Blogs from Pakistan, Asia - page 5

Lahore Days 1, 2 Perth to Lahore via Bangkok. Cost- AUD $652 Uneventful flights, 18 hours door to door. Note to Thai Airways- when did you get rid of your air vents? We could possibly have deflected the trillion airborne virus the guy sitting next to us for 4 hours coughing and spraying was creating. Arrival proceedings in Lahore were surprisingly efficient. Separate queue for females- bonus! Very, very short queue. Straightforward, a couple of questions and stamp, stamp of my 30 day visa (arrrgggghh- still annoyed about that!! -see trip description for details). Luggage carousel was orderly too- after last year's arrival into Dushanbe I was expecting much of the same mess but this was really efficient. Finally, at 02:00 we're in the steamy air of Lahore, 02:40 arrive at a barbed wire compound- the ... read more

Sost is Pakistan’s border town, even though it is 84km from the actual border. We knew it is only a small place so hadn’t rushed up there, even thought we know morning is when the only public transport there is would have gone. Instead of plan was stay in Passu for the morning and then see what ride we could to find. Knowing that might take time we had decided we wanted to be hitting the road about mid-afternoon. When the time came we checked out of our hotel and set ourselves up on the Highway just outside. More traffic was heading south than north though it was still barely a trickle. After half an hour maybe half a dozen vehicles had gone past which were either full or just going to the village. One car ... read more

The Hunza Valley is said to be the inspiration behind the mythical valley of Shangri-La in James Hilton’s 1933 novel ‘Lost Horizon.’ It’s really not hard to see why. Rehman is infamous in the Pakistan traveller network for hosting foreigners at his family’s home in Ghulkin, a small village in the Hunza Valley just 15 minutes from Gulmit. We’d got in touch with him a few days before to see if we could stay the night. Busy hosting a tour for a British Pakistani family he arranged for his wife Sitara to look after us. She called us the night before to arrange for a family friend to collect us from our Gulmit guesthouse early on Saturday morning. This is Pakistan so little runs on time and our lift was almost an hour late. We didn’t ... read more

We’d planned to be up early to catch a minibus to Karimabad, being a 3 hour journey we really didn’t fancy suffering it in the heat. It was another hot night, we’d tried to keep our room as cool as we could by using our sarongs as curtains during the day, that helped but the air temperature just wasn’t in our favour. Cursing both the lack of a fan and our reluctance to face the hassle in the heat of finding somewhere else to stay and moving, we started from the outset with the bedding dragged off on the floor under the window. We tossed and turned and then at 3:45am there was a big cracking roll of thunder. Marie at first thought it was a landslide as nothing followed for 10 minutes, but then it ... read more

We arrived in Astore, a Himalayan village perched on the mountainside, to find access to our guesthouse blocked by a polo match. It was on the edge of the field, on the other side. We were stoked, polo is the best audience participation sport there is and we’ve only seen a game once before in India. There were some female spectators but generally they were behind the caged section or on nearby rooftops. None were on the edge of the field like us and of course as the only foreigners we were a spectacle in our own right. As we walked the length of the pitch behind the spectators every single head turned to look at us. Even the local media guy wanted to interview us (we declined). We loved being close to the action and ... read more