Trust on the Karakurom Highway

The next morning, after that starry night, we hiked around the lake filming lambs and goats. We figured we had time to play around; the redneck Chinese truck driver had told us that he would probably be coming back sometime in the afternoon, so we cleaned our stuff out of the yurt and climbed back onto the highway around eleven, figuring we could try to pick up a ride without him, and, if nothing came, we could call him by noon and hitch back with him in the afternoon.

For half an hour, we stood on the starkly brown Karakorum Highway, the Pamirs white and rising above us. No one picked us up. A few cars passed us, but each shrugged us off as we tried to signal them that we wanted a ride.

Then, finally, a pickup truck slowed down. “Galen,” I hollered. “I think we’ve got a ride.”

But as the pickup pulled up, I noticed that the bed was full of junk and the cab full of passengers. The pickup’s window drew beside us, and I recognized our redneck driver from the day before.

Immediately, he began to yell at me. “I told you that you should call me, and I would save two seats for you if you wanted a ride back, but now, I’ve already left and I don’t have any space, and there is nothing I can do.”

I recognized that the situation was problematic, but I did not think that I had done anything wrong. He had told us he would probably be leaving in the afternoon. I did not have time to translate all this for Galen, so he could only look on and guess what was happening. As the driver was reprimanding me, I saw, from the corner of my eye, Galen disappear, but I did not have time to ask him where he was going.

“That’s it. I want to help you but I can’t trust you anymore,” the driver told me. “You have already proven I should not trust you. So now, you are going to have to trust me. If you want a ride, I can get you one. One of my buddies is waiting for passengers in Tashkurgan. I’ll give him a call and tell him to come down now and keep two seats for you. But you have to give me the money for those seats, because…how do I know you aren’t just going to take off with someone else if they come and pick you up.”

Just then, Galen ran up to me. “Lee, I think I’ve got a ride.”

“Hold on a second,” I interrupted the driver’s admonition, running to the station wagon that had pulled up behind us. I had been expecting severely limited English to have been exchanged between Galen and the car, and that I would iron out the rest of the deal, but I was pleasantly surprised to meet, Dan, from Michigan, in the station wagon’s passenger seat.

“You going to Kashgar?” he asked.

“Yea. How much for a ride?”

“He’s charging me 400,” Dan pointed to the driver “…so, how about you two pick up half of that?” Dan suggested.

“Sounds great.” I said, bouncing back to our redneck driver to tell him that we had found a ride.

“Alright,” the driver shrugged, zooming off while we piled our bags into the station wagon.

As we pushed out of the Pamirs, through the canyon and down into the desert plains surrounding Kashgar, I thought about what the driver had said. We had never not trusted him; we had simply learned to play the game. In China, you never put all your trust into anyone you did not know; why would we have fully depended on him?

This was to be our last hitchhiking trip in China, though it was neither our last trip in China nor our last time hitchhiking on this journey. Still, it was somehow fitting that on our last hitchhiking trip in this country where we could not trust anyone, a Chinese redneck gave us a lecture on trust, but an American gave us a ride.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *