Pakistan... So hot right now!

Try this out. Go for a run, 20 minutes should suffice. Then, take your dirty smelly socks, and microwave them for 30 seconds. Once you've completed this step, strap the now warm and moist socks to the sides of your head. Got it? That's the feeling you get riding through the scorching humidity of Pakistan at the moment.

I crossed the border at Wagah the day the olympics began, but the soldiers were busy competing in their own competition - The daily border show-down between India and Pakistan. Over a thousand people gathered on both sides of the border to watch the massive Punjab soldiers stamp up and down the pavement like supercharged roosters (complete with the headgear) to shouts of 'Long Live Pakistan'!! This daily event inevitably ends with a begrudging handshake between the two sides, but with the amount of pomp and aggression that goes into it, i'm surprised all out war does not break out on a daily basis.

From the border it was a flat 30kms to Lahore, where I spent 2 nights and checked out some of the local sights. The guesthouse I stayed in was run by a Sufi guy who hosted local musicians out on the rooftop. The music was pretty cool, with Urdu chanting and amazing drumming and percussion.

I'm pretty keen to get out of the cities and into the hills, so I left Lahore after 2 days for Islamabad, which took 2 days and was a bit like riding along albany highway, except that every 10 minutes or so someone would pull up next to me or pull me over and ask me all about where i'm from and what i'm doing and offer me a cup of tea! The pakistani hospitality is out of this world.


Islamabad is like Pakistan's Canberra. It was built about 50 years ago as the nations capital, and is a fairly tasteless city seperated into square sections each with a little market in the middle. From here things should get more exciting, as I head up along the Karakoram highway into the mountains.

I know the pictures are hardly the national geographic classics you're used to from TTI, but I left my usb cable in the tent and can only put up these two pictures of Lahore traffic I thought were fantastic.