Last days in Pakistan
Travel days move pretty slow around here. We took a jeep from Kanday Valley back to Skardu. It was a bit more roomy this time since we didn’t have the girls with us. Andy sat in the front to not get car sick, and I in the back with Azam and a couple of other guys making the trip back with us. The 4.5 hour drive back was uneventful (except for the checkpoint guard with the grenade launcher), which I will take after the daily adrenaline rushes. Back at the Mountain Lodge hotel, we took our first shower in two weeks. The pleasure of taking a shower after that long is indescribable. I took the two braids out of my hair slowly as some of it had turned into dreads and was a little painful. The water ran from our shower was quite brown from the days in the dust.
The next day was pretty relaxed. I did my best to wash our clothes from the trek as we needed some of it for the second part of our adventure. I laid the clothes to dry on the rocks upstairs and they dried within 20 minutes. We went into town to get a couple more scarves, random shit like empty feed bags and unique bottle openers (Andy fetishes). Azam was not impressed as he thought we may be shopping for quality fabric and keepsakes, not the cheap scarves from the guy on the corner. We went down some alleys looking for the goods and some of the vendor kiosks were from butchers. The butchers had their meat on display and the flys took notice, buzzing around the hanging meat and fat. That’s when the heat, the stomach bug, and the smells from the market got the best of me and we headed back to the hotel. We packed up our large red duffel with all of our hiking and cold-weather gear that we no longer needed. Manzoor will be shipping it by cargo back to the US for us. It’s not cheap, but it’s better than lugging all of that extra weight and paying for it on the flights we still need to take. We were lazy today, and kind of getting tired of the same food, so we ordered some chicken chow mein to just eat some food before we call a night.
The next day was our travel day back to Islamabad. There were dark clouds in the sky, which had us a little nervous. If this flight is canceled we would have a 16 hour car drive ahead of us. We made our flight with no problem, everything on time. Back in Islamabad, we stayed in a new hotel which was quite the upgrade. Greatly appreciated. We laid in our air conditioned room and decided it was time for food. Neither of us had been feeling very well since the night before and we’ve only been eating a Pakistani food for the last three weeks, so we wanted to give our stomach something we knew, McDonalds.
Andy found one close, close enough within walking distance. It was the hottest part of the day, and we were quite tired from the heat and not having eaten, but we froggered across the road and made it to the giant air condition mall. I can confirm that McDonald’s is the same in Islamabad, and it was everything we expected (and only $10). I knew Andy was sick because he barely ate anything. I didn’t feel great after eating McDonald’s, shocker, but we went back to the hotel and just called it an early night. The night and next morning was not friendly to either of our stomachs, we officially got the stomach bugs the other trekkers had. We needed something simple to eat. I saw a bakery on our way in and thought, well at least I can get some juice in a box there. We mustered up all the energy we could and walked down the street to the bakery. When we walked in, it was magical. It was like we walked into an avocado toast bakery in the Bay Area, the food and drinks and brought us so much joy. They even had on the Spotify Parisian cafe playlist.
We were feeling good, so we decided to go on a little tour to visit an archaeological site in Taxila, this is where everything went wrong for me at least. We stopped in the museum first and it was brutally hot. Being sick and hot is a recipe for disaster. I got out of there and threw up in the courtyard. We quickly made the call to throw up (no pun intended) the surrender flag to retreat for the day. At the hotel, we sat in the lobby while we stabilized our stomachs and heads enough to walk the 150ft to the bakery. First order, 3 large bottles of icy sparkling water. That was the first sparkling water we had seen anywhere thus far in Pakistan (1st world gripe). We felt so much better after a 3 hour visit in cafe and then casually made our way to the airport for our flight to Bangkok. Two “Dr. Bob” dog pills to ease the stomach pains and, fingers crossed, we have no issues on the flight. I’m getting on that plane no matter what.
During check-in, the guy informed us that we need to pay the new government tax enacted in July. Since we bought our tickets before then, we didn’t pay. He wanted cash, naturally. This wasn’t the first time this has happened, whether it was factual or not is TBD, but I also choose my battles and this was not one of them (might be the nausea). Luckily we had dollars in small enough denominations to make the payment and get out of there.