CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER
Life on the wild side on tour in Pakistan
I should add to the Derek Pringle Beyond the Boundary photo essay by saying I went to a similar place to him a few years later. Out in the Pakistani wilderness near the Khyber Pass are the tribal areas. You need a special permit to go there and a special army escort. It’s basically beyond Pakistani law. On the England A tour I was on, only three people accepted the invitation – wicketkeeper Keith Piper, coach John Emburey and me.
You drive for hour or so beyond Peshawar and you pass through a checkpoint. A few minutes later you enter a one-horse looking town surrounded by arid mountains. This is Darra Adam Khei, a classic, one-street village of two-storey wood and adobe buildings. The main street is a combination of mule-drawn carts, wandering camels, clanking buses and men polishing metal objects which turn out to be bullets. They stack them outside the shop in little pyramids as if they were apples or oranges. The place resonates to the sound of gunfire, and reeks of burning nitrates, but thankfully no one actually gets shot.
Darra is a sort of Dodge City of the East. Every shop sells guns – replica AK47s, Colt 45s, pistols, rifles, pen guns, even guns concealed inside a walking stick. James Bond’s special agent Q would love it. You walk into any shop, point to something you fancy in the cabinets behind the counter, climb a small flight of stairs and try it out. All along the road men are shooting into the air from ramparts on the rooves of shops.
Under supervision we ventured onto the roof of one shop and fired a selection of rifles, pistols and AK47s into the distant mountains. It was a tick on my bucket list, even if the impact on your shoulder from firing a Kalashnikov is more bruising than a Wasim Akram bouncer. The odd thing about Darra is it doesn’t feel remotely unsafe. The people are very welcoming and pleased to see visitors. Shepherd’s Bush Green, near where I live, feels more dangerous. Sadly Darra is not on the tourist trail any more, so Jos Buttler’s team won’t get to smell and feel a life-affecting experience. Well its probably nothing compared to playing Call Of Duty in the team room anyway.
