Elsien's Traveblogue

Pakistan has been really good, after Karachi, very interesting, and absolutely lovely people, who like Britain and Britons (and Dutch interlopers) and don't blame them for Britain's foreign policy. Although the Baluchi and Pashtun frontier people are apparently quite Taliban-friendly (so Pakistan people and fellow travellers tell me, as well as Pakistani newspapers and TV), the majority of Pakistanis love to talk to Westerners and are very open, friendly, helpful, generous and hospitable.
Poverty is the big issue though. I travelled through the most fertile part of Pakistan, the Punjab, and found all these small, dusty villages: mudbrick houses, wooden carts pulled by donkeys, mules, oxen and even the odd camel; harvest done entirely by hand (lots of women involved) and schoolboys sitting in the court / mudyard of the school in groups of 40 or 50 or more, being taught.Many girls don't get secondary education as it's not free and in many areas there is no provision.
There are lots of historical relics, some dating back to the Indus civilisation thousands of years BC, others Greek and Persian, Buddhist shrines from before the Islam, ancient Muslim and Sikh shrines and old bazaars, British colonial buildings and almost all of these are cruelly neglected, apart from the very few that have UNESCO heritage status, but most of them haven't and are falling to bits.
I liked the small cities I stayed in, even though they were dusty and noisy (Pakistani traffic hoots and honks all the time), but they had real character and authenticity as well as charcoal-smoked chicken tikka smell and flavour in the evenings.
The travel was pretty authentic too: on local trains and buses and minibuses. I had to sit with the women, which was a bit of a shame, as they are far less educated than the men and didn't speak much English or were far too busy with their large broods of small children. I met a couple who could: a young woman working for a bank on anti-poverty projects (hoorrah!) and a Primary teacher, but her accent was so outlandish that I had terrible trouble understanding her. (Mind you, I was told by a Pakistani bookshop owner that he couldn't understand me, "What language are you speaking?" and told to speak "Classical English".)
I only met the first other tourists after two weeks here, a Czech backpacker, on an archaeological site and a Frenchman, retired engineer, cycling around the world, in the most Spartan hostel imaginable (the only one in Taxila), where he and I were the only guests. We were locked in at 8pm and I almost froze under the thin blanket as the temperature had dropped from 25 to 15 degrees.
Islamabad was quite splendid, not quite part of Pakistan, planned in rectangles, with a lot of green and trees, a sort of International Milton Keynes, and with one of Pakistan's biggest mosques. I stayed in Rawalpindi, only a few miles away, more like the small cities above and a lot cleaner and more pleasant than Karachi. Karachi really was the pits.
However, for cleaner air I went further North, to Abbottabad in the mountains - a bit chilly and it rained for the first time I had left UK, but splendidly built up against the hills, surrounded by forest and with a weird Colonial British area where some Pakistani regiments are now based, appropriately, as it was the British army area before. Nice hotel with scalding hot water and a terrace overlooking the town and the mountains. Lots of different ethnic groups of people in different colourful clothing.
I've gone semi-native, in the futile hope that a headscarf will deflect attention - it doesn't, at least not for long, but I do gain respectability and acceptability his way.
Here in Lahore I have also been given a shalwaar kameez and I still look like me!

Lahore
Lahore has been an amazing experience. I started off staying in Malik's house, as the guesthouse was full. Malik was Benazir Bhutto's Press man, a journalist and a Sufi music enthusiast. He has been asked by Ms Bhutto to work for her again during the forthcoming election campaign, so you can imagine I was in my element talking politics. Malik's wife was Head of a Vocational Teacher Training College and now works in an Art College. She took me to her place of work and I spent a couple of days with one of her lecturers, Samira, who wanted to practise her already very good English. She was also a PhD student in Islamic Art and I met a lot of her fellow students, was taken to a lecture on miniature painting during the Mughal period in Lahore - see Orhan Pamuk's book 'My Name is Red'. Also the Lahore Fort, huge, impressive and in need of proper restauration - see previous e-mails. It was interesting to meet a lot of Muslim professional women; they were good fun but incredibly busy, responsible for 100% of childcare, housework, elderly relatives, study and jobs. Husbands just work.
Malik took us to Sufi concerts, qawwali (religious music, but also satirical, making fun of Mullahs!) in a Muslim shrine, the International Sufi Music Festival, Sufi drumming and trance dancing in another shrine, like whirling dervishes. There was a lot of hashish smoking there, surprisingly, not by Westerners, but the Pakistani in-crowd. After a few days there was room in the guesthouse where I met a bunch of interesting people, also backpacking and where there was another haunting Sufi music jam session on the roof terrace of the guesthouse.
Spent some time exploring Lahore, the most interesting and atmospheric of the Pakistani cities I have visited so far, but with all the provisos of towns seen previously. The Lahore Museum, the 'Wonder House' of Kipling's 'book 'Kim', is full of interesting and beautiful things and the mosque is big and stunning. The Old City is colourful and crumbling.
Missed Tony Blair by about 10 minutes, he'd just left the Governor's House when I walked by, it's near here.
Had dinner last night on the roof top of the most incredible 5-storey ancient house / art gallery / restaurant, overlooking the floodlit mosque and fort, absolutely stunning. The owner, a painter, paints 'nautch' = dance girls, a euphemism for prostitutes - his mother was one and the house itself is a former brothel, on the edge of the Red Light District.
Travelling to Amritsar in India today with my dinner companion from last night, Michael, a financial journalist.
I feel physically quite rested after a week in Lahore, but my mind and brain are buzzing after meeting so many interesting people, the Sufi music and possibly inhaling all that hash smoke!
I hope computers in India will be of better quality and connections a bit faster as I now have my pictures so far on CD but they won't send - I'll try again from India.

After the beauty and charm of Oman, Karachi is a bit of a shock to the system. I footslogged it for two days, but couldn’t really find any redeeming features: it’s incredibly noisy, dusty, dirty and polluted. Little tuk-tuks leave a stream of blue exhaust behind them and the rest of the traffic is not much better. The old buildings are filthy and literally falling to pieces. Most date back to the British Colonial period – a few seem to have been saved, like Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s house, but most are in the most indescribable state of disrepair.
I had a wander around the old Empress Market, holding my nose. It must have been a beautiful Victorian construction once, but now it’s disgustingly filthy, especially the poultry section. I doubt whether I’ll be able to eat chicken again for a while, having seen the shit-spattered, bedraggled state the poor beasts were in. True, they had more room than their trussed up sisters in China, but even so, Avian ‘flu would be a merciful release for them.
There was a gorgeous library in a park which I stumbled on by accident as the police wouldn’t let me past the Marriott – half an army of a roadblock with more guns and tanks than I’ve seen in the whole of Kosova – what are they protecting? Anyway, the library was so dusty that I had to get a rag of the librarians who had nothing to do but sit and read the paper, so that I could dust the chair, the table and the Jinnah book I wanted to look at. I still had to leave after 10 minutes as I was sneezing my head off – and I’ve never had a dust allergy in my life.
I walked around the diplomatic area as well where the consuls are really slumming it. Compared to the rest of Karachi it’s nicer, but your average diplomat must burst into tears when they are told they’re being sent to Karachi.
Modern buildings are ugly concrete cubes and poor people’s houses the usual half-built breezeblock shacks, surrounded by acres of dirt and old blue plastic bags – I bet they didn’t show Prince Charles these bits. My hotel wasn’t one of the most wonderful either: the shower didn’t work, there was a pink plastic bucket though – memories of Kiribati – and at half past midnight some man came into my room, unlocked the door, switched the light on, had a good look around and left again. Didn’t like what he saw?
Anyway, I’d seen enough of Karachi, so left on the sleeper train to Bahawalpur. I shared a carriage with a heavily veiled woman who spoke no English, but obviously had some problem as she kept being interrogated by some policeman – when she wasn’t grizzling quietly, she spoke loudly and indignantly into her mobile phone ….
Oh yes, actually, most Pakistani people I’ve met so far have been lovely and bemoan the fact that there are no tourists in Karachi any more. They blame Bush, I’d say the dirt may have something to do with it …..

Left Oman yesterday. A beautiful place, definitely, but a difficult one for a lone female budget tourist without 4WD or much Arabic. Ramadan didn't help, I think: people were sleepy, hungry, thirsty, grumpy because of the fast and the fact that they couldn't smoke all day and preoccupied with prayer and religious duties. Opening times were erratic; lunch was out of the question and during Eid everything was closed for a day or two, but after Eid life suddenly cheered up. People started totalk to me, I got hailed and 'hallo'ed' by taxi drivers, predatory and friendly sheikhs again and I could find places to eat and drink - although no alcohol.
After a few days in Muscat - lovely, but expensive, see previous e-mail, I went to Nizwa where I only spent long enough to visit the impressive fort and the soukh. I was only able to find a bed I couldn't afford for more than 1 night - the other 5 hotels I'd tried were all full of Eid guests and lots of well-paid Dubai expats in 4WDs. I nearly didn't get out of Nizwa, as I'd been waiting at the wrong bus station - information had been hard to come by and confusing to boot, but a sheikh in shining Nissan came to the rescue (they all have large Japanese or Korean cars except for 4WD expats) and gave me a lift to the right one, 10 km away. He propositioned me (of course?! I've lost loads of excess weight, have a suntan and hair bleached by sun and desert): why didn't I "sit" with him that night instead of catching my bus? I doubt "sitting" was what he had in mind, so I threatened him with all my real and imaginary male relations as well as my Mum and hopped out at the right bus station where I caught the bus with a minute to spare. Oh yeah, I did get a job offer in Nizwah, at the College of Engineering, a great financial package, I'd be able to afford my own 4WD and maybe even my own Sheikh.
Spent the last few days in Salalah, on the coast, right in the South, almost on the Yemeni border. The place has really grown on me, even though there's not really anything here. The package tourists have all been packaged together in hotels 5 - 10 km out of town and they stay there. I've been one of the very few tourists here all the time. I infiltrated the Crowne Plaza Hotel for a day and enjoyed their beach facilities. It was lovely for a day, but I'm not really a beach-person.
I could afford to rent a (Korean) car for a day as my hotel, though very clean and comfortable, was affordable. I explored some of the coast, the mountains, wadis and oases and bits of desert - it's really fabulous, but you have to be careful not to run over a camel - they're all over the place. (Salalah was the base for Wilfred Thesiger's desert journey - he wrote 'Arabian Sands'. They have his photographs, well, copies of, in the local museum / library). I did like the place, it's safe, friendly, a pretty authentic mix of old and new, with great surroundings. Hot, yes, but there's a sort of desert wind, or maybe sea-breeze that keeps it bearable. My favourite time of day is dusk, when the call to prayer, the pink evening light, the cooler warmth create a magic atmosphere.
I got the night bus to Muscat - it dropped me off right at the airport in time to catch the plane to Karachi in the morning. I'm reviewing my Pakistan programme, as both the Dutch and the British Foreign Office warn against non-essential travel in some 80% of the country, so I'll probably spend less time in Pakistan and more in India. The Punjab is still safe apparently ....

Muscat, Oman
I have an hour or so to kill before my bus to Nizwa and it's incredibly hot out there. Oman is for the most part rocks and desert, although I haven't seen much of that yet, it's where I hope the bus will take me to. I've been on the coast, the Arabian Sea, staying on the Corniche in Mutrah, a small fishing port near Muscat and yes, it's as romantic as it sounds. The little port has one or two big ships in, lots of small fishing boats, even though at the moment there's no fishing going on as it's Eid al Fitr, the end of Ramadan, and also a couple of incredibly beautiful dhows, traditional wooden Arab boats. The buildings on the Corniche are all low, white and either traditional, with latticework windows, or done in a compatible style. There's an incredibly beautiful soukh, with amazing wooden carved ceilings and lots of silver shops, aimed at tourists, of course, but still lovely. Behind the buildings, overlooking the bay, the sharp points of the completely bare mountains that I'm hoping to traverse or at least skirt today. Bright blue sky, white heat, I'm really in Arabia.
It's expensive though and many of the roads are only accessible by 4-wheel drive, and ideally you should have a driver as well, so the best way to really be a super tourist in this country is to start work in Dubai and then 'sultan' it from there. Most of the tourists are indeed ex-pats working in one of the other Gulf countries and staying in one of the expensive 5 star hotels. My hotel just about rated one, but it was clean and comfortable, room had bathroom and a/c, I don't entirely slum it, even though I travel on local transport with a backpack.
The Omanis, beautifully kitted out in dish-dashas (long white dresses for men, I've fallen in love with the word) and turbans or little Pakistani type hats are much more reserved than the Egyptians, who I adored, they'll chat intelligently with anybody, even if you don't want to buy anything. The Omani wives are pretty well wrapped up in black and stay in the house or the a/c car. Even with the holidays not many promenaded outside, although plenty of men did. There are also lots of Indian workers here and their wives are visible, in beautifully coloured saris and lots of cute looking children. They were all out yesterday, in the park by the sea where I spent a few hours sheltering from the sun, having messy pic-nics and playing noisy games. They don't chat to you much either, so this is all a bit more lonely than I'm used to.
I walked along the Corniche to Muscat itself, an impressive walled city with forts, watchtowers and castles towering over it and an amazingly opulent Sultan's Palace. The current Sultan is called Sultan Qaboos, unmarried and childless but must be in his fifties or older. Anyone interested?
I'm here until 2nd November when I fly to Karachi. I'm hoping to see a little more of the country before then.
I notice I've used the word 'beautiful' a lot: well, that's because it is! Wish you were here, but bring bags of money, sunglasses, head cover, a 4WD and a driver!