More photos from the ‘Salpa Arun to Gokyo’ trek here.

And a couple of little videos:

And

Apologies for the heavy-breathing soundtrack.

Here are some holiday snaps from that trip. Words to follow.

Though never explicitly describing himself as such, Bailey is a spy, attempting to establish the threat posed to British India by the Bolshevik regime.  Mission To Tashkent therefore offers a unique snapshot of the latter stages of the Great Game, in the aftermath of the collapse of Asia’s two great Empires. The Russian Empire had fallen in the February Revolution of 1917, triggered in part by Russia’s massive losses in WWI. Only months later Lenin’s October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. (By mid-1918 the new state was young enough that, as Bailey entered Tashkent, Tsarist sympathisers still held government positions, and it was not clear that the Bolsheviks would survive the Civil War.) In China, the Kuomintang’s Republic of China had brought to an end two thousand years of Imperial history; the Republic was now barely six years old, and since 1916 Beijing had held little real authority: the country had descended into feuding fiefdoms (this was the so-called Warlord era). Xinjiang, under the virtual dictatorship of Yang Zengxin, was relatively stable during this time. The British and Russians also exerted some authority here – the winnings of the Great Game; both powers had Consulates in Kashgar, while the Russians maintained a Cossack detachment, and the British a guard of Gilgit Scouts.

Ultimately the Bolsheviks won their Civil War, and Russian Central Asia was fully integrated into the USSR as the Turkmen, Tajik, Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republics. In China, Chiang Kai-shek brought an end to the Warlord era in the late 20′s, continuing the ROC even after being forced to retreat to Taiwan by Mao’s Communists in 1948. During Bailey’s mission, though, the geopolitical stakes were still very high.

Summit of Mintaka Pass, 1918

One tale from Mission to Tashkent, concerning the Mintaka Pass – at the nexus of Russia, China and British India – is worth recounting here, but requires a little background. (Note that Wikipedia’s photograph of the Mintaka Pass was taken by Bailey during his journey; the border cairn is clearly visible.) Since 1916 a number of parties of Norwegians had been arriving in Khotan (‘from China’, as Bailey puts it; Xinjiang had at the best of times never been a part of China proper), always without proper visas. In fact, these ‘Norwegians’ were Germans from Eastern China, trapped at the outbreak of the War by the Russians to the north, and, seawards, the British and Japanese. Their only practical means of escape was via the Wakhjir Pass [see also a previous post here] to neutral Afghanistan, which entailed a months-long journey across the entire breadth of Warlord-era China; the Gilgit Scouts in China were mandated to prevent such movements.

Descending from the Mintaka pass in May 1918, Bailey is met by a Chinese Guard of Honour and by Gilgit Scouts. Very much as an aside he relates a previous visit to the Mintaka by the Scouts’ commanding officer: the officer had been ordered by the British Consulate to intercept a party of two ‘Norwegians’ in Xinjiang who were straying from their stated route to Kashgar. He found them a number of days from the Wakhjir but was unable to arrest them on Chinese territory. Instead, dressed as a local man, he befriended them and offered to act as their guide to Afghanistan, where – coincidentally – he was also travelling. They travelled in this manner for a number of days, he allaying their concern that they had perhaps moved too far to the south. And so he led them over the pass, although this was not the Wakhir, but the Mintaka; and as soon as they set foot in British India he drew his revolver and arrested them. They spent the remainder of the War as POWs.

Mintaka Pass on Google Maps

View Larger Map

References and further reading
F. M. Bailey. Mission to Tashkent (1946)
Peter Hopkirk. Setting the East Ablaze (1984)
Lonely Planet Guidebooks. Pakistan & the Karakoram Highway Travel Guide (May 2008)

Unusual Time Zones
The BBC report also takes a brief look at some of the world’s other ‘unusual’ time zones. Just how many of these half-hour time zones are there? It turns out that – with the above exceptions – there are none in the Americas, Africa, Europe or indeed the Antarctic. Asia, though, has six: Iran (GMT+3½), Afghanistan (GMT+4½), India and Sri Lanka (GMT+5½), Nepal (GMT+5¾) and Myanmar (GMT+6½). In fact if one were to accept Indian claims on Pakistani Kashmir, it would be possible to travel overland from the Turkish to the Thai border entirely on the half-hour.

In the Pacific, the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia are at GMT-9½ and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands are perpetually forty-five minutes ahead of New Zealand herself (GMT+12/13).

However, the remainder of the world’s eccentric time zones are Australian: South Australia (GMT+9½/10½), the Northern Territory (GMT+9½), the area around Broken Hill, NSW (as per S. Australia), and the W. Australian town of Eucla (pop. 50, GMT+8¾/9¾). Additionally, the Cocos Islands (GMT+6½) of the Indian Ocean and Norfolk Island (GMT+11½) in the Pacific fall under Australian jurisdiction.

And so the answer would seem to be that, as of this morning, there are sixteen such time zones in the world, if we include the outlandish offsets of Nepal, the Chatham Islands and Eucla, W. Australia (pop. 50).

—
Aside: whenever I read or use the term ‘it turns out’, I’m reminded of Douglas Adams, who had this to say of it:

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ˜I read somewhere that…” or the craven ˜they say that…” because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

The US changes are a result of the US Energy Policy Act of 2005, while Canada as well as Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Qaanaaq (Thule) area of Greenland and the French collectivity of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (the last remnant of New France) pragmatically followed suit. There is much speculation as to the havoc this change will wreak and the rewards we will reap with this first major change to North American DST rules since the advent of the personal computer. Worst-case scenarios draw parallels to Y2K, and it does seem fairly likely that, given the lack of lead time, some systems somewhere will fail. Calendaring applications seem particularly vulnerable, as do devices such as routers. According to a straw-poll at Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference conducted on March 5^th, only about half of attendees had finalized system changes. Microsoft, apparently, was still issuing patches.

It seems remarkable that software should be so difficult to update: Sun’s Java has hard-wired DST rules, for example, as do earlier versions of Red Hat Linux, which require an update to a core system component (glibc). At best, the 2007 changes could be a wake-up call for software developers: DST rules change all the time. The US, for example, has made sweeping changes to its rules roughly once a decade until recent times, and state-wide (and even municipal-level) changes occur relatively frequently even now. On a global level, hardly a month goes by without a country-level change to DST legislation; some countries, such as Brazil, announce the start date of DST annually.

The benefits of an extra hour of daylight in the evening – and one less in the morning – may or may not include reductions in energy consumption, traffic accidents and crime rates (the explicit goal of the US legislation is to reduce energy consumption by 1%). David Prerau, writing in the New York Times, seems confident that the changes will provide these benefits. Others are not so confident. The California Energy Commission’s Demand Analysis Office’s paper Electricity Savings From Early Daylight Saving Time (pdf) concludes that “There is no clear evidence that electricity will be saved from the earlier start to daylight saving time on March 11, 2007…”. The University of California Energy Institute’s paper Does extending daylight saving time save energy? Evidence from an Australian experiment (pdf), which parallels an experiment in early DST in Australia in 2000 with the 2007 North American changes, is less optimistic still: “… while extending DST does reduce electricity consumption in the evening, the increased demand in the morning cancels this benefit out. We statistically reject electricity savings of 1% or greater at a 1% significance level.”

Cynics suggest that the DST changes are a poor substitute for a real energy conservation policy, and point out that more daylight in the evening means more shoppers venturing out to the mall in their SUVs.