"Bin Laden is my Hero" - Quetta to Punjab

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We planned to spend 3-4 days in Quetta resting and servicing the bikes before pushing on. But we were exhausted after crossing the desert and 3 days passed quickly without us doing anything much other than lazing around watching satellite TV, eating lots of cheap curry and being baffled by the oddities of Pakistani politics in the daily newspapers. Reading back over the last blog I realise I gave Quetta a pretty bad press. Not that this was totally undeserved mind, but more to do with the fact that I was fed up writing by that point. There are few real attractions to the city other than the usual colourful bazaars teeming with big-bearded local Baloch and Pashto tribesmen, and with a large number of Afghans to boot. In fact most of the street traders seemed to be from Afghanistan and I got the impression Quetta has more in common with Afghanistan than with most of Pakistan. We met more Baloch students who again impressed on us how much they resent the Pakistani political system and the Punjabi power base that in their eyes exploits Baloch mineral and natural gas resources without putting anything back in terms of development for the people.
We met Richard, a motorcyclist on his way from the UK to Australia. He obviously felt quite intrepid having just crossed the Baloch desert, and clearly thought we were totally mad to have done it on bicycles. We ventured out onto the streets on the evening of Pakistan’s Independence Day but were soon forced to retreat as gangs of exuberant young men roamed around throwing firecrackers at everyone and singing and dancing in the street. It was just a little bit too crazy. Back in the hotel garden Richard shared his single bottle of expensive Pakistani beer with us (Pakistan is officially a ‘dry’ country and Balochistan is furthermore a ‘dry’ state, yet they have a brewery in Quetta) and in return we shared the last of the whisky we had smuggled from Iran. While we sat chatting we listened to repeated bursts of automatic gunfire from all over the city – no celebration being complete without firing several thousand bullets up into the sky to land god-knows- where! This will perhaps be my lasting memory of Quetta.

Just as we were finally feeling more ready to leave Erika got sick, and then I soon followed. Thus our stay turned into a 2 week one. We actually recovered pretty fast but it took a while to feel energised enough to cycle again. In between shopping for cheap, locally printed copies of English language books (complete with all the copyright warnings on them) and a shalwar kameez we also visited the geological museum – Quetta’s only real ‘sight’. It has some cool dinosaur bones and fossils though. Sadly my 2nd hand shalwar turned out to be ridiculously baggy – they appeared to have been previously owned by the fattest man in Pakistan with a waist close to 4m and the resultant mass of folded material seriously impeded walking. We were befriended by an old Pathan guy called Nooh ul-Haq who would call on us at the hotel every day to “serve” us, which usually involved taking us to drink chai and watch the cricket, as Pakistan were playing the final test against England. The usual conversations about local politics (Baloch nationalism) and America’s evil designs on the world - favourite’s of our new friend, soon turned to disgust with the ICC and especially umpire Darrel Hair after the ball-tampering fiasco ended the cricket early. In fact I believe Darrel Hair may have been more unpopular than Bush & Blair for a few days, no mean feat!

It seems to be slowly getting harder to get back on the road each time we have a big stop, though I guess the illness didn’t help this time. Maybe we were still not really fit enough, but we had well and truly got fed up of Quetta so early one morning we cycled out of the city before the traffic got too bad. We were heading for the shortest route towards Punjab, through a town called Loralai. Officially this road is closed to foreigners but we had been assured by the govt. tourist people in Quetta that we would have no problems. We had a number of different maps, all of which showed a road we could use as a short cut from Hanna Lake, a popular picnic spot in the hills above Quetta, to Ziarat and then on to Loralai. So off we went up into the hills towards Hanna Lake, despite various warnings that to reach Ziarat we should take the longer route on the main road.
The hills were gentle but hard going on our weakened legs, but we were encouraged as everything got greener and cleaner as we went. We wished we had left the city days ago and come to convalesce up here. It should have been 20km to the lake, but after more then 30km we began to suspect we had been given dodgy directions. Stopping to check again we learnt that we were in fact in the Urak valley – the wrong valley for the lake. We also discovered that the road to Ziarat shown on our map does not exist, and that we would in fact have to go all the way back to Quetta and take the main road towards the Afghan border. This was not very welcome news and not a good start. The guy who told us this insisted we come for chai before turning around, and soon we were sat under a shady tree overlooking his fields of vegetables and apple trees, being fed enormous piles of freshly picked fruit and potfulls of sweet, milky chai. Our host was the incredibly smiley Hakimadad and we communicated via our sketchy Persian and his equally sketchy English - “Udru no, this not Pakistan!”.
As soon as we were sat down I realised getting up to cycle again was not going to be easy. I was well and truly knackered from the short, easy ride up here. In fact I barely had the energy to sit up and maintain polite conversation. Our hosts mistook this for fear and for a long time were keen to tell us that there was no need to worry or be afraid, repeatedly telling us that they were good people (this was obvious) and “Pathan, Kakar, good people, not terrorist”. Kakar is the clan within the Pathan/Pashto tribe to which this family, and the entire valley it seemed, belonged. I finally managed to convince them I was just really tired and they encouraged us to relax and said we were welcome to stay. Erika was taken off to their house, set within high, barricade-like walls, to meet the mother and sisters. Meanwhile Hakimadad continued to assure me he was not a terrorist and ask me all the time if I was happy and relaxed. His English was limited to phrases he had learned from cricket commentary on the radio however, so the conversation was bizarre in the extreme until I realised that “beautiful delivery” was his way of saying “everything is good”, and that “straight down mid-off for 4 more” was akin to “excellent” or so I guessed.
They of course wanted to know my views about America and the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Lebanon. When I told them I thought Bush, Blair and Musharraf were the real terrorists they were very happy, especially that I had included Musharraf in this list.
They then asked what I thought of Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. I did my best to avoid giving an answer, but they were all keen to emphasise how much they love and respect them. “Bin Laden is my hero” beamed Hakimadad, still with his amazingly friendly, peaceful smile. What can you say to that?
As usual they had no idea where Scotland is but eventually one his friends cleverly asked who the president of Scotland was. Well I wasn’t going to lie to them so I had to explain I was British. There was a long awkward silence. I then tried to compare Scotland to Balochistan, England to Punjab and Britain to Pakistan in the hope they would understand our politics a little better. I don’t know if it worked but Hakimadad smiled again saying “you not terrorist, me not terrorist, Blair and Musharraf terrorist!”. Well I can agree to that so all was well. Erika returned to describe the inside of the house and the women and their fancy embroidery, and pass on the fruits of her hour long intensive Pashto language lesson. Hakimadad fed us a delicious lunch and after a siesta we were shown around the farm to see their heavily laden apple trees with a mix of beans, aubergine and tomatoes growing under them. Oh and a fair amount of hash plants too.
In the evening I was allowed into the house compound (once the women had been hidden) and we ate and played cards all evening in a tiny mud-room with no power. If I needed to use the toilet (ie. go to the fields) one of the men would first have to go out into the courtyard to make sure the women were all hidden again!

We were woken in the morning by Hakimadad who seemed stressed and kept saying “you not go Quetta”. I was initially alarmed and thought something bad might be about to happen, but then we slowly began to piece together what he and his brothers were saying. They had just heard on the radio that the Nawab Akbar Bugti had been killed by the Pakistan army the day before. Bugti was a big Baloch tribal chief and elder, and a former governor of Balochistan. He had since seriously fallen out with the govt. and for the last year had been “in the hills” with an army of about 25,000 rebels fighting for a free Balochistan. The students we met back in Noshki and Quetta had idolised him and his struggle. As the news of his death had broken so had riots all over Quetta and according to the brothers a hospital had been burned down and there was fighting in the streets between the police, army and local tribesmen. “Quetta very danger, you no go, no 4 runs”. Well I was still feeling really drained anyway so another day relaxing didn’t seem so bad an idea. We were pretty concerned about the general situation though. For some reason we had regarded the road from Iran to Quetta as the difficult and dangerous section, but the road on towards Punjab was beginning to look much worse. Hakimadad explained that Bugti was Baloch and “this not Balochistan, this ‘Pashtunistan’!”. Our planned route through the hills would take us only through Pashtu towns and villages and we got the impression that Bugti and his struggle was nothing to these Pashtu, who instead idolise Bin Laden and the Taliban. No problems there then…

So we spent another day resting, eating lots of apples and helping the brothers pick some. Their food was delicious, and is still some of the best stuff we have had in Pakistan: simple, no chillies, not swimming in ghee and full of flavour. We couldn’t stay here forever though and so early the following morning we sped back down the hill towards Quetta. Our energy had returned, our legs felt strong and we felt an added urgency to put some distance between us and the city. We managed to skirt around the edge of the city through the Cantt. (military area) and get onto the main road towards Chaman and the Afghan border. This road goes to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, scene of the Taliban resurgence and allegedly there are a fair number of Taliban fighters in Quetta at any one time, coming for hospital treatment and other kinds of support. There is even a popular rumour that Mullah Omar was living openly in Quetta for some time. Thankfully everything was quiet for us, though as we passed the airport area the shops were all shuttered up with police and soldiers on the roof, and the road was covered in broken glass, scorch marks and the other debris of a recent riot. We were glad to get out into the desert again. The road followed the edge of a line of high hills heading north, but we soon arrived at another small town where we would turn off and up into these hills. After stopping for a juice we found the centre of this town full of tribesmen and the road blocked by tractors with a guy standing on one addressing the crowd through a loud-hailer. The only words I understood were “Bugti”. Fortunately we were ushered around the end of the tractors and the crowd happily parted for us, though it was a bit daunting to say the least. We found our junction but this road was also blocked where it crossed the railway, forcing us to make a detour down a side street and then back along the railway tracks. I was even happier than before to be back in the desert again.

We began to climb slowly up into barren, red-sand coloured hills and were glad to reach a small village for lunch. As usual everyone was extremely friendly and welcoming and we relaxed again, realising that even back at the roadblock and demo there had been no ill-feeling towards us. The protesters’ quarrel was with the Pakistan government and not any foreign cyclists. As we set off again towards Ziarat, high up in the hills, we were joined by a police motorcycle who informed us he was our escort. We didn’t feel we needed this but there was not much we could do. The road began to climb more steeply and the hills became greener, with apple and fruit orchards near villages and juniper scrub and forest elsewhere. We crossed a high pass and were both feeling tired. Normally we would have tried to stop in one of the small villages as Ziarat was still a long way off, but our police friend intended to escort us to Ziarat whether we liked it or not. This was not made any easier by the disappearance of the road surface for the next 50km. It was a long, tiring slog and it was well past dark when we finally arrived in Ziarat on the verge of collapse. Our guy on the motorbike had been quite nice but now we met the Ziarat police who could only communicate by shouting and we had no energy left to deal with them. They wanted us to stay in the police station because of the “great danger” from the local people. Fortunately I had met a guy over lunch who owned a guesthouse up here and because of this we managed to stay there and even get a discount. The police put a ‘gunman’ in the room next to us which was ridiculous; the town was dead and I have been in much more threatening places back home. The ‘gunman’ was clearly having a good time though and informed us he would be eating in the restaurant with us as our guest. The hotel also seemed to think we were paying for his room, though they backed down very easily. We ate a huge feast of chicken and rice and after ignoring our gunman for 5mins and not ordering him any food he got the hint and sat at another table.

Thanks to our extremely long day we decided a rest was in order. Also Ziarat was beautiful and the greenest place we had been for a long, long time. Our late breakfast in the garden of the guesthouse was interrupted by our gunman arriving and plonking himself down between us. We asked him what he was doing and he said he was there to escort us around the town. We told him we were staying in the hotel and he left. An hour later we left too and enjoyed a stroll around the bazaar and a walk up into the hills and forests without him or any danger. The smell of the juniper and pine trees was amazing and reminded us of home, and restored us completely from all the illness and bad vibes of Quetta and dealing with idiot police. We never saw the gunman again and managed to find a restaurant and eat without his help that night.

Of course when we tried to leave the next morning the police arrived with a pick-up to escort us along the road. They wanted us to put the bikes on the pick-up as it would be too slow otherwise and was uphill for 10km. We laughed at them and cycled off and they seemed happy enough to follow us along. The road was beautiful and twisted up towards a high pass through ancient, knarled juniper forest. The ride down the other side was equally impressive and we flew along the valley as it gradually widened into orchards and settlements. Arriving in a village for lunch we pulled up to a café but the police insisted we should first go to the police station. Here we were asked for our No Objection Certificate from the Baloch government and for a moment I was worried things could get difficult. I shrugged and said we didn’t have one, and the officer just smiled and said, Ok. They had however locked us into the police station and when we asked to go for food as we were hungry they instead sent someone out to get it for us, and we ate in the police station. This was kind of interesting but not something I wanted to repeat.
The road on towards Loralai took us further down the valley and as it widened out it got more and more arid until we were back in the desert with low hills far off to the north and south. Our final escort was much better and allowed us to stop at juice bar when we arrived in Loralai and even took us to the best hotel and made sure we got a good deal. The bazaar was bustling and the sky was full of homemade kites doing battle above the low mud rooftops.

Things only turned bad when 2 men without uniforms just walk into our room without explanation and sit down on the beds. They ask all the usual questions but ignored my questions such as “who are you?”, “what are you doing in our room?” etc. They claim to be “intelligence” officers, but produce no ID, and want our names, passport numbers etc. I tell them to get this info from the police who already have it and manage to usher and bundle them out of the room and shut the door. A few minutes later we hear someone slide the bolt across the outside of our door, locking us into the room. Erika starts to bang on the door and yell, while I just start to kick the window frame out. The ‘intelligence’ officers open the door smiling – the bastards. Erika is screaming at them and it’s probably only the fact she is between me and them that stops me lamping one of them in the face. The hotel manger has turned up now looking very unhappy and I ask him to throw these guys out. One of them produces an ID card which does indeed suggest he is some special branch of the police. I throw it off the balcony and threaten to do the same to him, which looking back was maybe not so sensible. Eventually everyone calms down and Erika tells them she will give them our information in the office of the hotel, not our room. She also gives them a lecture about proper conduct though I don’t suppose they paid any attention.

Again we have a gunman posted at the hotel; though this time he just has to doss down outside somewhere instead of getting his own room. When we try to go for food we are told we can only eat in the hotel restaurant. I am not happy with this and as they have no rice we explain we need to eat a lot of rice and therefore have to go elsewhere. Our gunman looks stressed and the hotel guy tells us there is no rice available in the town. They then begin to argue amongst themselves so we jut walk out and start to check out the numerous cafes along the main bazaar. Our gunman catches us up and, realising he has no choice, begins to help by asking around for us and then takes us off to a really busy place that has biryani. It is called Saddam Restaurant. It is full of all the usual bushy-bearded Pashtu types but now we are being looked at with obvious suspicion. I guess it’s because we have an armed guard with us. They are thinking “look at those westerners, they think we are terrorists and so they only feel safe here with an armed guard”. They think we don’t trust them, so of course they don’t trust us. At least this is what I am thinking. I want to stand up and announce that we did not ask for this guard and don’t want him, don’t feel we need him and that we don’t think you are all terrorists, but decide that keeping a low profile is probably better. Besides I am too hungry. We offer our guard some food as he is actually a nice guy and I feel sorry for him, but he won’t accept. The guy who has been serving us pulls up a chair to chat and we explain to him that the guard is not our choice, and also ask him to explain our situation to the guard, but I don’t know if he does. We then learn he is not a waiter at all but part of the big group from the next table, who have now started to fight with each other over who is going to pay for our food. This is Pashtu hospitality, and presumably the sort of thing the police need to protect us from. Crazy doesn’t come close. I realise there is no animosity towards us anyway, so am much happier, and by now most of the restaurant knows our story. Our ‘waiter’ is from Kohlu, the town close to where Bugti was killed and scene of some of the worst violence. He tells us our road ahead is fine and people here like foreigners; it is their cultural duty to provide hospitality to travellers. This is something they clearly take very seriously indeed. If only the police would believe this……..

We leave Loralai with the usual motorbike escort early the next morning. The scenery is now flatter with rolling desert coloured hills. At the edge of the orchard belt and the desert our escort waves us goodbye and we cycle on alone. We expect another vehicle to arrive from somewhere ahead but it never does. We even pass a police post and they don’t seem bothered by us at all. Hooray! We are free again. Maybe our antics last night paid off, or maybe we pissed off special branch so much they have decided to leave us to fend for ourselves in the hope something bad happens to us. Who knows? I certainly don’t care and look forward to being able to stop where and when we like for a change. Our target today is Mekhtar, not a huge distance to cover but the terrain is harsh and desert like again and is made worse by the fact there is no tarmac for most of the way. The road is being upgraded, but for some reason the first stage of this is to completely dig up the old road before they even begin to construct the new, smooth, 2 lane highway that will replace it. So now there is just a rocky, rutted track for around 100km, and where it crosses a wadi it is muddy or flooded with water. Our progress slows and both we and the bikes take a pounding. It is also hot again after the cool mountain air of Ziarat. We rumble slowly along with the beautifully painted Pakistani trucks listening to the tinny bollywood tunes they blast out. We pull over at a house to ask for water and are made to sit and drink chai, something that would not have happened with the police escort. This is why we cycle, to experience the road and landscape in way not possible on other transport and to be closer to the people of the landscape and experience their customs and way of life. Not to be herded around by the police.

After lunch and a snooze we are pleased to learn it’s not very far to Mekhtar. Only they forgot to tell us about the river. We spot dozens of trucks parked well off the road down on a flat piece of desert, then see the bridge. We figure the trucks have driven to the river bank so the drivers can wash and also wash the trucks, but as we start to cycle across the bridge we realise there’s more to it. The trucks are fording the river, here split into 3 channels, while tractors tow smaller vehicles across shallower sections. Ahead there is construction work on the long concrete bridge but we figure as we are only on bikes we can get through. I walk ahead to check but find that actually the far end of the bridge is totally missing, and the work is to rebuild it. We backtrack and go down to the river thinking we can go across on the back of a tractor. Eventually one arrives but his trailer is full of sand and the driver starts jabbering to the crowd around us. I can understand he is discussing how much he can charge us and ‘lakh’ rupees are being mentioned. This is 100,000 rupees!! We wave him away and decide to porter our bags and bikes across ourselves. In the end the deepest of the channels is only knee deep so it easy enough, but a large number of boys have appeared from nowhere to ‘help’, which mostly involves not doing much, laughing at us and, I’m convinced, trying to grab anything they can and run off with it. Maybe this is a bit paranoid, but leaves us with that old logic puzzle of how to cross a river with a load of stuff when you can’t leave anything unattended on either bank. Actually it is made easy by the fact that the crowd of helpers stays on the near bank while we take turns to carry our bags across to the far bank. We then carry our bikes through the river and they all follow us across, trying to splash us. It takes us an hour to finally be back cycling on the opposite side of the river, though after this it is indeed a short haul into Mekhtar.

We find the police once again soon after stopping at a rest house and café, they must have some kind of special radar that detects foreigners. No we can’t stay here of course. We ask about the fancy petrol station but we can’t stay there either, and are taken through the narrow-lanes of the bazaar to a police station that they try to describe as a foreigners rest house. We are safe from the stone throwing children in here but our room is actually a jail cell that stinks of piss. This is the only safe place apparently, outside is very dangerous. He does at least give me the key for the cell to show we are not being locked up. We are then allowed to walk back into the bazaar unaccompanied, past the stone throwing children, to buy some food. I can’t figure this one out at all. None of the food places have started cooking yet, so we buy supplies to cook ourselves back in our jail cell. Only when we return and ask for water they tell us there is none. But we need water to cook, wash and drink. He shows us a ditch outside. I am beginning to loose patience. There are places actually designed for truck drivers to sleep in back on the main road that the police won’t let us go to, instead we have a piss-stinking cell to sleep in and a ditch to wash in. Great. We are then told we can go to the petrol station where there is a shower and very nice room. A man appears who says it is his petrol station and many foreigners stay there, and begins to try to persuade me why our current lodgings are not very nice. No need mate. We are soon at his petrol station (the place we had wanted to try in the first place) which is clean and does not stink of piss. Not only is there water but a shower too! We wash and cook our dinner on their gas in a little kitchen and sleep on the floor of a room behind the office. The owner has indeed put up every overlander who has come this way and has the photos to prove it. And of course he doesn’t want any money as we are his guests.

While having our breakfast in the morning plagues of huge dung beetles start to fall out of the sky. I wash at the taps next to the prayer room and a beardy Pashtu truck driver asks if I am Muslim. I say no but try to explain there is only one god anyway and we are all the same. He then makes me repeat the Islamic proclamation of faith in Arabic: “La illahu illa Allah, Mohammed rasul Allah” though I’m still sleepy and it’s only after I’ve done it I realise what it was. He thinks he has just converted me to Islam! He is very happy anyway so I just smile and wander off.

We are back on our rough rocky track again for the morning and it is another hard slog to Kingri, a tiny village where we stop for lunch and also find the nice new tarmac road. It is amazing after nearly 2 days of rocks and sand. It is also a godsend as we are now back in the mountains again and have to cross one ridge of hills before dropping down into a wide, green valley that runs southwards. On our left is the last line of hills between us and the Indus; the Suleiman range. The hills are greener with acacia thorn scrub and there are clouds perched on top of the Suleimans, and we can almost sense that we are about to change continents again, from the deserts of Persia, Balochistan and Afghanistan to the lush green plains of India. We stop for a break by a small stream and see a huge monitor lizard climb up the far bank. Everything feels a little more tropical and we are excited that in a day or two we will cross the Indus at last, never having imagined when we set off we would cycle this far or make it all the way to the Indus.

We arrive on the outskirts of Rakhni as it is getting dark; this is the last village/town in Balochistan. There is a checkpoint on the road and the police want to know where we are going and take our details. They tell us we cannot cycle on to Fort Munro tonight as it is dangerous. This is fine, Fort Munro is a 1000m climb up into the Suleiman Mountains and we want to stay in Rakhni. They tell us we cannot stay in Rakhni either. They haven’t thought this through very well though as this doesn’t leave us with any options at all. After a lot of messing around and a senior officer being summoned, who then summons an even more senior officer, we are told we can go to the police station. We are tired and starving so don’t even begin to argue. We ride off towards the town but the crowed of guys who had gathered start to run after us yelling at us to stop. Some of them catch Erika and grab her bike, nearly pulling her off. There is a lot of screaming and yelling but she frees herself partly due to my efforts of hurtling toward them kicking out from my bike. They then grab at me. I drop my bike and start to fight with 2 of them before one holds up his hands and says “I am a soldier”. They don’t have uniforms but probably are soldiers. I am confused, tired, stressed and pissed right off. “The police have told us to go to the police station, we just want to go to the café that is 50m away, what are you doing assaulting us?” I keep yelling at them. “It is our duty” is the best they can reply. They are forcibly stopping us from going any further into town.
Eventually a more senior guy appears and introduces himself as a Major of the Pakistan army. We complain strongly about his soldier’s behaviour but he tries to brush it off as a misunderstanding because they are uneducated and don’t speak English, and more importantly we don’t speak Urdu. This Major seems to think the magic words “Pakistan army” will make us do whatever he says, and keeps on about how dangerous the area is. I tell him we have come from Quetta and this village can’t be more dangerous than anywhere else. He seems amazed we have come this way without an escort and that nobody told him we were coming. The Major wants us to stay in the soldiers’ barracks with the same guys who have just assaulted us. No way. After lying about there not being any café’s in town or civilian guesthouses he gets caught out. He is happy to enter a reasoned argument with me and after 5 minutes has agreed that we are free to choose where we stay and eat, and if we wish to choose to risk being killed or kidnapped that is our choice. I can almost sense his brain hurting and he is now grumpy as he gruffly hands us back to the police who show us to the guesthouse.
It is a dive but the owner seems nice even though he is charging us double for the room. I don’t have the energy to argue. He also seems intent on chasing the police away from us and for this service I will happily pay triple. We check in and have a bucket shower. Mid-way through this there is an almighty banging on our door and someone is yelling at us to “open the door now”. Telling them to wait only makes it worse. We finally open the door after dressing to find our Major has arrived, in uniform now, and with about 30 uniformed and armed soldiers, and none of them look friendly. I can only imagine the conversation he has had with his superior regarding how he has allowed us to come to this guesthouse, something he is still struggling to figure out himself I reckon. He is yelling and stamping his feet and looking like he may explode. “I have had to put on this uniform because of you” he booms. I point out I didn’t ask him to do this at all, but begin to think there is a limit to how far I can push him. He wants to take our passport and visa details, despite the fact his soldiers and the police have already done this. He then asks Erika if she can prove she is married to me. That’s it and I have a go at him, asking him what does this have to do with anything? and why is he here at our hotel harassing us?. He nearly does explode yelling “why have you come to this hotel?, it is forbidden”. I calmly point out that he himself told us we were free to choose to stay wherever we liked. “Yes it is your choice, but, but…” he stammers, “I have to patrol now because of you, because of you I have been ordered to put this uniform on and my soldiers have to patrol the town”. I point out that I have not told him to do anything, and amazingly he then agrees that it is not me who gives him his orders and calms down. We walk out to the street to find some food before everywhere closes, as it is now 10pm. Again we are surrounded by soldiers and the Major, who smiles with exasperation and tells me “again I have a problem as you are outside your hotel”. I tell him how hungry we are and that we are going to get some food, and that we are not prisoners. They then all start to ask us what kind of food we want and tell us there is no food available. Erika points to a restaurant 30m down the street and says we will eat whatever they are serving. “But this food will be chillied” he exclaims, clearly in the belief that we will die if we eat a chilli! We laugh at him and wander off, and I can hear him whining into his radio as we go, explaining my argument that he “cannot make us prisoners” to whoever is giving him an ear bashing.

I suppose I should have some sympathy for him as he was actually just trying to follow his orders and be nice to us at the same time, and has clearly never encountered anyone who has questioned him or his authority before. If his soldiers had let us go to a café to begin with, instead of assaulting us without even identifying themselves, then we would probably have stayed in their military compound as he wanted. My experience of the police and army on this stretch of the journey was that they treat us like some troublesome prisoners who have to be controlled and herded from one place to another, without any regard for what we might actually want to do ourselves. In contrast the local people, who the police and army feel they need to protect us from, treat us like distinguished guests. When Hakimadad told to me to relax and not to be afraid of them I could feel and sense his sincerity, even if Bin Laden is his hero. In contrast I don’t believe anything the authorities tell us, and nearly every time this has proved to be a correct assumption.

The next day we had a motorbike escort out of town. We never saw the Major again, though a man did come up to us while we were buying apples and claim he was intelligence and needed to see our passports. He told us to go to the police station. I told him the Major had our details, but then just agreed to go to the police station. He was on foot, we are on bikes. Our police escort led us straight out of town and we followed. In Pakistan sometimes bullshit seems to be the best policy.
Our escort took us the 3km to the boundary of Baluchistan, and then left us. From here we had a long climb up to Fort Munro on steep hairpins, with views unfolding back over Baluchistan the whole time. After a couple of hot, sweaty hours we reached the top and the cloud, turned a corner and saw the road dropping even more steeply down into the top of a cavernous gorge. We had a long time to admire this view as the road was closed for widening works. This involves blasting the cliff above the road and then bulldozing the debris off the cliff below the road! Eventually we got through on a stretch of rough and bumpy rocks just wide enough for a truck, before jolting our way down and down on the potholed road into the gorge. We had another wait at a similar works site, though not for as long this time as an ambulance arrived and pushed to the front of the queue, forcing them to clear the road quickly. In the back was woman with a broken leg who had been blown up by a rebel bomb in Kohlu. The women all called Erika over to the ambulance and one even lifted her burkha to show Erika her face. Once moving again the road just kept plunging down and down, with the narrow road in places cut into a vertical cliff wall with an enormous drop below. The nice, new, widened road surface below was pockmarked with craters and boulders from where the debris has been pushed down from above – an ingenious system of road improvement. Eventually the gorge opened out and we were in the foothills, still going down but with the hazy flat plain of the Indus valley spread across the horizon in front of us.

Despite the delays we were happy to be out of Baluchistan and on our way down towards the plains. From here there would be no more police escorts, no more bullshit about it being dangerous, no more hassles. Just us and the road. We would cross the Indus and in a few days soon be in Lahore, close to the Indian border. We would be able to relax and enjoy the rest of Pakistan properly, or so we thought.

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Photos

Urak Valley
A very pleasant wrong turn.

View of Ziarat
Its a shame you can not smell the wonderful juniper.

On the road to Loralai
A traditional house with roof made of juniper bark.

"Bin Laden is my hero..."
Our host Hakimadad (left) with his brothers and cousins, during a break from apple picking on their farm in the Urak Valley.

The dangerous streets of Loralai
Where an armed escort is needed to protect you from the fiercely hospitable local Pashtu's.

Chai stop
Having finally lost our escort we were free to risk the dangers of stopping for free chai again. Scary aren't they?

The River Crossing
The tractors tow anyhting too small to risk driving through by themselves, when they're not busy trying to charge a small fortune to carry foreign cyclists over......

The River Crossing
No tractor required. Note the large number of 'helpers'

The River Crossing
At least these bus passengers have somewhere to perform their ablutions before praying for safe crossing....

The Main Road to Punjab.....
No really, it is. This is shortly after the river with no bridge and about 80km in either direction to the nearest piece of tarmac.

Taking a break
from the pounding surface and dust from the passing trucks.

Leaving Balochistan
Only one last enormous mountain range to cross before we really arrive on the Punjab plain and reach the Indus and India.

Roadworks
The second stoppage on the descent to Punjab.

The Suleiman Range
Below the roadworks, where the road is literally carved into the cliff.

The Plains
Not as lush, green or tropical as imagined but we have finally arrived in Punjab. Only a few km left to the Indus.

Comments

[Kate]

Glad to see that you are OK, we have been getting worried here at CWT. Anthony came in the other day and asked if we had heard anything. That was after Joe had got Erika's e-mail asking about good places to go in India. See, we all care about you! Looks like its been pretty stressful for you over the past two months - I hope things have improved a bit for you now. Nothing exciting has happened in Kendal for ages apart from I had a ceilidh for my birthday and Wal's band Wierdstring pleyed - it was a great laugh. All the usual suspects were there including Chris and Caroline who are now living in Hebden Bridge (although you probably alread know that!). Biggest news in the UK is the recent Stern report which has indicated that if the world govts don't do anything about climate change there is likely to be a drop in word GDP of 20% - an effect worse than the 1930s depression and the 2nd World War put together. Hope that economics will give a push to societal changes where environmentalists haven't been able to. Anyway, keep well and looking forward to your next blog!