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Water dripping from the top of the crumbling,
cave-like opening of an unfinished tunnel in northern Pakistan forms
into icicles, accentuating the bite of a freezing January morning.
About a kilometre down the valley behind, a large huddle of passenger
vans, trucks and cars waits for the tunnel to open. They have been here
for many endless hours.
In one rented vehicle is the coffin and body of an old woman on way to
her own funeral, but she is running late.
On the other side of the mountain, in her home village, people have
already gathered for the burial.
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Anxiety is writ large on the face of her son, Wali Ahmad, a soldier in
the Pakistani army and a resident of Chitral district, located on the
far side of the 8.6km (5.2-mile) Lowari tunnel.
"My mother died in Peshawar. Now we have to take her home for burial. We
don't know if they will open the tunnel in time for us to make it there
in daylight," he says.
It's at least three hours' drive to his village of Golen from where he's
standing. It's already approaching midday, and the towering mountains of
the Hindu Kush range shut off the winter sunlight from most of Chitral's
34 branch valleys after 4pm.
At a little over 7,000 feet (2,500m) above sea level, the tunnel is the
only exit route in winter for the 500,000 population of Chitral.
Dozens of loaded trucks are parked every few kilometres along the rocky,
broken mountain road that winds up from the town of Dir to the tunnel.
Some drivers have lit gas cylinders beneath the engines to keep them
warm and prevent the pipes from bursting due to freezing temperatures.
Mohammad Qasim Khan, a resident of Drosh area in Chitral, is the head of
another party waiting for the tunnel to open.
"My daughter's just been operated for appendicitis, and my cousin got a
rod fixed in his left leg which suffered a fracture," he says.
"They can't stand the cold and the wait, but we are told the tunnel is
closed. We drove some eight hours from a hospital in Peshawar, and now
we've been stuck in this wilderness for more than six hours. There's no
food or heating here, and there are no toilets."
It is the same story on the Chitral side of the tunnel - residents
taking sick relatives to hospitals in Peshawar, students and job seekers
trying to make it to their appointed interviews, and workers with jobs
in the Gulf fretting over whether they'll be able to catch their flights
from Peshawar and Islamabad.
All these people are caught in a gridlock that started when the
government suddenly decided to reschedule work on the tunnel ahead of
this winter.
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The fortunes of the people of Chitral have fluctuated with the fortunes
of the Lowari tunnel project.
In summers, a road built by the British over the 10,230ft (3,140m)
Lowari Pass links them to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, of which Chitral
is a part. But the pass closes in mid-December due to snow.
Two other passes - one connecting Chitral to the Afghan province of
Badakhshan, and the other linking it to Pakistan's north-eastern
Gilgit-Baltistan region - are more than 12,000 feet high and also remain
snowbound in winters.
The region's only natural all-weather route passes through its
south-western town of Arandu into Afghanistan, and follows a southward
route via the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Ningarhar into Pakistan's
Peshawar valley.
But that is no longer an option.
"The Arandu route closed when a Pakistani military operation in the Swat
region in 2009 pushed Islamist militants into the Kunar region," says
Shahzada Iftikharuddin, Chitral's representative in Pakistan's national
parliament.
"This happened when the Americans wound up their bases in the Kunar
region, making it possible for these militants to set up sanctuaries
there. A number of Chitrali travellers were held and beheaded by them in
2010."
The tunnel was commissioned in late 2005, and by 2008 the construction
contractor, Sambu JV of South Korea, had dug the 8.6km tunnel all the
way through. But funding for the project stopped when a new government
took over.
Over the next few years, this unfinished tunnel remained open for winter
traffic.
In 2011, when some funds became available and work commenced, public use
of the tunnel was restricted to three alternate days in a week. This
catered to the needs of the locals and there was no crisis.
But after the first snow in late November this year, the commuters were
shocked to discover that a new standard operating procedure (SOP)
permitted three days of transit through the tunnel only every two weeks
instead of one.
Hundreds of people were stranded in the snow. Those with money had to
spend weeks in Dir town's hotel rooms. Others slept in their vehicles or
turned back.
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In Chitral, food supplies became scarce, sparking protests that finally
forced the authorities to revise the SOP and open the tunnel twice a
week - on Saturdays and Sundays - for six hours a day.
The authorities defend the new arrangement as the only viable balance
between human suffering and project completion.
"The project cost has escalated from 5bn rupees to 18bn, and we have to
pay penalties to the contractor for idle hours," says Hameed Hussain,
the project director of Lowari tunnel.
Besides, six hours of public traffic pushes carbon levels inside the
tunnel beyond human tolerance.
"We need an extra four to five hours to ventilate the tunnel before the
workers can get to work safely," he says.
At the moment, there is no proper lighting in the tunnel, no exhaust
system and no emergency services.
Most of the tunnel is still without the shotcrete lining, retaining
walls or a metalled road. Water seepage from the ceiling and walls forms
into puddles on the floor.
In addition, the widening process leaves the tunnel floor strewn with
debris, causing traffic jams inside the tunnel and endangering those
travelling in open vehicles.
Mr Hussain says he recovered four persons from a truck that had broken
down inside the tunnel last week. All of them had fainted.
But bound by towering mountains on all sides, the people of Chitral are
just too desperate not to take a chance with this drive through hell.
And those who can't make it, rue it.
Naila Shahid is one of them.
A graduate in environmental sciences, she had to miss an interview for
an assistant professor's job at a university in Dir district because
that would mean living in a hotel room for a whole week - a social and
financial impropriety.
"I was on top of the merit list. I received a call to appear for the
interview. I knew I couldn't make it because the tunnel would have
closed by the time I was finished and would next open only on the
following Saturday," she says.
"There is no male member of the family available to accompany me for a
week in a strange land. I cried last night. This job would have helped
me enroll for a doctorate."
The new deadline for the tunnel's completion is 2017. Until then, every
time the snows block the passes, many funerals are likely to be missed,
many careers suffer setbacks and many tears are shed in Chitral.
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