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| It's much drier and dustier in general than up here in the mountains, except for these brilliant pockets of green where water is diverted from the Indus for irrigation, via a massive canal network built by the British back in colonial times. |
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| Fancy sharing your living space with this chap? |
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| Lots of pretty flowers around, and saw some brilliant little iridescent what-may-or-may-not-have-been hummingbirds. |
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| Our friends had four fairly magnificent Himalayan cats (two of which had kittens on the same day while we were there). Must be pretty toasty under all that fur! This one's ginger relative could almost pass for a small lion... |
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| They overload their trucks to an even more comical extent, especially when it's less dense cargoes such as sugar cane. Two have trouble passing each other. |
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| We do have occasional camels up near us, but they're much more common here. This one has a comparatively light load. |
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| We came to Pakistan pretty much assuming we wouldn't get to swim anywhere while we were here, but we were wrong, this delightful canal being floated down in style. |
Also worthy of note was another magnificent example of Pakistani roadworks, where a huge stretch of highway (1-2 hours drive) was being widened from 2 narrow lanes to about 6 by the looks of it. What makes it interesting is the fact that they don't do it a little section at a time; no, it would be far grander to do all of it at once. So step one, scrape off the old tarmac. All 67km of it. Now what's next? Ah yes, gravel to lay the base for the extra width, delivered in hundreds of painted trucks. And so on.
Which makes for an exciting drive (especially at night!): bouncing over rough gravel and patches of old tarmac, blinded by the full beams of oncoming trucks, every now and then having to switch which "lane" you're driving in to avoid piles of newly-delivered gravel, and occasionally screeching to a halt in front of an unmarked 10-foot pit in the road. Why do it any other way?
