Inspired by my Iranian Datasheet I decided to break down my two months trip in Pakistan. This is the continuing story from the same trip in October and November 2012. Prepare for a very long post.
Background.
After my month in Iran it was time to put on my hardcore shoes and cross the border to Pakistan. I had no specific interests of what to see in Pakistan except to see what all the fuzz in the Western media is all about. I have a fetish for off the beaten path countries and Pakistan certainly belongs to one of them.
With other words spoken. I let Pakistan come to me, and hell it did.
Country.
Pakistan is extremely diverse and diveded into different regions.
Desert in the Southwest, in the North you have the mountainous Himalayas with several peaks over 8000m. In the Southeast you have real tropical climate and in the east the fertile Punjab region.
People.
Most people look like how stereotypical Talibans are pictured in Western media,but there are of course exceptions. People are extremely curious and everybody is staring at you all the time and they often approach you and starts to ask questions. Usually they are very friendly but sometimes you bump into some real Islamic fanatics who might give you a hard time about Islam. You will be offered tea and hashish all the time. However even if these people are friendly, they are unreliable as hell. You should never trust anyone or what they promise and you'll be good.
Women.
No women are visible in the streets. I think I saw less than 10 women during two months.
Visa.
These days you need to apply for a visa in your country of origin or at your home countrys embassy, for me this meant that I got my Paki visa in Stockholm,Sweden for 20€. It's impossible to get it abroad at some other embassy. However I met aAustralian couple in Lahore who strangly got it in Vietnam, but consider this as an exception. The good thing with this visa is that once you are in Pakistan, you can extend it how many times you want, and it's free!
I extended mine twice.
Getting in.
Easiest way is to fly straight to Islamabad.
You can cross the land border from Iran, China and India.
Costs.
Guesthouse 1-3€ per night.
Pack of smokes 0,50€.
Food at middle class restaurant 1-2€.
Beer, ( if you can find) 5€.
The Iran-Pakistan bordercrossing.
I wrote this down when I was in Pakistan so the writing is catching my feelings and experiences at the very moment. I apologise for my blurry writing since I'm not a native English speaker.
I left Zahedan, Iran and took a shared taxi towards the Pakistani border. I was told that ride was going to take about one hour,but of course nothing can go that easy. After half the way they stopped us at an Iranian checkpoint and I was told that I’m not allowed to continue without escort. I had to wait maybe around 45min for the escort before we could continue.
The taxi driver got frustrated when he had to waste his time with me, but it was his own choice to take me to the border. After about two hours we got to the border and there were a lot of people outside waiting. The soldier took me in and the place were packed with people. The soldier couldn’t speak any English but an old guy showed up and explained to me that the computer system had been broken down all day and no one had yet been able to cross the border during whole day. Shit…
The good thing about being escorted was that the soldier took me first in line to wait, the line was incredible long because people had been waiting there since the early morning. After two hours of waiting I started loose the hope about make it across the border on that day because I knew the border will close at 2pm. Around 12 o’clock the system started to work again and i got my exit stamp and the soldier escorted me to the Pakistani side and said :
” Voila, Pakistan! Are you happy now?”
Iranians don’t like Pakistan. That is clear as crystal water.
On the Pakistani side they also took me to be first in line to get my entry stamp and after that I was free to go, or that was what I thought...
Outside the custom office were a lot of people who wanted to exchange money for a worthless rate, but I knew I could get a much more better rate at the bazaar in Taftan three kilometers away.
At this point the Pakistan police escort hassle begun. The taxi driver took me to the nearest police station and there I was told that I must have an armed police guard with me all the way to Quetta. Well whatever I said and told him to hurry up because the last bus was soon leaving. The taxidriver took us to the bazaar in Taftan and there I could by a ticket to Quetta, it felt very expensive now when I was used to the ultra cheap buses in Iran. I got my ticket and went outside and thought fucking hell..
I was only three kilometers on the Pakistani side and it felt that I’ve come to another continent and traveled 50 years back in time.
There were no asphalt, trash were lying everywhere, everything were really chaotic,noisy and dusty. Iran was very Western,very clean,calm and organised compared to what I saw on the Pakistani side,but I liked it.
This was something new,something different that I hadn’t seen before.
Anyway, I was waiting for the people to finish their loading of the bus, this is one of the countries where they drive with a shitload of stuff on the roof of the bus. I went into the bus, they packed the bus full with people and it took very long. They putted plastic chairs in the walkway in the bus so they could fit in more people.
Finally at 4pm we left, the road was bumpy as hell and they played some Baluchi music very loud. well,whatever I thought..I was happy that we finally were on our way. After maybe one hour we reached the first checkpoint, me and the guard were sitting almost in the back of the bus so we had to climb and jump and crawl over people and stuff to get out. It’s only foreigners and guards that need to get off the bus, at the checkpoint they gave me a sheet where I had to write down my name,passport number,visa number,country,my route,reg.plate of the bus and a signature. I noticed there had been maybe five other travellers travelling this route in the last two weeks.
Well, I stumbled into the bus again and took our seats and on our way we were again. Outside there were only desert and the bus had to use the horn quite frequently to avoid crashing into camels. I fell asleep for a while and then the guard woke up and showed me that we had to get out again, what the fuck! It wasn’t even 45min ago since the last time! It was another checkpoint where I had to do exactly the same procedure and stumble into the bus again over all the people and stuff in the walkway. And I had to repeat this fucking procedure 6-7 times until 11pm! In and out of the bus all the time, but it sure was a great way to exercise and the people were friendly and patient with the whole thing and just smiled. At several points when the bus stopped people wanted to talk with me.
All the time i got the same questions…
-Where are you from, mister! Finland
- Huh!? England? No. FINLAND
- Do you have wife? No.
- Why?! I don’t know.
- Are you Muslim? No.
Silence…..
- Do you accept Islam?!. Yes I do.
By then I realised the people here are really religious and almost fundamentalistic and I better give them the right answers or then…Never ever say that you are a non-believer in these areas. It’s always better to say you are a Christian.
However. At midnight the bus stopped again and they started to shout that I should get out and bring my bag! What the hell! In the middle of night somewhere in the middle of nothing! When I got out in the dark there were a lot of people armed to their teeths with guns and they told me to follow them. At this point I didn’t know if these guys were fucking Taliban’s or armed carpet sellers or policemen because it was very dark so I didn’t see much. It turned out that it was 5-6 policemen who took me in to a checkpoint were they explained to me that I need to spend the night there. They said it wasn’t safe for me to continue my travel in the night because of the increasing Taliban activity that has been going on recently a little bit further forward. Two days before they blew up a gasoline truck over there. Anyhow, the policemen were a friendly bunch of people and some of them could talk good English so we were chatting and drinking tea and listening to The Black Keys for a couple of hours. Then they asked if I wanted to sleep and I said hellyeah. They took me out and I thought this is good, I’ll probably get a bed to sleep in or something. Haha.. What a joke, they claimed that they wanted to protect me but the place were just carpet on a pile of soil,outside of course. So i spent my first night on this trip sleeping outside under the stars. It was fucking cold, around 6-7 + degrees, I put all the clothes that I had on me and layed down and fell a sleep. After two hours I woke up and thought I was going to freeze my titties off! I was shivering like hell so Inwent back to the hut were the policemen where to get warm again. There I caught the policemen watching porn movies on their cellphones and then they started to show me pictures of female travellers that also had stayed some nights there.
First they are standing there cocky and proud with their guns and asking me if i accept Islam in a very threatful way, and then I see something like that.
True followers of Islam…Yeah right.
They told me that a bus will show at 6am that can take me to Quetta but instead pickup truck showed up at 7am
I sat on the back of a pick up truck with two armed policemen and they escorted me to the next checkpoint where another pickup where waiting for me with new guards. It was frickin cold to sit on the back of a pickup truck in the early morning in a speed of 100km/h because the pickup truck was not covered. It was all open air and the sight was excellent.I saw two buses on the road that had been blown up by Talibans. Sick.
Those guys took me to the next checkpoint where I had to wait for another pickup truck to show up. This whole process lasted 10 hours before Iwas in Quetta. The same thing happened over and over again with pickup trucks and armed policemen by my side. I lost the count but I was escorted by at least 14-15 different pickup trucks. On the last escort into the city of Quetta i had five policemen with me. One at the steering wheel,two in the back, one in the front seat and one with a machine gun on the roof and of course the sirens on! It took me 34hours to travel about 600km.
Coming into Quetta was quite an experience, the traffic culture is shocking. You can find anything on the streets, motorbikes,bicycles,donkeys,trucks,buses,sheeps and rickshaws and all are moving around in a very chaotic way. This capital of Baluchistan is so much different from Iran. Like an another planet, everything is very dirty, trash is lying everywhere, people are pissing in the streets a lot of noise and everything is very dusty! Everyone wear traditional clothes and got big beards. Just like the traditional stereotype of a Taliban.I’m probably the only one here who are walking around in jeans. Some people are also walking around with guns here. I don’t like when people who are not dressed in uniforms walks around with rifles. You never know…
However this is something new to me and I have never seen anything like this before. Cambodia,Philippines and Mongolia are like very clean and organised compared to this. But I somehow liked it!
Now there is some action going on again.
But the people are really friendly here and they speak surprisingly good English, every time I’m walking around in the streets people are inviting me in for dinner or tea and they are even offering me a place to sleep there. They seem to be very happy to meet some foreigners, I guess there are no too much of them over here.
Officially I’m not allowed to walk around in streets after 6pm without police escort here but I’ve done it anyway and nothing threatening has happened. Yesterday evening i took a rickshaw to the bus station to buy a ticket to Lahore. There they told me that I need a NOC document to be allowed to travel by bus to Lahore,so i went to the police station to get it. But of course i didn’t get it…. There I met the police chief of Quetta again and he said “:What?! Are you coming here with a rickshaw in the evening?! Are you crazy?! This is one of the most dangerous cities in the world and you are using a rickshaw! For god sake! Don’t go out in Quetta after dark without a police escort! For gods sake! ”
I ended up sitting there and chatting with them for an hour and the police chief and I became good friends,after that four police officers escorted me back to the hotel. I think they are overreacting a bit, but the law is the law and they are meaning well.
It’s impossible to do anything here when the police are watching you all the time and hotel owners don’t let you out on the streets so two days is enough for this place, but now I’m still here lurking around. I had a bus ticket to Lahore, but this morning when i was about to leave the hotel manager called the police and they didn’t let me go. They said I’m not allowed to go anywhere without the NOC document so they escorted me to the place where i could get it. I knew this was just waste of time because i already went there yesterday and they refused to give me the document. Same thing happened today and they totally ignored me and said that this is not their headache. They want me to take a flight, but I refuse to pay for an expensive flight and the Pakistan Airplanes aren’t really the safest aircrafts in the world..
The situation in Quetta had been quite hopeless and frustrating for a couple of days, but after I changed hotel everything changed to bright side again. This hotel had no curfew for guests so I was allowed to go out after 1800 hours. I shared a room with the Hungarian guy i met in Isfahan and he was on the way to the northern Pakistan like me and in exactly the same hopeless situation that I was in . Taking a bus was no longer an option because the danger to be kidnapped is obviously too high to let any foreigners travel by road. We had to choose from a three day long nasty train ride,or the more expensive alternative to travel by air, but the earliest flight from Quetta that had any seats left was departing on Sunday and that meant four days of waiting…
The guys at this hotel helped us out a lot compared to the fucking mafia hotel. They checked both prices and timetables for train and flights for us but they couldn’t book anything and we couldn’t decide what to do.
Later I went to the internetcafé and I spent a couple of hours there, when I paid my bill a guy from the booth nearby turned around and asked me to sit down for a minute so we could have a chat. I was exhausted but I thought that this guy could maybe help us out. The guy were a true gentleman and he asked how he could help us out meanwhile he was sipping his whisky. We explained our situation and within a few minutes the guy made some phone calls and Tadaa, he reserved us a pair of tickets to Islamabad on Friday evening! I don’t know how he did it because every flight until Sunday were fully booked. Anyway, I don’t know if flying with Pakistan Airlines made my trip in Pakistan any safer but it definitely made it more interesting.
Coming to Islamabad
The flight from Quetta to Islamabad went surprisingly smoothly. The plane was definitely the oldest aircraft I’ve ever used. I’m not surprised that the biggest part of the Pakistan Airlines fleet is banned to fly into the European Union.
Islamabad is a bloody boring city. The city is so green and clean compared to the chaotic Quetta. There is asphalt everywhere and the traffic is very smooth. The capital city was built in the 1950′s a while after Pakistan got their independence and they decided to move it from Karachi up north. The whole city is divided into big quarters with big streets,exactly like neighbourhoods in American movies. There is nothing to do here if you not know any cool people to hang around with. It’s on my top on my “The most boring capitals in the world ” along with Vientiane in Laos.
Islamabad is probably the most modern city in Pakistan, you can see in a lot of ways. The cars are more modern,the people are more modern, the houses are more modern, the lifestyle is more modern. You can find McDonald’s,Starbucks,Pizza Hut and those kind of things here. Most of the people don’t wear traditional clothes like in Quetta and here you can actually see woman on the streets .Quetta was more like the biggest sausage party I’ve ever seen. In Pakistan woman don’t need to cover themselves or wear scarfs,but a lot of woman prefer to do it anyway because they can get in trouble otherwise. The law in Pakistan is whatever the policeman says it is. If you are a woman and you are walking on the streets without covering your body, and the policeman for some reason don’t like you. He can give you a fine. The same thing goes with everything else here.
The same thing goes for alcohol. There are no bars or clubs but you can find liquor stores here but you need to get a liquor license to be allowed to buy there. It’s not a problem for a foreigner even if it takes a few weeks to get it, but it’s difficult for a local. But there is a way around it for foreigners.
The first night I went into the RED ZONE where all the embassies are located. It’s a huge area where no Pakistanis are allowed to enter. I had to cross six checkpoints before I got to the Club 21 near the french embassy and there I could find a bar. There is also a Canadian club and an American club. These places are off-limits for Pakistani passport holders but if you are a foreigner you just have to show your passport and then they will let you in. However, the bar had a big business atmosphere and there were mostly all kinds of diplomats hanging out. Very boring but I had a few pints and then I left. The second night I went with my host to a Chinese restaurant where they served beers “under the table”.
It was the first and the last time for me in Pakistan..
Another strange thing you can find here is a market with second-hand clothes of American soldiers. Dead American soldiers….who served their duty in Afghanistan
Anyway, I spent a few days in Islamabad and the continued my trip.
Highway to the Himalayas.
I went to the ticket office in Rawalpindi to get a bus ticket to the North, there. I met a guy from Saudi Arabia. He was kind enough to pick me up the next day with his bike and he took me to his friends from Gilgit who were on their way back home. I joined them to the bus station and then we left towards the Himalayas. I was very close to postpone this trip because in the morning I had a very bad stomach after the 21 inch pizza I downed the night before, but I had already purchased my ticket for 16€ so there were no other options than to go.
The bus was really oldschool and from another time. I had seat nr 15 and fuck me sideways if there not was a big crack in the window next to me. Like the diarrhoea wasn’t bad enough, it also seemed that I had to freeze my nuts off. Away we went and then it started to rain, the first time I’ve seen any rain in three months. The road was more curvy and bumpy than the body of Shakira. Probably the worst road I’ve ever seen..
After five hours we had to wait for three hours for other buses and vehicles to join in. We were driving in a convoy of at least 35 buses and minibuses because the risk of Talibans and other road pirates. These mountain terrorists use to block the road and kill all passengers so that’s why they always are driving in convoys escorted by policemen with machine guns. There were also several checkpoints where I had to get of the bus and do the same paperwork like at the road between Taftan and Quetta. The ride was quite chilly at night because of the broken window but that was not the biggest problem. My stomach was…
Anyway, the trip lasted 26 fucking hours before I was in Gilgit. I must admit that the scenery is spectacular to say to least. The road is to 99,5% without any fences to prevent vehicles from falling down into the abyss and that’s enough for a lot of people to shit in their pants. Like I said, the buses are quite old and the drivers are not the most reliable in the world. You know, these Muslims are like every other religious fanatics in the world. They are not afraid of dying, if an accident happens it’s Gods will and it was meant to happen and their next life in heaven will be wonderful anyway. That’s just their philosophy.
In Gilgit town there are not many things to do, it’s more like a rest place and a base where people go to other places from. I get a little Laplandic feel here, big mountains,blue rivers,the smell of burning firewood and barbecued meat,but no tourists.
Gilgit and Mount Nangaparbat.
I met another Finnish guy at the guesthouse in Gilgit and he wanted to do the same trek as me so we decided to do it together. The next morning our guide met us at the guesthouse and after a delicious cup of milk tea we went to the bus station to catch a minibus to Raiko bridge. We were 23 people packed in a fucking Hiace and it took us 2,5 hours to get to the bridge, it was only 75km away but this is Pakistan..
At the bridge a jeep waited for us and it took us around one hour to reach 2300m. I can tell you folks that, that ride wasn’t a dance on roses. Holy hell. It was the steepest and one of the most exciting rides I’ve ever had! The road was less than three meters wide at some points and when I looked down i could see that the abyss had a depth of at least 1km. If something had gone wrong nobody had been able to find us,simply because there wouldn’t have been anything left of us or the jeep. There were also big rocks on the road everywhere because they are falling down all the time mainly caused by goats climbing in the mountains high above the road. If a rock of that magnitude had rolled over us we had been smashed. Bigtime. However,it gave me a good adrenaline kick,far better than any amusement parks has given me. Well,maybe except for the fastest roller coaster in the world at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi. That one kicked my ass.
Anyway, the jeep dropped us off at a small mountain village where we had a quick lunch break. After that we started to climb uphill. At around 2700m it started to get quite tough. Our guide was a very fast walker and I had a hell of time trying to keep up with him. I guess my lungs have never been working that hard before and my heartbeat had never been higher. It didn’t matter how much I breathed,I still couldn’t get oxygen enough. But after a while and few short breaks we reached Fairy Meadows at an altitude of 3125m. The view was already breathtaking even if it was getting dark and the sky wasn’t really visible. The old men at the “campsite” welcomed us with a bucket of tasty milk tea. To my great luck they had one tree house with a fireplace where i could dry my sweaty clothes. All my clothes were at the laundry so I hadn’t any extra clothes with me. That really saved the whole trek for me. I had probably frozen to death sleeping in a cold windy tree house without a heater at -4 Celsius with only soaking wet clothes. However, they made us a very tasty dinner and then we went to sleep. I looked out through the window at 5:30am and holy macaroni. The sky was clear and the whole Killer Mountain was visible. We waited two more hours and by then sky was absolutely crystal clear. The weather couldn’t have been better. These days are very rare when the whole mountain is visible and you got a blue sky. I think that was the best view I will ever have while I’m enjoying my breakfast. Absolutely amazing.. a camera can never capture what you see with your own eyes.
Unfortunately this glorious moment didn’t last forever. One hour after we finished our breakfast we started to walk toward the Nangaparbat Basecamp. It started to get cloudy already and all the fresh snow were melting. With other words spoken..slippery as hell. This day I had no problem with the breathing or anything. It didn’t take very long before we reached 4000m but unfortunately we couldn’t continue all the way to the base camp because it was too much fresh snow so that made it too dangerous to continue. At this point it was very cloudy and a lot of fog and the mountain wasn’t visible at all. We had a quick lunch break and then our guide told us we must turn around and go back to the “camp” . Fucking hell, this was a slippery episode. These guys had proper trekking shoes and walking sticks and I had only my Puma sneakers with a flat thin bottom. It was very steep downhills and I must admit I had some problems keeping my balance. I slipped a few times and rolled around in the snow and the mud, but what the hell. It didn’t matter, it was a great challenge. Luckily nobody got hurt.
In the evening we got back to the camp and the made us an excellent dinner once again. Fresh meat of mountain chickens and fresh baked nan. Tasty stuff. It snowed quite a lot during the night so that made the next day quite challenging too. The mix of snow,rocks,mud and water makes it slippery as hell when you are walking downhills. However, in the afternoon the jeep picked us up again and took us back to the Raiko bridge again. From there we travelled back to Gilgit in the most awesome way you can ever travel. Two hours on the roof of a minibus! Maybe a little bit dangerous but so incredible nice! You got 360′degree open air view in one of the most beautiful scenery’s on mother earth,fresh air and plenty of legroom. Ain’t getting better than that!
Skardu
I spent the weekend in Gilgit and then I took a minibus on Monday morning to Skardu.The road got for some reason the nickname “The road of dead sheeps” . I didn’t see any dead sheeps, but a lot of those who were alive and well. This 230 km journey lasted eight hours and as like everywhere else in Gilgit-Baltistan the ride was quite a thrill and the scenery was absolutely amazing. Unfortunately I hadn’t the opportunity to sit on the roof this time, maybe better so because I don’t think that my clothes had been warm enough for that.
However Skardu,the heart of Baltistan is located on an altitude of 2400m,almost twice the height of the highest mountain in Finland. It probably most famous for being the starting point for all treks and expeditions to K2. I had planned together with the other Finn and the Hungarian to do a trek to the mighty Desoai Plains,one of the most spectacular places in Gilgit-Baltistan and the second highest plateau in the world located on 4300m. Unfortunately there had fallen too much snow over there already so the whole place is inaccessible until springtime so we couldn’t do it. Anyway, the next morning when I woke up I felt sick as hell. Tired, very feverish and a very aggressive diarrhoea. The guys convinced me to come down and have a breakfast with them,but after 5 minutes I had to run up to our room again and throw up everything,including the tasty dinner I had the night before. I tell you folks, it was nastier then it sounds!
At that point I was sure that my whole Skardu adventure was game over. The only option I had was to intake horizontal position in my bed and guard the toilet door with my all my dignity. Something very evil must had gotten in to my body the night before because all this vomiting and shitting were devastatingly aggressive. I became quite dehydrated during the day because every time I tried to drink a sip of water I had to throw it up again within fifteen minutes. 24.10.2012 was probably the day when I set the unbreakable personal record of how many toilet visits I’ve done in one day…
And the fever, I was shaking and freezing like never before. It didn’t really help the fact that in this part of world they got no heaters in houses. Not even in hotels. So it was around +5 degrees in our room, I had my pullover,jacket and beanie and then I wrapped two thick blankets around me like a tortilla and I was still shaking. A few painkillers did the job to make my situation bearable. I have no idea what caused me this. I basically ate exactly the same food as the other guys,we even shared the same plates. In Pakistan they rarely use any cutlery when they are eating. In most cases you only take a piece of thin bread and wrap the food into it and then you eat it. That’s one the reasons i always wash my hands with antiseptic gel before i eat here. The other is that the toilet procedure is also quite different from the western world. I haven’t seen many western toilets since Istanbul. East of Istanbul it’s the almighty squat toilet that rules! As far as I’ve seen,in Turkey, Iraq Kurdistan,Iran,China and South East Asia they still use toilet paper, but not that’s not the culture in Pakistan! (and probably not in India and Bangladesh either).
There are usually no washbowl in toilets over here,but there are always a few buckets of water. What you do is when you are done with your dirty deeds, you just take one bucket of water and flush your holy pile of glory away down into the hole. Then you make a boat of your right hand,fill it with water and wash your most glorious parts over and over again until you are nice and clean , after that you just wash your hands with soap and voila! That’s it!
To many people this might sound very nasty,but try to think like this. Many people have given me this example.
If you fall and dive with your face into a pile of dogshit. Do you clean yourself with a piece of paper? I guess not. You will probably run to the nearest place where you can find water. However.. I must admit that I usually got a roll of toilet paper in my bag all the time… Think how well the Finnish forest industry would run if every single human on this planet would use toilet paper every day? Or would we run out of threes? Anyway, let’s skip the crap talking and let’s get back to Skardu. The day after I felt surprisingly good, I didn’t feel feverish at all so I joined the guys on a full day walk around Skardu and to the lake Satpara. Awesome weather and awesome views! On the last day we did a full day jeep tour to Khaplu which included even more awesome views and we visited some villages to see how these people live their lives in the mountains. However,Skardu was great and it would had been even better if we had the opportunity to go the Desoai Plains. Northern Pakistan kicks ass! A true hidden pearl behind all bullshit that western media are pumping out!
After Skardu I went back to Gilgit and from there to Hunza valley where I spent a week and did some trekking. Stunning is all I can say.
Lahore.
Before going to Lahore I had some major stomach problems and I had to spend 5 days in bed before I could continue. Fucking hell.
It took me 19 hours to get from Gilgit and the trip down was a real pain in the ass like on the way up.
However, coming into Lahore was like entering a new country again. The weather was warm and humid,the roads are very good compared to many other places in Pakistan and the western junk food chains are visible in every corner. The first thing I did was to go to McDonald’s of all places in the world. I usually always stay from these junkfood chains when I’m travelling, because trying out all kinds of street food is much more interesting and often also tastier. At this point I was very tired of eating the same food every day in the north. Only the thought of any more nan,chapatis,chicken biryani, mixed vegetables and dal made me want to throw up. It was the first western junkfood I’ve had in three months, and goddamn it was good! But it was also very expensive, four euros for a big mac. I could have enjoyed four meals for that price in a local restaurant.
Anyway,my host in Lahore took Couchsurfing into another level. The guy himself was on a business trip to Karachi but he sent his office manager and driver to pick me up at the bus station. As he was gone I alone had full access to his house,car with private driver and a personal cook that made me food whenever i wanted to! That’s what I call true hospitality!
However it turned out to be a quite boring place to be because I had nothing to do there so i changed place to an excellent guesthouse in the centre.
His driver took me to the guesthouse and on the way when we were waiting at a road crossing some people started to hammer on the windows. I turned around to see what the hell is going on and to my big surprise there were a bunch elder ladyboys. I locked the doors and the driver said I should watch out for these guys. He explained that these elder gentlemen are way out of date so they got no customers anymore and that’s why they hit the streets to beg money and rob people. I saw plenty of them just on the way to the guesthouse and I was quite surprised of seeing them here. I had no idea that ladyboys existed and were accepted in a Islamic country. Ladyboys exists all over Southeast Asia,especially in Thailand you can see them everywhere. Buddhism is very liberal and tolerant to these kind of things, but Pakistan is a Muslim country and the relation and marriage between man and woman is very important and respected in Islam so it was really strange to see that there actually is room for other kinds of sexual minorities and ideas.
However, Lahore got seven million inhabitants and it is a really cool city 30km from the Indian border. The first day I checked one of the biggest and probably the best looking mosque in the world, impressive building The old town of Lahore is amazing, it feels like travelling back in time 300 years. You can see buildings and mosques that never been renovated, there are still some in original shape just like the way they were built and painted in the 15th century. There is a redlight district in Lahore also, I was sitting on a motorbike through it and I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures but I could at least notice that they are not suffering from any lack of customers over there. Outside the redlight district is some kind of a park and there you can see people in a terrible state injecting heroin openly. Pakistan got five million heroin addicts. What a fucked up place.
However, there is a lot of drugs going here and people do it quite openly. One day I went out to the countryside do some job on the fields,harvesting rice rather spoken. Hell of a job to do it manually, there is not a lot of machines here so most of the jobs on the countryside are done by hand in a primitive way. There I also got invited in to a Sufi-place where they had big sacks of marijuana which they made drinks of. It’s really easy for the people to get it here because marijuana is growing everywhere in the nature. I must admit I had my share there, as a foreign guest it’s very rude to decline food and drinks. Fruity people.
Yesterday I also went to some kind of a Sufi-night. Sufism is a kind of Islamic mysticism. The people believe that they are in direct contact with God, by meditating,hyphnosis, psychedelic dancing, traditional music and hash. The place where the celebration were held had a quite special atmosphere. Candles were burning, two guys with long hair and long beard and colourful clothes were playing their big drums without a break for two hours in a row. People were sitting on the floor and smoking hash like chimneys. In the middle of the floor people were in trance and dancing some traditional Sufi dance, they repeated the same move over and over again for two hours. It had a really psychedelic feeling, it felt almost like being in some zombie ritual movie in Africa. Very strange but very interesting. This is what makes Pakistan to an interesting country to travel in and this is also what makes Western Europe in general so boring to travel around in. No matter to which country you choose to go to, the culture and religion is basically the same. Here you can find so many different cultures and religions and languages in the same place.
Yesterday was the first day of the new Islamic year. There are some interesting festivals and processions going on here next week so that’s why I decided to extend my visa with one more month. It’s a really cool place to just hang out in so that’s why Igot no hurries to get out of here. I got only four weeks left of my Indian visa so i won’t see a lot of India. I’ve already booked a flight out of India.
Going into India and out of the muslimworld will be involve many changes. There will be a lot of things that I will see in India that have been almost impossible to see or experience in Iraq,Iran and Pakistan.
I had planned to be here for maybe four or five days but it’s a really cool place with cool people so it’s been nice to just chill out here for a while. Being on the road constantly is hard work. It’s been great to not sit in any bumpy buses for a couple of weeks.
However, the last weeks deeds except all the slacking has been all about festivals and processions.
Urs is the death anniversary of a Sufi saint in South Asia, and it took place last Wednesday in Pakapattan. It’s a place three hours south of Lahore. I hired a car together with a Swiss, French and a Korean guy. I had absolutely no expectations for the festival and I had no idea about what we are going to see. It was very crowded and chaotic and the atmosphere was very intense. We wanted to go the Sufi shrine to participate in the celebrations but police didn’t let us in. We were roaming around there for 14 hours and were invited in for dinner and tea countless of times. A lot of people there had apparently not seen any white dudes before so some of them were overexcited.
We were like the biggest rock stars ever, there were people with phones and cameras everywhere who took pictures of us. I don’t know how many times I was captured on picture but it must have been hundreds of times. I started to think that fucking hell, how annoying it must be for celebrities that have to live with that every time they step their foot outside their front door.
However, there were a lot of Qawali bands playing there. I really like their drumming but I can’t stand the way the guys are singing. It sounds like a full-grown man being raped. Terrible. Especially when their sound system was shitty as hell. They had turned the volume up so hard that it was cutting through the speakers. Horrifying, it made my skin crawl.
Anyway, later we found a place where only drummers were playing. That was really cool, like Max Cavalera said once ” A few acoustic bongo drummers can sound heavier than the heaviest metal band out there” and I can’t agree more.
There I could also see a lot of stoned people who were dancing and singing in trans, that might be a little bit scary to see at first but there is nothing to be afraid of. I guess it’s just healthy to see and experience stuff like that. People all over the world are exercising different kind of psychedelic rituals to get them closer to God. It’s just in the western world where we have forgotten these kind of things. It’s a shame, spirituality is important.
After too much Kashmiri tea and sonalvas and too many hours of music and Islamic prayers we decided to leave in the middle of the night. We were back at the guesthouse in the morning and I slept the whole next day away. On Saturday the intention was to participate in the Ashura festival where a lot of bloody things and chaos were going on. Unfortunately the security was too tight. There were 25000 policemen and approximately 25000 soldiers and rangers to secure the city from any bomb blasts. The processions were targeted both in 2010 and 2011 so it’s understandable that the security was really tight. On Sunday we tried again, but no chance. The police didn’t allow us in under any circumstances. The biggest reason for this was because the locals thought that the French guy who was with me looked like a Taliban. Long hair and long beard. Shiamuslims don’t grow long beards. I though it was a little bit funny, they should be outside the supermarket when the French guy is coming out with a bag full of baguettes on his back and a box of croissants in his hands. That doesn’t look really Talibanic to me.
But shame on he who gives up, I was wearing my black shalwar khameez just like all the Shia people and I and Mr France went on another round by on our own. This time we passed several checkpoints without any problems with the police but we didn’t get into the “red zone” where people were slashing themselves with knives. We couldn’t see the action, but we could see a lot of bloody clothes and completely teared up backs. Some backs were really badly sliced up. They are doing this because of mourning for the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad and his suffering and martyrdom, and the sacrifices he made to keep Islam alive. If you are interested to know more about it you can google it up by yourselves. This is the thing that separates the Shias from the Sunnis.
When I got back to the guesthouse the TV was on. They were sending live from the processions and after a few minutes of watching I was just happy that we didn’t get in. It was so unbelievable crowded out there and people were going nuts. Worse than any moshpit that I’ve seen. We could have been killed. Crazy people.
Two months in Pakistan overview.
During my two months here I’ve seen a lot of very different sides of Pakistan. From the dusty and chaotic Baluchistan to the beauty of the mountainous north. From the redlight district in Lahore to the clean streets of Islamabad. I’ve seen so called Talibans walking around with AK-47′s on their shoulders and I’ve seen Ladyboys way out of their date begging on the streets for money. I’ve seen villages that been drowned in mud by floodings and snow covered mountain peaks higher than 8000m.I’ve seen people beating their bodies with knives while others were injecting heroin in public. I’ve been escorted in the desert with five policemen with machine guns and I’ve been sitting on bus roofs through the Himalayas.
Pakistan is sure the land of contrasts and paradoxes.
I definitely not regret my choice of travelling here,it’s been a great experience and I’ve seen and done a lot of things even though I had my share of problems. I must say that I don’t recommend anyone to travel by land from the Iran border to Quetta. It’s a lot of hassle,you loose a lot of valuable time and it’s dangerous and simply not worth the risk. After I saw the up blown bus on the road and experienced the massive amount of heavy armed policemen and soldiers on the streets of Quetta, it wasn’t hard to understand that they actually were there for a reason. If I would do this route all over again, I would take a flight from Shiraz in Iran directly to Islamabad. I talked with a German girl who travelled alone through Baluchistan,just like me she had to stay the night at a checkpoint because the risk of Taliban attacks. Next morning she wanted to jump on the earliest bus to Quetta, she tried to stop the bus but the policemen didn’t allow her to go because they wanted to her give police escort all the way to Quetta. She became very angry at them when they didn’t let her go but if she had gone inside that bus she had been dead today. That bus was attacked by Talibans a few hours later and that was the same up blown bus I saw. Everybody were killed.
Two weeks ago I met a Chinese girl who wanted to go to Quetta, I recommended her to not go because it’s not worth it. Anyway,she came back to Lahore a few days ago and then she told me that she was only 200m away from the bomb that exploded there last week. A lot of people were killed. Seriously, think twice about the necessity of going through Baluchistan before you decide to go. Adventure is great,but to the price of what? Is it really worth to risk your own life? It’s a thin line between being brave and very stupid.
Northern Pakistan is a true hidden pearl. It’s not a secret, but it’s strange how it’s already kind of forgotten. A few decades ago Pakistan had a great amount of tourists but after 9/11 the western media has done a good job to scare all the visitors away,and they still do. The possibilities are endless when it comes to trekking,fishing,mountain climbing, safaris, or cultural experiences. A big problem in the north is the lack of good infrastructure. The conditions are rough and the roads are in such a bad shape so it takes 24 hours to travel by bus while the same distance takes 45 min by air. One reason why the Pakistani government don’t invest a lot of money on the infrastructure in the Northern areas is because they are tax-free areas. But the people of the north say they are more than happy to pay tax if they get infrastructure,hospitals and schools for the money. However, Northern Pakistan is great and I will return some time when it’s spring or summer. It was excellent to be here in the beginning of the winter because there were almost no tourists and the weather was great,the negative thing was that I couldn’t go to some places because there was too much snow already.
The most important things you’ll need in Pakistan is time and patience. Everything is so slow and everything takes much longer than expected. If someone tells you that it’s a five minutes walk to the place you want to go, you can count it’s at least 20 min. If you’re told that your bus will depart at 09:00, it’s still there at 10:30. Everything is very unreliable so it’s smart to not have a tight time schedule.
People are also unreliable, if you ask them something and they don’t know,they will never admit that they don’t know. Instead they will give you the answer you want to hear. This is very frustrating sometimes, especially with rickshaw drivers. If you want to go to a place and you ask the driver if he is 100% where the place is. Every single time he says, yes yes no problem! It usually ends up with that we are in the middle of nowhere and the driver got no idea of where we are or where the place is. It’s not hard to figure out that this demands both a lot of time and patience. It’s nothing wrong with saying I don’t know. Goddamn it.
They are just over friendly and they are over helping all the time. Patience is the key.
Otherwise Pakistan rocks! Like I’ve told you in my previous posts, it’s dirt-cheap,there is a lot of things to do and see, and a little bit dangerous also. All necessary indigents you need for a great adventure! If someone got any questions about travelling around in these areas, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Hell yes.
Background.
After my month in Iran it was time to put on my hardcore shoes and cross the border to Pakistan. I had no specific interests of what to see in Pakistan except to see what all the fuzz in the Western media is all about. I have a fetish for off the beaten path countries and Pakistan certainly belongs to one of them.
With other words spoken. I let Pakistan come to me, and hell it did.
Country.
Pakistan is extremely diverse and diveded into different regions.
Desert in the Southwest, in the North you have the mountainous Himalayas with several peaks over 8000m. In the Southeast you have real tropical climate and in the east the fertile Punjab region.
People.
Most people look like how stereotypical Talibans are pictured in Western media,but there are of course exceptions. People are extremely curious and everybody is staring at you all the time and they often approach you and starts to ask questions. Usually they are very friendly but sometimes you bump into some real Islamic fanatics who might give you a hard time about Islam. You will be offered tea and hashish all the time. However even if these people are friendly, they are unreliable as hell. You should never trust anyone or what they promise and you'll be good.
Women.
No women are visible in the streets. I think I saw less than 10 women during two months.
Visa.
These days you need to apply for a visa in your country of origin or at your home countrys embassy, for me this meant that I got my Paki visa in Stockholm,Sweden for 20€. It's impossible to get it abroad at some other embassy. However I met aAustralian couple in Lahore who strangly got it in Vietnam, but consider this as an exception. The good thing with this visa is that once you are in Pakistan, you can extend it how many times you want, and it's free!
I extended mine twice.
Getting in.
Easiest way is to fly straight to Islamabad.
You can cross the land border from Iran, China and India.
Costs.
Guesthouse 1-3€ per night.
Pack of smokes 0,50€.
Food at middle class restaurant 1-2€.
Beer, ( if you can find) 5€.
The Iran-Pakistan bordercrossing.
I wrote this down when I was in Pakistan so the writing is catching my feelings and experiences at the very moment. I apologise for my blurry writing since I'm not a native English speaker.
I left Zahedan, Iran and took a shared taxi towards the Pakistani border. I was told that ride was going to take about one hour,but of course nothing can go that easy. After half the way they stopped us at an Iranian checkpoint and I was told that I’m not allowed to continue without escort. I had to wait maybe around 45min for the escort before we could continue.
The taxi driver got frustrated when he had to waste his time with me, but it was his own choice to take me to the border. After about two hours we got to the border and there were a lot of people outside waiting. The soldier took me in and the place were packed with people. The soldier couldn’t speak any English but an old guy showed up and explained to me that the computer system had been broken down all day and no one had yet been able to cross the border during whole day. Shit…
The good thing about being escorted was that the soldier took me first in line to wait, the line was incredible long because people had been waiting there since the early morning. After two hours of waiting I started loose the hope about make it across the border on that day because I knew the border will close at 2pm. Around 12 o’clock the system started to work again and i got my exit stamp and the soldier escorted me to the Pakistani side and said :
” Voila, Pakistan! Are you happy now?”
Iranians don’t like Pakistan. That is clear as crystal water.
On the Pakistani side they also took me to be first in line to get my entry stamp and after that I was free to go, or that was what I thought...
Outside the custom office were a lot of people who wanted to exchange money for a worthless rate, but I knew I could get a much more better rate at the bazaar in Taftan three kilometers away.
At this point the Pakistan police escort hassle begun. The taxi driver took me to the nearest police station and there I was told that I must have an armed police guard with me all the way to Quetta. Well whatever I said and told him to hurry up because the last bus was soon leaving. The taxidriver took us to the bazaar in Taftan and there I could by a ticket to Quetta, it felt very expensive now when I was used to the ultra cheap buses in Iran. I got my ticket and went outside and thought fucking hell..
I was only three kilometers on the Pakistani side and it felt that I’ve come to another continent and traveled 50 years back in time.
There were no asphalt, trash were lying everywhere, everything were really chaotic,noisy and dusty. Iran was very Western,very clean,calm and organised compared to what I saw on the Pakistani side,but I liked it.
This was something new,something different that I hadn’t seen before.
Anyway, I was waiting for the people to finish their loading of the bus, this is one of the countries where they drive with a shitload of stuff on the roof of the bus. I went into the bus, they packed the bus full with people and it took very long. They putted plastic chairs in the walkway in the bus so they could fit in more people.
Finally at 4pm we left, the road was bumpy as hell and they played some Baluchi music very loud. well,whatever I thought..I was happy that we finally were on our way. After maybe one hour we reached the first checkpoint, me and the guard were sitting almost in the back of the bus so we had to climb and jump and crawl over people and stuff to get out. It’s only foreigners and guards that need to get off the bus, at the checkpoint they gave me a sheet where I had to write down my name,passport number,visa number,country,my route,reg.plate of the bus and a signature. I noticed there had been maybe five other travellers travelling this route in the last two weeks.
Well, I stumbled into the bus again and took our seats and on our way we were again. Outside there were only desert and the bus had to use the horn quite frequently to avoid crashing into camels. I fell asleep for a while and then the guard woke up and showed me that we had to get out again, what the fuck! It wasn’t even 45min ago since the last time! It was another checkpoint where I had to do exactly the same procedure and stumble into the bus again over all the people and stuff in the walkway. And I had to repeat this fucking procedure 6-7 times until 11pm! In and out of the bus all the time, but it sure was a great way to exercise and the people were friendly and patient with the whole thing and just smiled. At several points when the bus stopped people wanted to talk with me.
All the time i got the same questions…
-Where are you from, mister! Finland
- Huh!? England? No. FINLAND
- Do you have wife? No.
- Why?! I don’t know.
- Are you Muslim? No.
Silence…..
- Do you accept Islam?!. Yes I do.
By then I realised the people here are really religious and almost fundamentalistic and I better give them the right answers or then…Never ever say that you are a non-believer in these areas. It’s always better to say you are a Christian.
However. At midnight the bus stopped again and they started to shout that I should get out and bring my bag! What the hell! In the middle of night somewhere in the middle of nothing! When I got out in the dark there were a lot of people armed to their teeths with guns and they told me to follow them. At this point I didn’t know if these guys were fucking Taliban’s or armed carpet sellers or policemen because it was very dark so I didn’t see much. It turned out that it was 5-6 policemen who took me in to a checkpoint were they explained to me that I need to spend the night there. They said it wasn’t safe for me to continue my travel in the night because of the increasing Taliban activity that has been going on recently a little bit further forward. Two days before they blew up a gasoline truck over there. Anyhow, the policemen were a friendly bunch of people and some of them could talk good English so we were chatting and drinking tea and listening to The Black Keys for a couple of hours. Then they asked if I wanted to sleep and I said hellyeah. They took me out and I thought this is good, I’ll probably get a bed to sleep in or something. Haha.. What a joke, they claimed that they wanted to protect me but the place were just carpet on a pile of soil,outside of course. So i spent my first night on this trip sleeping outside under the stars. It was fucking cold, around 6-7 + degrees, I put all the clothes that I had on me and layed down and fell a sleep. After two hours I woke up and thought I was going to freeze my titties off! I was shivering like hell so Inwent back to the hut were the policemen where to get warm again. There I caught the policemen watching porn movies on their cellphones and then they started to show me pictures of female travellers that also had stayed some nights there.
First they are standing there cocky and proud with their guns and asking me if i accept Islam in a very threatful way, and then I see something like that.
True followers of Islam…Yeah right.
They told me that a bus will show at 6am that can take me to Quetta but instead pickup truck showed up at 7am
I sat on the back of a pick up truck with two armed policemen and they escorted me to the next checkpoint where another pickup where waiting for me with new guards. It was frickin cold to sit on the back of a pickup truck in the early morning in a speed of 100km/h because the pickup truck was not covered. It was all open air and the sight was excellent.I saw two buses on the road that had been blown up by Talibans. Sick.
Those guys took me to the next checkpoint where I had to wait for another pickup truck to show up. This whole process lasted 10 hours before Iwas in Quetta. The same thing happened over and over again with pickup trucks and armed policemen by my side. I lost the count but I was escorted by at least 14-15 different pickup trucks. On the last escort into the city of Quetta i had five policemen with me. One at the steering wheel,two in the back, one in the front seat and one with a machine gun on the roof and of course the sirens on! It took me 34hours to travel about 600km.
Coming into Quetta was quite an experience, the traffic culture is shocking. You can find anything on the streets, motorbikes,bicycles,donkeys,trucks,buses,sheeps and rickshaws and all are moving around in a very chaotic way. This capital of Baluchistan is so much different from Iran. Like an another planet, everything is very dirty, trash is lying everywhere, people are pissing in the streets a lot of noise and everything is very dusty! Everyone wear traditional clothes and got big beards. Just like the traditional stereotype of a Taliban.I’m probably the only one here who are walking around in jeans. Some people are also walking around with guns here. I don’t like when people who are not dressed in uniforms walks around with rifles. You never know…
However this is something new to me and I have never seen anything like this before. Cambodia,Philippines and Mongolia are like very clean and organised compared to this. But I somehow liked it!
Now there is some action going on again.
But the people are really friendly here and they speak surprisingly good English, every time I’m walking around in the streets people are inviting me in for dinner or tea and they are even offering me a place to sleep there. They seem to be very happy to meet some foreigners, I guess there are no too much of them over here.
Officially I’m not allowed to walk around in streets after 6pm without police escort here but I’ve done it anyway and nothing threatening has happened. Yesterday evening i took a rickshaw to the bus station to buy a ticket to Lahore. There they told me that I need a NOC document to be allowed to travel by bus to Lahore,so i went to the police station to get it. But of course i didn’t get it…. There I met the police chief of Quetta again and he said “:What?! Are you coming here with a rickshaw in the evening?! Are you crazy?! This is one of the most dangerous cities in the world and you are using a rickshaw! For god sake! Don’t go out in Quetta after dark without a police escort! For gods sake! ”
I ended up sitting there and chatting with them for an hour and the police chief and I became good friends,after that four police officers escorted me back to the hotel. I think they are overreacting a bit, but the law is the law and they are meaning well.
It’s impossible to do anything here when the police are watching you all the time and hotel owners don’t let you out on the streets so two days is enough for this place, but now I’m still here lurking around. I had a bus ticket to Lahore, but this morning when i was about to leave the hotel manager called the police and they didn’t let me go. They said I’m not allowed to go anywhere without the NOC document so they escorted me to the place where i could get it. I knew this was just waste of time because i already went there yesterday and they refused to give me the document. Same thing happened today and they totally ignored me and said that this is not their headache. They want me to take a flight, but I refuse to pay for an expensive flight and the Pakistan Airplanes aren’t really the safest aircrafts in the world..
The situation in Quetta had been quite hopeless and frustrating for a couple of days, but after I changed hotel everything changed to bright side again. This hotel had no curfew for guests so I was allowed to go out after 1800 hours. I shared a room with the Hungarian guy i met in Isfahan and he was on the way to the northern Pakistan like me and in exactly the same hopeless situation that I was in . Taking a bus was no longer an option because the danger to be kidnapped is obviously too high to let any foreigners travel by road. We had to choose from a three day long nasty train ride,or the more expensive alternative to travel by air, but the earliest flight from Quetta that had any seats left was departing on Sunday and that meant four days of waiting…
The guys at this hotel helped us out a lot compared to the fucking mafia hotel. They checked both prices and timetables for train and flights for us but they couldn’t book anything and we couldn’t decide what to do.
Later I went to the internetcafé and I spent a couple of hours there, when I paid my bill a guy from the booth nearby turned around and asked me to sit down for a minute so we could have a chat. I was exhausted but I thought that this guy could maybe help us out. The guy were a true gentleman and he asked how he could help us out meanwhile he was sipping his whisky. We explained our situation and within a few minutes the guy made some phone calls and Tadaa, he reserved us a pair of tickets to Islamabad on Friday evening! I don’t know how he did it because every flight until Sunday were fully booked. Anyway, I don’t know if flying with Pakistan Airlines made my trip in Pakistan any safer but it definitely made it more interesting.
Coming to Islamabad
The flight from Quetta to Islamabad went surprisingly smoothly. The plane was definitely the oldest aircraft I’ve ever used. I’m not surprised that the biggest part of the Pakistan Airlines fleet is banned to fly into the European Union.
Islamabad is a bloody boring city. The city is so green and clean compared to the chaotic Quetta. There is asphalt everywhere and the traffic is very smooth. The capital city was built in the 1950′s a while after Pakistan got their independence and they decided to move it from Karachi up north. The whole city is divided into big quarters with big streets,exactly like neighbourhoods in American movies. There is nothing to do here if you not know any cool people to hang around with. It’s on my top on my “The most boring capitals in the world ” along with Vientiane in Laos.
Islamabad is probably the most modern city in Pakistan, you can see in a lot of ways. The cars are more modern,the people are more modern, the houses are more modern, the lifestyle is more modern. You can find McDonald’s,Starbucks,Pizza Hut and those kind of things here. Most of the people don’t wear traditional clothes like in Quetta and here you can actually see woman on the streets .Quetta was more like the biggest sausage party I’ve ever seen. In Pakistan woman don’t need to cover themselves or wear scarfs,but a lot of woman prefer to do it anyway because they can get in trouble otherwise. The law in Pakistan is whatever the policeman says it is. If you are a woman and you are walking on the streets without covering your body, and the policeman for some reason don’t like you. He can give you a fine. The same thing goes with everything else here.
The same thing goes for alcohol. There are no bars or clubs but you can find liquor stores here but you need to get a liquor license to be allowed to buy there. It’s not a problem for a foreigner even if it takes a few weeks to get it, but it’s difficult for a local. But there is a way around it for foreigners.
The first night I went into the RED ZONE where all the embassies are located. It’s a huge area where no Pakistanis are allowed to enter. I had to cross six checkpoints before I got to the Club 21 near the french embassy and there I could find a bar. There is also a Canadian club and an American club. These places are off-limits for Pakistani passport holders but if you are a foreigner you just have to show your passport and then they will let you in. However, the bar had a big business atmosphere and there were mostly all kinds of diplomats hanging out. Very boring but I had a few pints and then I left. The second night I went with my host to a Chinese restaurant where they served beers “under the table”.
It was the first and the last time for me in Pakistan..
Another strange thing you can find here is a market with second-hand clothes of American soldiers. Dead American soldiers….who served their duty in Afghanistan
Anyway, I spent a few days in Islamabad and the continued my trip.
Highway to the Himalayas.
I went to the ticket office in Rawalpindi to get a bus ticket to the North, there. I met a guy from Saudi Arabia. He was kind enough to pick me up the next day with his bike and he took me to his friends from Gilgit who were on their way back home. I joined them to the bus station and then we left towards the Himalayas. I was very close to postpone this trip because in the morning I had a very bad stomach after the 21 inch pizza I downed the night before, but I had already purchased my ticket for 16€ so there were no other options than to go.
The bus was really oldschool and from another time. I had seat nr 15 and fuck me sideways if there not was a big crack in the window next to me. Like the diarrhoea wasn’t bad enough, it also seemed that I had to freeze my nuts off. Away we went and then it started to rain, the first time I’ve seen any rain in three months. The road was more curvy and bumpy than the body of Shakira. Probably the worst road I’ve ever seen..
After five hours we had to wait for three hours for other buses and vehicles to join in. We were driving in a convoy of at least 35 buses and minibuses because the risk of Talibans and other road pirates. These mountain terrorists use to block the road and kill all passengers so that’s why they always are driving in convoys escorted by policemen with machine guns. There were also several checkpoints where I had to get of the bus and do the same paperwork like at the road between Taftan and Quetta. The ride was quite chilly at night because of the broken window but that was not the biggest problem. My stomach was…
Anyway, the trip lasted 26 fucking hours before I was in Gilgit. I must admit that the scenery is spectacular to say to least. The road is to 99,5% without any fences to prevent vehicles from falling down into the abyss and that’s enough for a lot of people to shit in their pants. Like I said, the buses are quite old and the drivers are not the most reliable in the world. You know, these Muslims are like every other religious fanatics in the world. They are not afraid of dying, if an accident happens it’s Gods will and it was meant to happen and their next life in heaven will be wonderful anyway. That’s just their philosophy.
In Gilgit town there are not many things to do, it’s more like a rest place and a base where people go to other places from. I get a little Laplandic feel here, big mountains,blue rivers,the smell of burning firewood and barbecued meat,but no tourists.
Gilgit and Mount Nangaparbat.
I met another Finnish guy at the guesthouse in Gilgit and he wanted to do the same trek as me so we decided to do it together. The next morning our guide met us at the guesthouse and after a delicious cup of milk tea we went to the bus station to catch a minibus to Raiko bridge. We were 23 people packed in a fucking Hiace and it took us 2,5 hours to get to the bridge, it was only 75km away but this is Pakistan..
At the bridge a jeep waited for us and it took us around one hour to reach 2300m. I can tell you folks that, that ride wasn’t a dance on roses. Holy hell. It was the steepest and one of the most exciting rides I’ve ever had! The road was less than three meters wide at some points and when I looked down i could see that the abyss had a depth of at least 1km. If something had gone wrong nobody had been able to find us,simply because there wouldn’t have been anything left of us or the jeep. There were also big rocks on the road everywhere because they are falling down all the time mainly caused by goats climbing in the mountains high above the road. If a rock of that magnitude had rolled over us we had been smashed. Bigtime. However,it gave me a good adrenaline kick,far better than any amusement parks has given me. Well,maybe except for the fastest roller coaster in the world at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi. That one kicked my ass.
Anyway, the jeep dropped us off at a small mountain village where we had a quick lunch break. After that we started to climb uphill. At around 2700m it started to get quite tough. Our guide was a very fast walker and I had a hell of time trying to keep up with him. I guess my lungs have never been working that hard before and my heartbeat had never been higher. It didn’t matter how much I breathed,I still couldn’t get oxygen enough. But after a while and few short breaks we reached Fairy Meadows at an altitude of 3125m. The view was already breathtaking even if it was getting dark and the sky wasn’t really visible. The old men at the “campsite” welcomed us with a bucket of tasty milk tea. To my great luck they had one tree house with a fireplace where i could dry my sweaty clothes. All my clothes were at the laundry so I hadn’t any extra clothes with me. That really saved the whole trek for me. I had probably frozen to death sleeping in a cold windy tree house without a heater at -4 Celsius with only soaking wet clothes. However, they made us a very tasty dinner and then we went to sleep. I looked out through the window at 5:30am and holy macaroni. The sky was clear and the whole Killer Mountain was visible. We waited two more hours and by then sky was absolutely crystal clear. The weather couldn’t have been better. These days are very rare when the whole mountain is visible and you got a blue sky. I think that was the best view I will ever have while I’m enjoying my breakfast. Absolutely amazing.. a camera can never capture what you see with your own eyes.
Unfortunately this glorious moment didn’t last forever. One hour after we finished our breakfast we started to walk toward the Nangaparbat Basecamp. It started to get cloudy already and all the fresh snow were melting. With other words spoken..slippery as hell. This day I had no problem with the breathing or anything. It didn’t take very long before we reached 4000m but unfortunately we couldn’t continue all the way to the base camp because it was too much fresh snow so that made it too dangerous to continue. At this point it was very cloudy and a lot of fog and the mountain wasn’t visible at all. We had a quick lunch break and then our guide told us we must turn around and go back to the “camp” . Fucking hell, this was a slippery episode. These guys had proper trekking shoes and walking sticks and I had only my Puma sneakers with a flat thin bottom. It was very steep downhills and I must admit I had some problems keeping my balance. I slipped a few times and rolled around in the snow and the mud, but what the hell. It didn’t matter, it was a great challenge. Luckily nobody got hurt.
In the evening we got back to the camp and the made us an excellent dinner once again. Fresh meat of mountain chickens and fresh baked nan. Tasty stuff. It snowed quite a lot during the night so that made the next day quite challenging too. The mix of snow,rocks,mud and water makes it slippery as hell when you are walking downhills. However, in the afternoon the jeep picked us up again and took us back to the Raiko bridge again. From there we travelled back to Gilgit in the most awesome way you can ever travel. Two hours on the roof of a minibus! Maybe a little bit dangerous but so incredible nice! You got 360′degree open air view in one of the most beautiful scenery’s on mother earth,fresh air and plenty of legroom. Ain’t getting better than that!
Skardu
I spent the weekend in Gilgit and then I took a minibus on Monday morning to Skardu.The road got for some reason the nickname “The road of dead sheeps” . I didn’t see any dead sheeps, but a lot of those who were alive and well. This 230 km journey lasted eight hours and as like everywhere else in Gilgit-Baltistan the ride was quite a thrill and the scenery was absolutely amazing. Unfortunately I hadn’t the opportunity to sit on the roof this time, maybe better so because I don’t think that my clothes had been warm enough for that.
However Skardu,the heart of Baltistan is located on an altitude of 2400m,almost twice the height of the highest mountain in Finland. It probably most famous for being the starting point for all treks and expeditions to K2. I had planned together with the other Finn and the Hungarian to do a trek to the mighty Desoai Plains,one of the most spectacular places in Gilgit-Baltistan and the second highest plateau in the world located on 4300m. Unfortunately there had fallen too much snow over there already so the whole place is inaccessible until springtime so we couldn’t do it. Anyway, the next morning when I woke up I felt sick as hell. Tired, very feverish and a very aggressive diarrhoea. The guys convinced me to come down and have a breakfast with them,but after 5 minutes I had to run up to our room again and throw up everything,including the tasty dinner I had the night before. I tell you folks, it was nastier then it sounds!
At that point I was sure that my whole Skardu adventure was game over. The only option I had was to intake horizontal position in my bed and guard the toilet door with my all my dignity. Something very evil must had gotten in to my body the night before because all this vomiting and shitting were devastatingly aggressive. I became quite dehydrated during the day because every time I tried to drink a sip of water I had to throw it up again within fifteen minutes. 24.10.2012 was probably the day when I set the unbreakable personal record of how many toilet visits I’ve done in one day…
And the fever, I was shaking and freezing like never before. It didn’t really help the fact that in this part of world they got no heaters in houses. Not even in hotels. So it was around +5 degrees in our room, I had my pullover,jacket and beanie and then I wrapped two thick blankets around me like a tortilla and I was still shaking. A few painkillers did the job to make my situation bearable. I have no idea what caused me this. I basically ate exactly the same food as the other guys,we even shared the same plates. In Pakistan they rarely use any cutlery when they are eating. In most cases you only take a piece of thin bread and wrap the food into it and then you eat it. That’s one the reasons i always wash my hands with antiseptic gel before i eat here. The other is that the toilet procedure is also quite different from the western world. I haven’t seen many western toilets since Istanbul. East of Istanbul it’s the almighty squat toilet that rules! As far as I’ve seen,in Turkey, Iraq Kurdistan,Iran,China and South East Asia they still use toilet paper, but not that’s not the culture in Pakistan! (and probably not in India and Bangladesh either).
There are usually no washbowl in toilets over here,but there are always a few buckets of water. What you do is when you are done with your dirty deeds, you just take one bucket of water and flush your holy pile of glory away down into the hole. Then you make a boat of your right hand,fill it with water and wash your most glorious parts over and over again until you are nice and clean , after that you just wash your hands with soap and voila! That’s it!
To many people this might sound very nasty,but try to think like this. Many people have given me this example.
If you fall and dive with your face into a pile of dogshit. Do you clean yourself with a piece of paper? I guess not. You will probably run to the nearest place where you can find water. However.. I must admit that I usually got a roll of toilet paper in my bag all the time… Think how well the Finnish forest industry would run if every single human on this planet would use toilet paper every day? Or would we run out of threes? Anyway, let’s skip the crap talking and let’s get back to Skardu. The day after I felt surprisingly good, I didn’t feel feverish at all so I joined the guys on a full day walk around Skardu and to the lake Satpara. Awesome weather and awesome views! On the last day we did a full day jeep tour to Khaplu which included even more awesome views and we visited some villages to see how these people live their lives in the mountains. However,Skardu was great and it would had been even better if we had the opportunity to go the Desoai Plains. Northern Pakistan kicks ass! A true hidden pearl behind all bullshit that western media are pumping out!
After Skardu I went back to Gilgit and from there to Hunza valley where I spent a week and did some trekking. Stunning is all I can say.
Lahore.
Before going to Lahore I had some major stomach problems and I had to spend 5 days in bed before I could continue. Fucking hell.
It took me 19 hours to get from Gilgit and the trip down was a real pain in the ass like on the way up.
However, coming into Lahore was like entering a new country again. The weather was warm and humid,the roads are very good compared to many other places in Pakistan and the western junk food chains are visible in every corner. The first thing I did was to go to McDonald’s of all places in the world. I usually always stay from these junkfood chains when I’m travelling, because trying out all kinds of street food is much more interesting and often also tastier. At this point I was very tired of eating the same food every day in the north. Only the thought of any more nan,chapatis,chicken biryani, mixed vegetables and dal made me want to throw up. It was the first western junkfood I’ve had in three months, and goddamn it was good! But it was also very expensive, four euros for a big mac. I could have enjoyed four meals for that price in a local restaurant.
Anyway,my host in Lahore took Couchsurfing into another level. The guy himself was on a business trip to Karachi but he sent his office manager and driver to pick me up at the bus station. As he was gone I alone had full access to his house,car with private driver and a personal cook that made me food whenever i wanted to! That’s what I call true hospitality!
However it turned out to be a quite boring place to be because I had nothing to do there so i changed place to an excellent guesthouse in the centre.
His driver took me to the guesthouse and on the way when we were waiting at a road crossing some people started to hammer on the windows. I turned around to see what the hell is going on and to my big surprise there were a bunch elder ladyboys. I locked the doors and the driver said I should watch out for these guys. He explained that these elder gentlemen are way out of date so they got no customers anymore and that’s why they hit the streets to beg money and rob people. I saw plenty of them just on the way to the guesthouse and I was quite surprised of seeing them here. I had no idea that ladyboys existed and were accepted in a Islamic country. Ladyboys exists all over Southeast Asia,especially in Thailand you can see them everywhere. Buddhism is very liberal and tolerant to these kind of things, but Pakistan is a Muslim country and the relation and marriage between man and woman is very important and respected in Islam so it was really strange to see that there actually is room for other kinds of sexual minorities and ideas.
However, Lahore got seven million inhabitants and it is a really cool city 30km from the Indian border. The first day I checked one of the biggest and probably the best looking mosque in the world, impressive building The old town of Lahore is amazing, it feels like travelling back in time 300 years. You can see buildings and mosques that never been renovated, there are still some in original shape just like the way they were built and painted in the 15th century. There is a redlight district in Lahore also, I was sitting on a motorbike through it and I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures but I could at least notice that they are not suffering from any lack of customers over there. Outside the redlight district is some kind of a park and there you can see people in a terrible state injecting heroin openly. Pakistan got five million heroin addicts. What a fucked up place.
However, there is a lot of drugs going here and people do it quite openly. One day I went out to the countryside do some job on the fields,harvesting rice rather spoken. Hell of a job to do it manually, there is not a lot of machines here so most of the jobs on the countryside are done by hand in a primitive way. There I also got invited in to a Sufi-place where they had big sacks of marijuana which they made drinks of. It’s really easy for the people to get it here because marijuana is growing everywhere in the nature. I must admit I had my share there, as a foreign guest it’s very rude to decline food and drinks. Fruity people.
Yesterday I also went to some kind of a Sufi-night. Sufism is a kind of Islamic mysticism. The people believe that they are in direct contact with God, by meditating,hyphnosis, psychedelic dancing, traditional music and hash. The place where the celebration were held had a quite special atmosphere. Candles were burning, two guys with long hair and long beard and colourful clothes were playing their big drums without a break for two hours in a row. People were sitting on the floor and smoking hash like chimneys. In the middle of the floor people were in trance and dancing some traditional Sufi dance, they repeated the same move over and over again for two hours. It had a really psychedelic feeling, it felt almost like being in some zombie ritual movie in Africa. Very strange but very interesting. This is what makes Pakistan to an interesting country to travel in and this is also what makes Western Europe in general so boring to travel around in. No matter to which country you choose to go to, the culture and religion is basically the same. Here you can find so many different cultures and religions and languages in the same place.
Yesterday was the first day of the new Islamic year. There are some interesting festivals and processions going on here next week so that’s why I decided to extend my visa with one more month. It’s a really cool place to just hang out in so that’s why Igot no hurries to get out of here. I got only four weeks left of my Indian visa so i won’t see a lot of India. I’ve already booked a flight out of India.
Going into India and out of the muslimworld will be involve many changes. There will be a lot of things that I will see in India that have been almost impossible to see or experience in Iraq,Iran and Pakistan.
I had planned to be here for maybe four or five days but it’s a really cool place with cool people so it’s been nice to just chill out here for a while. Being on the road constantly is hard work. It’s been great to not sit in any bumpy buses for a couple of weeks.
However, the last weeks deeds except all the slacking has been all about festivals and processions.
Urs is the death anniversary of a Sufi saint in South Asia, and it took place last Wednesday in Pakapattan. It’s a place three hours south of Lahore. I hired a car together with a Swiss, French and a Korean guy. I had absolutely no expectations for the festival and I had no idea about what we are going to see. It was very crowded and chaotic and the atmosphere was very intense. We wanted to go the Sufi shrine to participate in the celebrations but police didn’t let us in. We were roaming around there for 14 hours and were invited in for dinner and tea countless of times. A lot of people there had apparently not seen any white dudes before so some of them were overexcited.
We were like the biggest rock stars ever, there were people with phones and cameras everywhere who took pictures of us. I don’t know how many times I was captured on picture but it must have been hundreds of times. I started to think that fucking hell, how annoying it must be for celebrities that have to live with that every time they step their foot outside their front door.
However, there were a lot of Qawali bands playing there. I really like their drumming but I can’t stand the way the guys are singing. It sounds like a full-grown man being raped. Terrible. Especially when their sound system was shitty as hell. They had turned the volume up so hard that it was cutting through the speakers. Horrifying, it made my skin crawl.
Anyway, later we found a place where only drummers were playing. That was really cool, like Max Cavalera said once ” A few acoustic bongo drummers can sound heavier than the heaviest metal band out there” and I can’t agree more.
There I could also see a lot of stoned people who were dancing and singing in trans, that might be a little bit scary to see at first but there is nothing to be afraid of. I guess it’s just healthy to see and experience stuff like that. People all over the world are exercising different kind of psychedelic rituals to get them closer to God. It’s just in the western world where we have forgotten these kind of things. It’s a shame, spirituality is important.
After too much Kashmiri tea and sonalvas and too many hours of music and Islamic prayers we decided to leave in the middle of the night. We were back at the guesthouse in the morning and I slept the whole next day away. On Saturday the intention was to participate in the Ashura festival where a lot of bloody things and chaos were going on. Unfortunately the security was too tight. There were 25000 policemen and approximately 25000 soldiers and rangers to secure the city from any bomb blasts. The processions were targeted both in 2010 and 2011 so it’s understandable that the security was really tight. On Sunday we tried again, but no chance. The police didn’t allow us in under any circumstances. The biggest reason for this was because the locals thought that the French guy who was with me looked like a Taliban. Long hair and long beard. Shiamuslims don’t grow long beards. I though it was a little bit funny, they should be outside the supermarket when the French guy is coming out with a bag full of baguettes on his back and a box of croissants in his hands. That doesn’t look really Talibanic to me.
But shame on he who gives up, I was wearing my black shalwar khameez just like all the Shia people and I and Mr France went on another round by on our own. This time we passed several checkpoints without any problems with the police but we didn’t get into the “red zone” where people were slashing themselves with knives. We couldn’t see the action, but we could see a lot of bloody clothes and completely teared up backs. Some backs were really badly sliced up. They are doing this because of mourning for the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad and his suffering and martyrdom, and the sacrifices he made to keep Islam alive. If you are interested to know more about it you can google it up by yourselves. This is the thing that separates the Shias from the Sunnis.
When I got back to the guesthouse the TV was on. They were sending live from the processions and after a few minutes of watching I was just happy that we didn’t get in. It was so unbelievable crowded out there and people were going nuts. Worse than any moshpit that I’ve seen. We could have been killed. Crazy people.
Two months in Pakistan overview.
During my two months here I’ve seen a lot of very different sides of Pakistan. From the dusty and chaotic Baluchistan to the beauty of the mountainous north. From the redlight district in Lahore to the clean streets of Islamabad. I’ve seen so called Talibans walking around with AK-47′s on their shoulders and I’ve seen Ladyboys way out of their date begging on the streets for money. I’ve seen villages that been drowned in mud by floodings and snow covered mountain peaks higher than 8000m.I’ve seen people beating their bodies with knives while others were injecting heroin in public. I’ve been escorted in the desert with five policemen with machine guns and I’ve been sitting on bus roofs through the Himalayas.
Pakistan is sure the land of contrasts and paradoxes.
I definitely not regret my choice of travelling here,it’s been a great experience and I’ve seen and done a lot of things even though I had my share of problems. I must say that I don’t recommend anyone to travel by land from the Iran border to Quetta. It’s a lot of hassle,you loose a lot of valuable time and it’s dangerous and simply not worth the risk. After I saw the up blown bus on the road and experienced the massive amount of heavy armed policemen and soldiers on the streets of Quetta, it wasn’t hard to understand that they actually were there for a reason. If I would do this route all over again, I would take a flight from Shiraz in Iran directly to Islamabad. I talked with a German girl who travelled alone through Baluchistan,just like me she had to stay the night at a checkpoint because the risk of Taliban attacks. Next morning she wanted to jump on the earliest bus to Quetta, she tried to stop the bus but the policemen didn’t allow her to go because they wanted to her give police escort all the way to Quetta. She became very angry at them when they didn’t let her go but if she had gone inside that bus she had been dead today. That bus was attacked by Talibans a few hours later and that was the same up blown bus I saw. Everybody were killed.
Two weeks ago I met a Chinese girl who wanted to go to Quetta, I recommended her to not go because it’s not worth it. Anyway,she came back to Lahore a few days ago and then she told me that she was only 200m away from the bomb that exploded there last week. A lot of people were killed. Seriously, think twice about the necessity of going through Baluchistan before you decide to go. Adventure is great,but to the price of what? Is it really worth to risk your own life? It’s a thin line between being brave and very stupid.
Northern Pakistan is a true hidden pearl. It’s not a secret, but it’s strange how it’s already kind of forgotten. A few decades ago Pakistan had a great amount of tourists but after 9/11 the western media has done a good job to scare all the visitors away,and they still do. The possibilities are endless when it comes to trekking,fishing,mountain climbing, safaris, or cultural experiences. A big problem in the north is the lack of good infrastructure. The conditions are rough and the roads are in such a bad shape so it takes 24 hours to travel by bus while the same distance takes 45 min by air. One reason why the Pakistani government don’t invest a lot of money on the infrastructure in the Northern areas is because they are tax-free areas. But the people of the north say they are more than happy to pay tax if they get infrastructure,hospitals and schools for the money. However, Northern Pakistan is great and I will return some time when it’s spring or summer. It was excellent to be here in the beginning of the winter because there were almost no tourists and the weather was great,the negative thing was that I couldn’t go to some places because there was too much snow already.
The most important things you’ll need in Pakistan is time and patience. Everything is so slow and everything takes much longer than expected. If someone tells you that it’s a five minutes walk to the place you want to go, you can count it’s at least 20 min. If you’re told that your bus will depart at 09:00, it’s still there at 10:30. Everything is very unreliable so it’s smart to not have a tight time schedule.
People are also unreliable, if you ask them something and they don’t know,they will never admit that they don’t know. Instead they will give you the answer you want to hear. This is very frustrating sometimes, especially with rickshaw drivers. If you want to go to a place and you ask the driver if he is 100% where the place is. Every single time he says, yes yes no problem! It usually ends up with that we are in the middle of nowhere and the driver got no idea of where we are or where the place is. It’s not hard to figure out that this demands both a lot of time and patience. It’s nothing wrong with saying I don’t know. Goddamn it.
They are just over friendly and they are over helping all the time. Patience is the key.
Otherwise Pakistan rocks! Like I’ve told you in my previous posts, it’s dirt-cheap,there is a lot of things to do and see, and a little bit dangerous also. All necessary indigents you need for a great adventure! If someone got any questions about travelling around in these areas, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Hell yes.
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