Himalayan India

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Tuesday 3 June

Crossed over from India to Pakistan at Wagha. It looks quite different this morning so quiet without the crowds. It is a bit of a palaver getting passports checked, filling out departure forms, going through customs before walking across the border to get passports checked again & go through customs etc. At least there were no queues.

We were driven to our hotel in Lahore, The Pearl-Continental. It is a large hotel with a huge atrium where you can see right up past all the levels to the roof. The sound of music being played in the foyer or restaurant & kids playing carries up to our room on the fifth level. The music is soothing. The kids less so when it is late at night!

It has a nice pool with very comfortable loungers.
There are 9 different eating places here & we had a fantastic buffet dinner & breakfast in one. I have never seen such an array of different dishes at one buffet.

Nasir, from Karakorum Explorers, is our excellent guide here & he took us through the narrow streets in the old part of town to see the little shops; into a mosque & up one of the minarets. The steps were very deep & spiral & anywhere the ground was in the sun it was scorching. So hard work but worth it for the great view over Lahore. I was pleased that we also saw the cannon, Zamzama, made famous at the start of Rudyard Kipling's "Kim". It was the only thing I knew about Lahore before we got here!

I bought some fine cotton lawn from one of the stalls for about £3 & arranged for it to be made into a salwar-kamiz for another £1.60 by a nearby tailor. I got it by the next evening. It is lovely & comfortable with loose, baggy trousers, long length top & a long scarf/shawl all in co-ordinating colours but different patterns. It should be cooler to wear than my other trousers & shirt but it does feel like going out in my pyjamas but as most of the other women here wear the same it should be ok!


Wednesday 4 June

Very hot again made worse by wearing long sleeved shirts & long trousers as advised. I didn't get my salwar-kameez until the evening. We visited the Badshahi Mosque which is huge & can hold 100,000 people. It is one of the largest mosques in the world. It is a beautiful building. Some of the other visitors, Pakistani, wanted pictures of themselves with Russell & occassionally me. I can't imagine why except there don't seem to be many white people here so we are a novelty.

Next we strolled round the Fort, Shali Qila, which is similar to the Red Fort at Agra. It is really a whole city full of large buildings for the emperor to hold public & private audiences, sleeping quarters, gardens etc. Huge entrances with enormous doors so the emperor could enter on an elephant & then there were wide but shallow steps so the elephants could walk up to the higher levels where there was a great view over Lahore & the surrounding country - good to see if the enemy was coming.

One building was lined with a mosaic of mirrors - very intricate work & impressive glittering in the sun.

In the evening we went to the old Anarkali Bazaar for a wander around before climbing up more very deep steep spiral steps in the dark as the power was off to the top of Cooco's Den, a quaint restaurant in the old city next to the Badshahi Mosque so at night you get a great view from the open roof terrace of the mosque when it is lit up.

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