic weapons and what looked like machine guns on tripods were for sale. The NRA would have loved it, and I thought I might have found good use for a machine gun right about then.

As we descended, I could feel the humidity increase, and thought I could see flashes of lightning in the distance. I was hoping it wasn’t gunfire, anyway. And soon I could see a few droplets appear on the windshield. My pack, which was not waterproof, was sitting on top of the pile of luggage on the roof, and I began to worry about what its contents would be like if we encountered serious rainfall.

My mind, or what was left of it anyway, was teetering on the brink of some bottomless, dark chasm. It was screaming at me, “What the hell are you doing here, you fucking idiot?! You could be home in bed right now! But no, you had to go tripping off to fucking Pakistan, and look at you now! Are you happy? Hmmmm? Is this your idea of a great time? Huh? Shit for brains?”

I had no answer. Somewhere, something had gone terribly wrong. Surely there must have been a juncture where I could have avoided all this, but I couldn’t begin to think where it might have been, other than never to get on that Aeroflot plane in San Francisco. I was really beginning to lose it.

The rain began in earnest at dawn. I could tell that my bag was going to get soaked. Ah hell, I thought, why not? What more could go wrong? Might as well complete the disaster and have a bus breakdown, too. No, don’t tempt the gods, David. Shut your mouth!

We pulled into a larger town, and I could tell by the signs on the stores that we had reached Abbottabad, about 120 miles from Islamabad. We pulled over in the center of town, and one of the passengers got out, along with some of the driver’s gang, and they began pulling stuff off of the roof. My seat was by the door, so I hopped out to, figuring I might get them to get my bag down too, while it was only half-soaked.

It was coming down steadily by then, and I got pretty wet while they wrestled with their ropes, but I managed to get them to lower my bag, along with the man’s huge bundle, which he shoved through the door into the bus. Apparently his cargo wasn’t waterproof either.

My bag was pretty wet, but I didn’t think that the water had managed to seep in too deeply. I shoved it under one of the jump seats, and we took off again, just as the heavens really opened up.

I’ve only seen rain like this once before in my life, in the Yucatan. No, this was worse. It was like a firehose had been turned on the bus, and the rain and wind that came with it whipped the trees lining the road like a wet dog shaking itself. We were forced to close all the windows because the water blew through even the slightest opening. The heat, humidity, vomit and cigarette smoke combined to marinate my brains. Well, at least I managed to get my bag inside before this happened, I thought to myself. I was desperate for some sliver of silver lining.

We drove on through the downpour, and I could see the road was flooded in areas, as we kicked up huge plumes of water. We had been scheduled to arrive at seven in the morning, but we were forced to a crawl in this rain, and were still over fifty miles from Islamabad when that hour arrived. We’d been driving for almost fifteen hours, and I wasn’t sure if we’d ever get there.

At length we entered the outskirts of the city, and miraculously, the sky began to clear. Our driver made a left turn off the highway, and we wove our way into the center of Islamabad, past hundreds of cars, tuk-tuks, and horse carts. At a large roundabout, where six streets converged, he pulled over next to several other buses, and had barely shut off the engine before I grabbed my bags and leapt off the bus onto the crowded street. Sixteen hours of pure hell was finally over. I couldn’t get off of that thing soon enough.

Nor could I get out of Islamabad fast enough. All I wanted was to get to Lahore, check into a nice hotel and linger in a hot shower. Any notion of taking another bus ride was unthinkable now. I wanted to fly, no matter the cost. I had learned that PIA flew to Lahore several times a day, and if I got to the airport early enough, I just might get onto one of those flights. It was eight thirty, but I figured the sooner I get there, the better.

Several taxis were parked nearby, and I bulled my way through the crowds of people to the driver side of one of them. The driver looked at me expectantly. “How much to the airport?” I asked him. “The airport, sir?” “Yes, the airport!” “The airport, sir, that would be 100 rupees, sir.” “Let’s go,” I said, and threw my bags in the back.