Goa

The medics’ training session was over. We’d graduated this group of medics. They were heading back into Afghanistan to treat their people, working in the villages, in the countryside, not in the cities.

Our current volunteer medical team of Americans was heading back home to the States, with a new team to arrive in mid-January. Although I’d originally signed up for just these past 3 months, I elected to stay another 4 months. I’d be a transition member, and the team leader in January.

‌So meanwhile, the opportunity for an adventure. Basically, I wasn’t a detailed planner. I’d pick a destination, and head on out. That was generally my concept of planning for some adventures. This was one of those times. I sat in the garden of the Nasar Bagh villa, thinking:

• ‌So, I’m in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.
• The mountain K2, second only to Mount Everest in height, is kind of close and within the borders of Pakistan. Maybe I’ll go there.
• Right, that makes perfectly good sense. Dead of winter and you want to travel through Pakistan to the second highest mountain in the world; 8,611 meters, 28,251 feet above sea level.
• You’ve been here three months now and you’ve experienced the roads …
• No traffic moves faster than 15-20 miles per hour because the road conditions are so bad.
• They are crammed with every nature of vehicle: tuk-tuks (a three wheeled, motorized rickshaw, with a covered area for the passengers, found everywhere in Pakistan and India), as well as horse-, ox-, or camel- drawn carts, flocks of sheep or goats, people walking, in either direction, on both sides of the road.
• Chrome plated, colorfully painted, blue, red, green, yellow buses, with tiny windshields already hard to see out of, but then loaded with decals and hanging knick-knacks, side windows similar, almost as many people riding on the top as inside,
• 12 passenger vans with 18 people crammed in.
• And, in addition, you really think the way will be clear, like of SNOW,
• And there will be some sort of lodging open this time of year?
• And that it’ll have heat?
• And, keep in mind, there will be lots of SNOW.
• Hummmm.
• How about the beaches of Goa, India . . . chances are it’ll be warmer.
• What about the stories of an insurgency on the Kashmiri boarder; Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs? You have to go that way to get to India.
• Well, you are supposed to be able to hook up with an armed caravan.
• And you are looking for an adventure.

Yeah, well it really wasn’t a difficult decision; I wasn’t all that fond of being cold.