My Travel Adventures

With a population of over fourteen million, Lahore is the second largest city in Pakistan and one of the largest urban centres in Asia. Although it has been continuously inhabited for millennia, it rose to prominence in the medieval period, when it served as the capital of the Hindu Shahis, the Ghaznavid Empire and the Delhi Sultanate. Lahore’s greatest blossoming took place under the Mughal Empire, when Emperor Akbar ordered that a palace be built in the city and moved his capital there from Fatehpur Sikri. His son Jahangir was buried in Lahore, and his grandson Shah Jahan was born there.

I ordered an InDrive to Lahore on my last evening in Islamabad, and although it was meant to arrive at eight o’clock, my driver only showed up a little before nine. Humza suggested that next time, I better just order an InDrive the moment I am ready to go. I did not take it as a good sign when, after a mere half an hour of driving, we stopped at a gas station for a coffee and cigarette break, but somehow my driver was still able to beat our estimated arrival on Google Maps by a considerable margin.  

On my fourth day in Islamabad, I paid for a driver to take me around Taxila. Founded around the year 1000 BCE, Taxila served for some time as the capital of Gandhara, the region from which Buddhism and a specific aesthetic sensibility around this religion spread to Tibet, China and beyond: the city’s shrines were even visited by the Chinese monk Xuanzang during his famous Journey to the West. In 325 BCE, Taxila surrendered to Alexander the Great without a struggle. It was successively ruled by the Mauryans, Indo-Greeks and Indo-Scythians until the old city was destroyed by the Kushan Empire in the common era. However, it was under the Kushan Empire that Gandhara reached the peak of its cultural and artistic influence, earning fame as a respected centre of learning.  

The day started out quite cloudy, making it a perfect time for my planned museum visits – I prefer to use my sunny days for taking pictures outdoors. My opinion diverged entirely from that of my hosts who, as proper Pakistanis, only refer to a day as good to spend outdoors when it is cloudy and “not too warm.” Fortunately, we found an intersection between our priorities. In the morning, we would use the lower temperatures to visit the Shah Allah Ditta Caves, after which we would drive to the Faisal Mosque and the Islamabad Museum.

My friend Humza recommended a tour of Rawalpindi during my stay in Islamabad. The two cities are right next to each other, forming a metropolitan area of around six million people, many of whom travel back and forth between the two for work and school. While Islamabad serves as the nation’s capital, Rawalpindi is the seat of the Pakistan Army General Headquarters, which is why it was recently targeted by drones claimed by the Taliban. Interestingly, before the partition, Rawalpindi had a Hindu and Sikh majority. The population left a massive hole in the city’s economy and social fabric when it was forced to leave, and many of their old havelis are in a state of disrepair.

Established in 1967, Islamabad was designed by the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis during the rule of military dictator Ayub Khan. It was conceived as a giant grid split into square sectors by broad avenues, with each sector having a primary school, two mosques, a few green spaces, and a central square for shops and restaurants. The sectors are lettered from northwest to southeast and numbered from northeast to southwest. Tracing a diagonal line along the map you might, for example, cut through F-6, G-7 and H-8. Each sector also has four subsectors numbered in a clockwise direction from southwest, such as F6/1, F6/2, F6/3 and F6/4. This concept seems so megalomaniacal that it comes as no surprise that it remains far from complete. The letter series essentially runs only from E to I (with only one D-letter sector and some faraway gardens named B-17) and the numbers do not go below 5.    

On the second morning of my two-day layover in Uzbekistan, I rented a car and drove to the mountains. The process was easy: the rental company did not even want to see my international driver’s licence. They did, however, make sure to impress upon me the importance of a twice-stamped document that I was to show the police in case I was pulled over. It seems that stamped documents are an obsessive precaution in this country: when I checked out of my hotel early in the morning on the following day, I was handed another one to show at the airport in case anyone asked for it. No one ever did.