Pakistan - Page 6

A Gilgit vs Chitral match at Shandur. This tournament is played "free style" where there are very few rules, the game can be very rough. Sometimes in a scramble for the ball one of the horses ends up jumping over the barrier seen here and into the crowd. People have to rush out of the way.

There was a Pakistani Army marching and Bagpipe band that would come out on the field at intermission. A remnant of the old British colonial days I guess.

People usually mob the field after a match, the police and guards would try to stop it but weren't very effective. They were equiped only with wooden batons, and once large numbers of people started to go onto the field they seemed hopelessly overwhelmed, sometimes taking random, frustrated swats at people.

The mountain peaks towering above the field. We woke up one morning to find fresh snow on these mountains, all the way down to about a hundred meters above where we were camping.

The gang! Back row: Jacky (France), Oskar (Slovenia), Arato (Japan), Rin (Japan), Kong (Hong Kong) and one Pakistani. Front row: another Pakistani, Hiro (Japan), Me (Canada), and three more Pakistanis. All of these Pakistanis are guys who we got jeep transport up to the pass with, unfortunately I forget their names. Aside from us there were about 10 or 15 other foreigners up there that year.

A lot of goods, tents, blankets, rice, goats, etc. were hauled up to the Shandur Pass for the event. The roads leading down to Chitral (in one direction) and Gilgit (in the other) were so rough and slow going that it was just as quick to go by tractor as by jeep.

After the last Polo Match, we arranged transport in this jeep with a group of Kohistanis who were all travelling together. They were fantastic guys, and our two day ride down to Gilgit was very enjoyable. We bounced around in this jeep on some of the narrowest, rockiest roads (sometimes they were just a barely recognizable path that the only the largest of all the boulders had been cleared from) I've ever been on, often with a good drop down to some river or stream. We had to get out often to cross streams, or get the jeep through a sticky, muddy, or particularly dangerous section, to me it was a real adventure. One night the Kohistanis bought and slaughtered a goat for us all to have for dinner. The next day we made a stop in a tiny little outpost with a few houses and a shop around lunchtime. They asked us foreigners if any of us had a knife, and when Jacky volunteered his, it was promptly stabbed into the necks of two Chickens. Twenty minutes later lunch was served... chicken and rice, very good by the way.