My Travel Adventures

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.

My plane landed in Tashkent at one o’clock in the morning, but fortunately I was not dazed enough to forget to exchange money. A few taxi drivers fought over me in the parking lot, but as a matter of principle I stuck with the first person I approached – the alternative had been a burly man who flung his arm around my shoulder in a manner that would have seemed friendly had it been easier to extricate myself from his embrace. He followed us to the car insisting to my driver that I was to go with him for a higher price, and exchanged some choice words with him – though thankfully no more than that – as I climbed inside.

I arrived in Azerbaijan on the evening of Nowruz. The timing was unintentional; in fact, had I realised my trip was to coincide with the weekend of the New Year, I probably would have arranged things a little differently. My original plan had been to fly to Islamabad via Sharjah on Sunday, but when Iran – in response to the recent US-Israeli offensive – began to launch strikes against its neighbours, my flight was cancelled. I scrambled at the last minute to figure out an alternative route, which eventually yielded the option of flying around the affected zones: From Baku to Tashkent and from Tashkent to Islamabad. Due to the timing of the flights, I ended up having one day to explore Baku and another two days in Tashkent.