Avoiding stoning in Pakistan

A week earlier in Kashgar, western China's historic Silk-Road trading town, I had met two other independent travelers who wanted to traverse the Karakoram Himalayas and enter Pakistan.

[...] casually over breakfast at my prosaic hotel, a woman I had just met gave me the most depressing warning I've ever received over toast.

The only female I had seen on Gilgit's unpaved main street was covered in a full, black chador that hid even her eyes, but the woman with the disheartening tip said I wouldn't need a chador.

[...] she said, I must buy the other proper Pakistani woman's outfit: a shalwar kameez - huge, baggy pants and a loose tunic top that reaches the knees - and a dupetta or large scarf to cover my hair.

Two dozen Pakistani men sat or stood quietly in the doorways of their shops, eyes cast downward.

Rounding a corner, I startled half a dozen young women - not in chadors - crouching down while they washed clothes on rocks in the stream.

A young woman with dark brown eyes wearing a red, silk-brocade shalwar kameez said her name was Sapano.

When I got home to San Francisco six weeks later and had my slides developed, I discovered that in the photograph of Sapano holding her baby, down in the lower-left corner was her toddler, a little boy clinging to her kameez, nearly hidden in its folds.

[...] when I hear about the problems in northern Pakistan, I think of this boy and his mother and hope that some middle-aged women and young men there have a positive memory of an American who once came to tea.