(Daniel) This morning Rowan and Gabby arrived at 8am outside the hotel, and helped me to pack the truck ready for our drive to Islamabad. Rowan, while playing with his new camera, had accidentally erased his memory card overnight. He had not realised what the word “format” meant. THis is why there are very few photos from Pakistan, another way that the country has left its mark on us.
As we headed out of town, we accidentally missed the turning for the Highway, and carried on to what is known as the GT road. Perhaps this means general traffic, as this is basically the road which everything not allowed on the highway must take instead. This includes horses, donkeys, tractors, bikes, buffalo, and many other vehicles of varied shapes and sizes. After 10km on the GT road, we got another chance to get on the highway, leaving the cacophony of horns and waving people to drive on the wonderful new three lane motorway connecting Lahore to Islamabad.
We travelled quickly on this road, stopping to eat and to go to the toilet every 30 minutes (yes I’m still sick). We arrived into Islamabad at about 3pm. Located next to the old city of Rawalpindi, these two have both grown so close to each other that they almost appear as two halves of a whole. As we pulled into town, it was apparent that this is a new town in it’s extreme. Still recovering from the effects of the catastrophic earthquake, but being built in a very modern way, with the whole town laid out like a grid. The start of the grid is known as Zero Point, and from there you can move out to sections with grid references, for instance, Section 9 – G Zone. It sounds very impersonal and in practice it is exactly that.
Using the grid system, we quickly found the embassy area, and tried to drive straight in, but security was incredibly high, and you must park and ride with a security search and no phones etc. allowed. Once we had passed security, a bus took us to the Indian embassy where we were told that the embassy was not taking any more applications today, but that if we returned tomorrow our papers would be processed within one day. Hopeful that we could get this down to a same day service, we took the bus back to the Wolf, and drove back down the sections until we found a campsite next to the national sports stadium. There we set up camp before walking back out to the street to make some phone calls and look for food.
Whilst walking around Gabby spotted that there is a modern cinema in Islamabad, so we grabbed a taxi and asked for the cinema. The driver headed off, and in usual style stopped around the corner to ask some other drivers what on earth we were talking about. They all nodded and agreed on something, and on we went. It was only as we drove out of Islamabad and towards the neighboring city of Rawalpindi that we realised that there must be some mistake! Not wanting to cause a fuss, we decided to ride it out a while. The driver took us deep into the old city, and eventually stopped outside what must be one of many Bollywood type cinemas, where he turned, expecting us to jump out. We explained that this was not the cinema, and that we needed English language films.
He asked some more people for directions, and we were off again. This time, we drove to another Bollywood cinema, but this one was showing ‘Bulletproof Monk’ in its line up, a film that has been out for a good 4 years or more! We didn’t want to upset the driver especially after he had fought the traffic so hard to get us here. But no-one felt like staying, and I was long overdue a trip to the loo. So we asked him to drive us back to MacDonald’s, and it’s clean maintained toilets.
When we arrived back in Islamabad, the armed guards outside Macdonald’s (western company) searched with mirrors under the car for car bombs, and then allowed us into the car park. Once again, we ate the worlds most popular meal, in the hope of appeasing our stomachs. Then got the driver to take us back to the street he found us. Rowan and Gabbs were not feeling up to staying in the tent, and I just wanted to sleep. So I went back to the campsite, and climbed into the rooftent, while the others checked into a Hotel and spent the night there. As a note of interest, I saw a German motorbike on tour was parked up in the campsite next to us before I went to bed. The Germans seem to be the most prolific nation for overlanding.