20,000 km in a Wreck to Pakistan and Maybe Beyond

A lecture about how to (not) travel by car to Pakistan. Two brothers, a thirty-year-old wreck of a vehicle, and a twenty-thousand-kilometre tragicomic journey from the Czech Republic to the Himalayan eight-thousander Nanga Parbat.

The expedition Subaru Libero, prepared over a year, starts breaking down already in the Balkans. Instead of a carefully laid plan, the brothers find themselves in remote Kosovar villages searching with local help for a new alternator, looking for a tow service to neighbouring Albania - and even end up in a minefield. In Bulgaria they are nearly arrested by plainclothes police, in Turkey they collide with a reckless driver and crash.

Yet their determination to continue does not waver. The brothers manage to climb the biblical Mount Ararat and then enter Iranian dictatorship, where they meet the friendliest people of the entire journey - they attend a birthday celebration and an almost funeral feast, discover a black market for alcohol, and visit nomads. They also figure out how to quickly get a new drive belt into the closed country, without which they cannot proceed.

The operation ultimately succeeds, and via Sistan and Baluchistan the expedition reaches the Pakistani border. With an armed escort they cover hundreds of kilometres through territory frequently hit by terrorist attacks from neighbouring Afghanistan - all the way to Islamabad. And from there it is still very far to the notorious Nanga Parbat, which nearly proved fatal even to the legendary Reinhold Messner.