Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
planned adventure and they willingly helped us get all our bags onto the boat. It
seemed sharing just a small part of our adventure was tip enough. We travelled
through West Germany and then in Berlin we entered East Germany. It was the
first taste of being behind the Iron Curtain. It felt far more like a frontline than the
relatively open society of Poland. All passports were checked and rechecked in the
presence of soldiers with sub-machine guns. Fierce Alsatian dogs straining at their
leads sniffed the undercarriages of the train.
In Warsaw, Zawada came to meet us with members of the Polski Zwiazek Alpin-
izmu, and we were quartered in people's homes for a few days as the rest of the
Polish team assembled. Alex and I stayed with Andrez and Anna and were treated
royally. The Zawada flat was far more luxurious than others I stayed in on my
earlier trip to Poland. Both Andrez and Anna took to Alex immediately and he re-
sponded with great courtesy. The Polish shared with the British middleclass a
sense of social decorum and politeness, which Alex understood.
There was little time for sightseeing. The huge amount of equipment and food
assembled at the PZA storerooms in Warsaw had to be checked, itemised on a
central record sheet and then packed carefully into the yellow hardboard barrels
commonly used on many Polish expeditions of that era. Luckily it doesn't rain
much in Afghanistan since these barrels disintegrate when they get sodden. Apart
from Zawada and Voytek Kurtyka, the three other Polish members of the team
were Jan Wolf, Piotr Jasinski and Marek Kowalczyk. We also had a climbing doc-
tor, Robert Janik.
I had climbed with Piotr and Marek in Wales during the exchange in 1975 and we
all got on well as we settled down to the tasks of the expedition. As the total num-
ber of barrels was now more than a hundred, we began to feel there was far more
stuff than a team of eleven might need. Then we discovered there was also an asso-
ciated trekking party of around ten, and that other climbers would be travelling
with us. Two of these turned out to be Alex Lwow and Krzysztof Wielicki on their
way to make a few illicit ascents but it was years before I realised the extent exped-
itions were used as cover for black-market trading.
The big issue was finance. We did not have enough money to fly us all to Kabul as
the Poles had hoped. The plan now was to cross the Soviet Union by train. We
handed over half of our available dollars to the treasurer of the PZA. I suspect this
was traded on the black market, and that greatly increased the zlotys available for
last-minute acquisitions of food and to purchase our train tickets.
The problem was this: we had no permits to travel across the Soviet Union. The
route was closed to Westerners at the best of times, but now was forbidden for se-
curity reasons. In advance of the invasion of Afghanistan, huge amounts of milit-
