Weekend away part 1 - Naran (again)

This weekend we took another trip up the Kaghan Valley to visit a couple of friends who are spending a few weeks volunteering at a school in Naran.  (We would have happily taken a week, but that would have left the hospital even more short-staffed...)

A view down the lower part of the valley.

And up the way.  I'm still amazed how populous these steep hills are.

Driving close to the edge.

Since we were last here, a little progress has been made with this landslide.
The two temporary bridges have seemingly been pressed into service elsewhere,
leaving the traffic to fight its way along the side where the road used to be.

A new addition since last time is the beekeepers.  Every half a mile or so we
passed a few hundred of these little beehives, usually with a tent or two nearby
for the keepers.  We must have passed tens of thousands of hives on our trip -
do they get packed away to hibernate in the winter?  Or are they packed into
trucks and forcibly migrated to somewhere warmer?

Most of these places also have a little stall where you can buy the produce.
It comes in unmarked recycled containers, from old jars to 2-litre coke bottles.

No problems getting past the glacier this time, as thousands of people have
apparently already discovered.  Naran has been transformed by the tourist
season:  a huge tent village has sprung up on all the available flat land,
catering for tourists using tents bearing the logos of countless different aid
agencies; all those broken down building have been fixed up, painted, and
filled with things that tourists might like to part with their cash for.

We even had the thought that Naran might be the Pakistani equivalent of
somewhere like Ibiza (minus the drinking/clubbing) - bustling until the small
hours with young trendy tourists from the big cities, throbbing music, rowdy
social gatherings, even a big searchlight-type thing sweeping the night sky.

And of course no Pakistani street scene is complete without one of these -
and this is a particularly fine example.  Next part tomorrow...

Camels, canals and a multitude of cats

We recently spent a week visiting some friends of our down in the Sindh, around 5 hours bus ride out of Karachi. We attended two tribal weddings, which I shall leave to Jenny to describe in all their colourful detail. For now, here's a few pictorial impressions of what it was like there...

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.

Fancy sharing your living space with this chap?

Lots of pretty flowers around, and saw some brilliant little iridescent
what-may-or-may-not-have-been hummingbirds.

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...

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.

We do have occasional camels up near us, but they're much more common here.
This one has a comparatively light load.

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?

What You See Is What You Get...

...but isn't necessarily what you wanted.

This week I and my 'boss', Mr P, at the workshop went down to Pindi on another shopping trip - mainly for supplies for the hospital, but also to try and reconnoitre the availabilities and prices of various materials for the solar project.

So after many deals and many cups of tea at various shops (including spending £500 on lightbulbs), we parked the van and hopped into a more nimble rickshaw to head into the narrower, busier streets of the metalworkers' bazaar.



















Riding in this thing feels very much like driving a fairground dodgem - the handling is pretty much identical - only it's more in your interest to avoid the other vehicles rather than take them on. And he can get through some minuscule gaps when he wants to. The bazaar is a bit different from your average one - the stalls/shops are much bigger and generally have piles of interesting things, and various guys making things out of other things.

Anyway, to come to the point of this blog post, here's a representative sample of one of the dual-language, triple-participant conversations in one of the shops. To give a little context, I'm trying to track down some plastic tubing for use as a heat exchanger. It'll need to stand up to nearly 100°C, and there aren't many kinds that'll do that.

(opening pleasantries)

Me: "Do you have any PEX pipe?"

(discussion back and forward between Mr P and shopkeeper in Urdu/Punjabi)

Shopkeeper: "What about this one?" (hands me a bit of tube - a yellow one, 1/2" diameter, no markings)

Me (thinks): "It's a yellow one, 1/2" diameter, no markings..."
Me (out loud): "Umm... what's it made of? It has to not melt at 100°C."

(more Urdu/Punjabi discussion)

Mr P: "Okay, how about this one?" (points out a different one - black, 1" dia, again no markings)

Me (internally): "It's black, 1" dia, again no markings..."
Me (out loud): "Do you know what it's made of? I really need to know the material it's made of before I can tell whether it's suitable or not..."

(more Urdu/Punjabi discussion)

Shopkeeper: "Also, I have this one over here..."

Me (in the privacy of my own head): "But what the @£%$!!ing $£^^@ is it made of???!!!!! Aaaargh!!"

What You See Is What You Get...
...but that doesn't necessarily mean you know what it is, and neither does the shopkeeper.











Random addendum: for ages I've been trying to get a picture of one of the painted trucks at night, because in many cases all that amazing decoration is done in reflective paint. But, not wanting to blind oncoming drivers with my camera flash (road travel here being quite dangerous enough already!), I had to take a short movie and grab a frame from it - not the full glory, but you get the idea:

The Salt Range

The aforementioned Salt Range: this may be of more interest to you engineers and other geeks, but it has some nice scenery too!

Once you get down to Islamabad from where we are, the journey is amazingly flat for several hundred kilometres. So after all that flatness, it's intriguing to encounter a succession of increasingly urgent-sounding signs...





























































...before heading onto a 10km-long, 50kph-limited, 7%-inclined series of double bends, cuttings and bridges that looks something like this...



















...complete with escape roads for those whose brakes aren't up to it (looks like it's been used a few times too!):
















In this one you can see where they've obviously had to swerve the road inwards a bit from the edge after it got too precarious:



















Some striking scenery - all of these were taken on the return journey - on the way there it was so hazy you couldn't see much beyond the road itself:



















While the speed limit for those double bends is mostly 50kph, the trucks have to settle for less than a 10th of that as they settle down into hill-climbing gear for the long haul upwards:



















In our area there are plenty of twisty little mountain roads that snake along the sides of valleys in improbable ways, but to do it with a 6-lane motorway is pretty darn impressive.

Squeegie merchant!

Today I went down to 'Pindi with the workshop boss to get the first batch of supplies for our prototype solar water heater. Here's the edited highlights of the day, complete with random hotchpotch of sights, observations and random impressions:

Mobile Goat Bouncers. For a while on the drive down we were stuck behind a small truck chock-a-block full of goats. There were also two guys in the back with the goats, whose job seemingly was to clamber about the place disciplining their charges if they misbehaved. All while barreling down a bumpy hill, swerving around the other traffic. Can't say I particularly envied them their job.

First stop - the metal merchant:




















After purchasing our copper pipe and aluminium sheet, we headed to a little shop where we were presented with an ever-growing pile of different pipe fittings and valves. Here the language barrier didn't help general communication - after about 20 minutes I drew the chap a quick diagram and he said "Ah, for this you need 3/4" to 1/2" reducing tees." Which I could have told him right at the start! Or rather I could, had I been able to follow any of the conversation, or known how to say any of that in Urdu.

The taxis in Pindi are almost as finely decorated as the trucks in the rest of the country. The very best ones, which unfortunately I wasn't fast enough to snap, had a large painting of an animal on the side in addition to all the other paraphernalia: tigers were popular, as were white horses, as (for some reason) were eagles fighting cobras. But the BJW award of geniusness has to go to the one proudly displaying an intricately painted 3-foot lobster.
















The drivers here also have their own equivalent of the UK's once-ubiquitous "My other car is a Porsche" stickers - writing on the back of a tiny Suzuki pick-up said, I'm reliably informed: "When I grow up, I'm going to be a truck".

Taxi race:
















Members of the Wilson clan will no doubt be thrilled to hear that we also went to a genuine Pakistani squeegie merchant. Need a plunger (or ten?), any kind of brush, or a random basket-y thing? He's got them too!

Some of the trucks have proper pictures on as well as random patterns. I'm a fan of the somewhat bewildered expression on the tiger.




















A final thought: watching a suzuki with 8 men clinging onto the back of it go over a speed-bump is, for some reason, really rather amusing.

At last...

Hey, what's this? Could it be one of those trucks I've been trying to get a decent picture of for the last 4 weeks? Here, stationary, in the compound, where I can freely wield the camera? Why, I do believe it is, and a pretty fine specimen it is too.

A birthday outing - supplemental

A birthday outing

Saturday being Jenny's birthday, we went into the next big town with a couple of friends. We visited several cloth shops to get Jenny some "birthday suits". The shopkeeper-to-customer work ratio is definitely the right way round: you sit on a comfy sofa and point at what you want to see, and the guy gets them out and unrolls them for you. Then if you don't want them, they do all the putting away. Also, since you take them to the tailor to get made for you, they're more-or-less guaranteed to fit you. Bonus!

Jenny (under the tablecloth (or chaddor)) at the cloth counter.

Trying on a dupatta.

About 1/20th of the selection in one of the half-dozen cloth shops we visited. I like the swirly one in the bottom row. It's a shame the men's fashions are so much drabber - you could make some cracking hawaiian shirts out of some of these...

A visit to the nut man. Nuts and dried fruit are good, but a lot of hard work: you have to remove all the stalks/stones/dust, wash them in a mild detergent solution, rinse, and finally bake them in the oven for 10 mins before they're safe to eat!

A view down one of the bazaar streets.

Our driver purchasing some freshly-cooked-in-its-husk-at-the-side-of-the-road corn.

As promised, a first half-decent pic of the painted trucks. Uphill they are pursued by an impatient queue of wannabe overtakers.

Trumpeter serenades the entry of the cake.

Chocolate-y traybake-y Pakistani-flag-y goodness. Yum.

How to Drive

Soundtrack for this post: How To Drive by Cancel The Astronauts

A few tips on how transporting oneself by road should be accomplished:

1. You own the piece of your vehicle presently occupies.
2. Any unoccupied piece of road is up for grabs by anyone:  just because you are travelling at high speed towards a particular patch in your own lane doesn't mean you have any greater claim to it.
3. Horns are for honking.
4. Lights are for flashing.
5. Size matters.  But then so does nippyness.
6. Never be content with staying behind another vehicle.  No matter how fast it's travelling, you should go for the overtake.
7. When preparing to overtake, get as close as you can to the back bumper of the vehicle in front, while edging out into the oncoming traffic as much as possible.  Sound your horn a few times and/or flash your full beams for good measure (of course).
8. Go for it, whether it looks sensible or not.  Hopefully someone will let you back in if the move doesn't come off.
9. Switching the A/C off for a few seconds is handy for those nitro-boost-requiring moments.

Finally, if a truck is your vehicle of choice, it must be resplendently decorated.  Extra trucker points to be had for reflectors, coloured lights, whirly windmills, collections of sticky-up poles, a greatly protruding front bumper, a greatly protruding 'forehead', sticky-out bits on your wheel hubs, or a musical/novelty horn.

(this photo nicked from google somewhere - hope to get some of my own soon, as we've seen some equally/even more stupendous examples...)

EDIT:  Oh, and I almost forgot:  10.  Seatbelts should be worn on the motorways (where the road is smooth, well looked-after, wide, and almost deserted - and where there are signs saying you have to).  Take it off as soon as you're back on the twisty, bumpy, overcrowded, unmarked, potholed roads.  After all, "they're so restraining!"  (I kinda thought that was the point...)