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?

Conference 2

Here's a few pics from our 2nd conference. It was in this lovely hexagonal compound (which made finding your way around it a little taxing until you learned to always keep an eye on which number of side you were on):

(click to see larger image)










There was lots of interesting wildlife that we don't get up by us, some wild, like this pointy fellow:



















But lots kept in the compounds fairly extensive menagerie. These guys' tufts remind my of one of my university professors...



















Poor monkey:

























On the last night we took part in the 'Fun Night' (a title like that is asking for trouble, but it was actually genius!). Lots of people sang songs (including me), danced, read poems, acted out the story of Samson complete with Bollywood dances, and so on...

Here's a couple of the highlights:

Jenny and the other girls put in several hours of practice for this Sindhi Stick Dance:



And this is a Qawali - often written about leaders or holy men, but in this case an irreverent appreciation of our company's leadership team:



We've seen few really good sunsets so far - the sun usually sort of fades out through the haze like this:



















But occasionally it does do something a little bit interesting:

























You may have noticed that this post about a conference - a meeting of people - doesn't contain many people. That's on purpose. But please be assured that we did in fact meet lots of lovely people doing all sorts of interesting work in all kinds of places and situations. We had some interesting teaching, and some fascinating local perspectives on culture and politics. We enjoyed some good times of worship (with an actual music group! And some awesome harmonies, mostly courtesy of one musical family...) and times of sharing things for prayer.

It's nice not to be doing that long bus journey again for a while though...

Orientation conference

We've been back for a few days now, but hadn't quite got round to updating you on our orientation conference in Lahore. When we tried to book our Daewoo (that's the coach company here - connected to the car company of the same name) tickets we weren't too disappointed to learn that one of the colleges had booked the entire 6.30am bus, meaning we'd have to get the 11.30am instead. What a shame.

The Daewoo bus is fairly special: the overall experience is closer to travelling on an airline than a bus (but with more legroom), with baggage checks, luggage tags, and a hostess who brings round newspapers and refreshments. And the equivalent of £8 gets you a 7.5 hour journey. Unfortunately ours picked up a puncture on one of its inner rear tyres, which added another 90 minutes.



















Especially for Laurence, I should point out that the full writing on the green rickshaw reads "MASTER PANTHER".

The journey includes one rather special stretch through the Salt Range, including what I think is the craziest piece of motorway engineering I've ever experienced, which I shall save for a post of its own in full geekish glory.

A friendly chap I met on the bus (and even bought us chicken at one of the stops) helped find us a taxi who wouldn't overcharge us. The journey to the college campus at which the conference was taking place was straightforward enough, but actually finding where to go once we were inside the vast maze of buildings, gardens and arches (in the dark) took so long that we decided to tip him a little extra. The campus was very nice indeed. Here are some of us watching the ubiquitous cricket match.



















The conference itself was great, mainly just for the chance to meet a few other folk in a similar boat. There were 25 or so of us from locations all over the country. We had some fascinating talks on culture, religion, politics and local church history, interviews with local church leaders, and even a cooking lesson ("make sure you don't waste any of the oil!" - we can see why so many of the more affluent people here struggle to keep their weight down!).

On the last day we had an outing to the Wagah Border ceremony (detailed post with pics to follow), before a lovely meal out with one of the other couples (at a buffet restaurant - endless variety of curries being made in front of you, live music, pretty swish - not the kind of thing we'd frequent, but great for a rare treat).

On the journey back we broke the journey at the house of a couple of our new friends, then got a couple of minibuses back up from Pindi. The last one waited until it was full, then set off. Then stopped to pick up just one more passenger to be squeezed in wherever possible. Then again for one more. And again. And one more time, this time for a family of three, prompting a complete re-shuffle so that no women were sitting next to unrelated men. Wouldn't like to do that for more than a short ride!

Oh, and when we got back, it was cold! Apparently there was a big hailstorm soon after we left, and it's been triple-layer temperature ever since - bit of a shock to the system!