Blogs from Pakistan, Asia - page 17

Letter from Islamabad 02/11/2008 End of the first week and are now half way through our training. Have attended Urdu lessons for two hours every morning and know more about my own language construction than I was teached in school in England. Our teacher has given us both the basic structure and the history of his language. We have learned some basic sayings parrot fashion but has encouraged us to develop our own phrases based on the structure S O V (subject object verb). Have learned a lot about Islam and cultural matters through a range of workshops and discussion sessions. Islamabad is a strange city built on a grid system with a market area in the centre, housing is arranged around the edge. We are currently staying in street 32 F11/2 house 334. There are ... read more

Gilgit was so lively compared to Passu, and was our first town since Kashgar, with the streets around the guest house packed with lock-up shops selling pretty much everything a body might need - veg, clothes (some second hand), trekking gear, meat, spices, many mosques; a real bustling atmosphere that is a good rehearsal for India! On our first day, we were taken on a mini tour of Gilgit. First to a 7th cent. Buddha carved into a rock face some 50 ft high in a very implausible location! (Why up there?) The carving is aproximately 15ft high, and fairly uremarkable save for the setting. Down the valley below the Buddha was a fast-flowing mountain stream, which where it's scored enough depth, the water sparkles a brilliant turquoise, and nipping betwen the stones we saw a ... read more

The bus to Pakistan was due to leave at 11am; which 11am was a moot point! There is a constant dilemma about times. 'Official' activities, such as bus and train times run on Beijing time, whereas most of the Kashgar population run on local time - 2 hours earlier -so it was difficult to know quite when the bus would take off, and when we should start to queue. In the event, we waited around for a couple of hours. The bus left half empty, which meant we had the unusual experience of having plenty of space. Most of the native passengers seemed to be taking a fair amount of Kashgar market with them! Cardboard boxes, tarpaulins gathered and sewn up, all containing god knows what, to sell at home for a nice profit. The landscape ... read more

Sukkur was fun. We had armed guards following the bus and guarding the hotel and, after some people had had a few drinks, two or three people got their photos taken holding AK47s (can you imagine that happening back home!). One of the girls I was sitting with was half convinced that she saw a sniper on the roof next door. It turned out to be a man with a chair, but, as someone pointed out, the chair coud be so he could shoot us all in comfort. The second day was brilliant; we went to an old ruined city called Moenjodaro, which was apparently the birthplace of IndoEuropean languages. It was unimaginably hot, but still managd to interest us. The name translates as City of the Dead, so I'm guessing it was named after it ... read more

We left a terrible guide in Pakistan (he rejected our tip in the hope of getting a bigger one and then took it back when he didn't) to meet two wonderful ones in Pakistan. Pakistan is amazing; we literally crossed the border, stripped off our mantors (I do NOT recomend wearing a t shirt under a mantor in the middle of the desert btw but at least we got out of them sooner), got onto two small and wonderfully air conditioned buses, met our two lovely guides Bilal and Amjad, stopped for samosas and soft drinks before we had gone five minutes and basically completely failed to get bored for the eleven hour drive. There was a slight downpoint when I woke up without realising I'd been asleep to find all the curtains closed (so that ... read more