10.04.2006

where "it's" at

Day 38

I repeat, internet access is very slow, but I'll try to keep posting.

Yesterday I went out on my first fieldtrip. The organization I'm with operates a fleet of 2-door Toyota Land Cruisers. Their sturdy, efficient vehicles that can go almost anywhere. Another engineer joined me and the driver shot off down the Karakorum Highway, south, toward Islamabad.

The last time I travelled south on the KKH was in late July, 1998, it could even have been August, I forget. It was early in the morning and still dark. I don't know if we had stopped for breakfast. I was sitting in the back of a Toyota coaster with a number of people who will likely read this post. We'd finished a post-graduation excursion into Hunza. It had been a magical, unreal time. Time stood still, as we wanted it to and we basked in the moon-glow of denial. It was great. One day we hiked up a glacier, imagining we could cross a 5000m pass and then return to our guesthouse, but that didn't turn out to be possible. Still, it was a most exhilarating day capped by stunning views of the origin of a big glacier and the ice-covered peaks surrounding it. That night we camped beside the glacier in an open and roughly level space. Three of us lay outside in our sleeping backs gawking at the millions of stars visible through the thin, clean air.

And then we had to leave. At one point we rounded a bend in that grey dawn and there was Nanga Parbat shining in the morning sun. One of the imagines stamped in my mind. I was listening to U2's song, "Where the Streets Have No Name" and so when I play that song, I can relive that moment, although many details have faded.

So that's one of the things I was thinking about as we raced south for a ways and then turned East, off of the KKH and onto the Skardu road. I'd driven by that intersection many times, but never turned there. There's a bridge to start out with, a single-lane, steel, prefabbed military suspension bridge. Our driver butted ahaed of the waiting transport lorries (they'd take forever to cross the bridge anyway) and raced on, into the northern Indus valley. The valley is immediately different than the Hunza valley or the lower Indus valley. It's even more desolate, strewn with blackened bolders at first and then narrow, with towering ridges on both sides of the river. The ridge-lines are jagged. Between them higher peaks are visible. There was new snow on some of them. Some were shrouded in clouds. The Indus boiled at their feet. I wished I knew more about whitewater so I could gauge the difficulty of the rapids. Some looked ruthless.

Early in the afternoon we reached our desitination, a small village with a brand new mini-hydel installation (300kW). Mini/micro hydropower is a remarkable form of power. It's about as low impact and sustainable as you can get. In this case, a stream empties into the Indus through the village, dropping it's last 50 feet in a stunning water fall emitting from a high, narrow, smooth gorge; tapping into the streamto create power and the returning the water to the stream is straight-forward. The penstock (pipe that delivers water to the turbine) snaked up and out of sight, above the water fall to the point where water from the stream was collected in a large, open tank called the forebay (the report says the penstock is 1000ft long). The other engineer and I had a look at the turbine and generator, both humming like mad. Then we took a walk up above the village to the forebay, roughly 400 vertical feet above the powerhouse. And there we stood, on the edge of a small ridge overlooking the power channel, discussing the merits of small scale hydropower and the benefits it had brought to the village.

Once down, a local farmer offered us fresh pomegranetes off of his tree. They were sweet and perfect. The sun glistened off the rock face across the river and to our right (back along the road) a towering snow-bound peak was visible bewteen jagged spires. That's how engineering should be done, I say.

Unfortunately I didn't have fresh batteries in my camera, but tomorrow I'm off again, up deep into the Hunza valley to visit two more micro-hydro projects so there will be pictures.

This morning there was a live mouse on my kitchen counter which somewhat reduced my appetite for breakfast.

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