pmsl

If you are young, like a smoke and don’t have an alarm clock rural Pakistan is a hard country to get around. We were traveling from Gilgit to the Hunza valley and from there up the Karakoram highway over the mountains and into western China. The trouble was the bus always left at the crack of dawn and we were for ever over sleeping.

Anyway on this particular occasion, having missed the bus for the second day running, some locals we had met the night before offered us a lift. We gratefully accepted.

Halfway through what was a stunning journey we stopped at a shack, from the roof of which hung various cuts of mutton, and of course the ubiquitous local fly nation.

Our host and driver stepped out of the car and swiftly negotiated the purchase of his favored aforementioned cut. Off we sped.

Upon arriving in the valley our ever hospitable lift giver refused all offers of payment and insisted we join him later for food. It would have been churlish to refuse and besides which he was good company. Thus that night we found ourselves eating a delicious mutton stew and chatting late into the night.

The next morning, whilst my girlfriend was as right as rain, I, unsurprisingly, had the most noxious and foul smelling diarrhea imaginable. Well, as they say, shit happens.

Normally in these circumstances I just make sure I am hydrated and rest up a few days until the passing has passed. Trouble was the clock on our Chinese visas had started ticking, not from entry to the country but from date of issue, and as we had already spaced out too many days post visiting the embassy in Islamabad we didn’t wish to hang around.

I had no alternative therefore but to break out the lomotil. (Lomotil is basically the active ingredient in all those anti-diarrhea tablets available over the counter in the west, but cost about ½ p a tablet in the subcontinent) The thing with Lomotil is, while it stops you from shitting yourself, it doesn’t cure the actual infection. It is a bit like putting a cork in the barrel, it stops the leaks but not the fermentation process or production of gas, if you get my drift.

Anyway a few days later, having successfully negotiated several glaciers breaking across the road, the mountains, and both the Pakistani and Chinese customs, we found ourselves on a bus in the far west of China’s westernmost province, Xingang.

The province, bar the odd Han immigrant city, is basically Muslim central Asian and not Han Chinese. The indigenous population is a mix of Yughurs, Kazaks and other minorities. In reality it is a colony where the locals are shat upon from a great Chinese height, think Tibet but without the temples, costumes or western sympathy.

So there we were on the bus in the middle of nowhere, stopping every now and then to pick up a local in furs, when my belly begins to rumble, really rumble. I look around. We are on the back seats and in front of us are a motley collection of locals who probably have never seen a bath in their lives and a smattering of Pakistanis who are in general tolerant of common stomach complaints. I feel therefore that it is probably safe to let rip, so I do.

It starts slowly but keeps on coming, and coming, and coming. It seemed like an entire underground gas reservoir was escaping, cunning only in its silence. I swear it must have lasted a full sixty seconds and was god knows how many cubic litres in size.

Then the smell kicked in, oh my god what had I done. With in ten seconds the people in front of us opened their window, then the people in front of them opened theirs and the people in front of them then followed suit and so it continued. As my fart inexorably expanded up the bus, so people opened their windows in a seemingly desperate pursuit of breathable air. In the end even those right at the front of the bus had opened their windows.

It was only then that I realized I had achieved something I was never ever likely to repeat, my greatest ever fart