My Travel Adventures

To my great surprise, I found my driver waiting for me at exactly eight o’clock in the morning. I had arranged a ride with my hotel two nights before, as I feared my intended route would be too difficult to explain in a last-minute conversation with an InDrive chauffeur: the plan was to stop by the Bhutto Family Mausoleum just outside Larkana before continuing to Mohenjo-Daro and finishing the day in Hyderabad. Perhaps it helped that I checked about the driver twice at the reception: once in the evening when I arrived and again in the morning just before eating breakfast.

When I reached Multan and checked in yesterday evening, I was told at the reception that every time I left the hotel, I would have to have a police escort with me. I had read something to that effect on Google reviews and booking sites, but the posts were so old that I assumed they were outdated. In vain did I try to convince the hotel that I had a local friend who would accompany me at all times, for, as I found out later, this measure was not just intended to ensure my own security, but also to keep me away from Multan’s nuclear facilities in case I was a spy. In any case, there was nothing I could do but accept the dictate from on high. At least the service was free.

One major sight I missed in Lahore yesterday was the Lahore Museum – the oldest museum in Pakistan. While the museum building itself seems intimidatingly large, an average visit by a non-specialist might take about an hour and a half to two hours, as the upper floor space is comparatively small. The exhibition halls are organised very logically. As one walks in, the hall with ancient artefacts from Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and other sites are on the right. On the left is the hall with Islamic art, which leads into spaces dedicated to Hinduism and Buddhism, and finally to a hall that is nominally dedicated to Chinese art but serves as a catchall for everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else (such as the diary of Queen Victoria).

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.

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.

On the last day of my long weekend in Spain, I explored Toledo. Since basically every tourist site in the country opens at ten o’clock in the morning, I spent my first hour outside walking the road along the southern edge of the city. While this route does not have too many sights – except, perhaps, for the Old Arab Baths – it offers some pretty views of Toledo that most tourists miss. Since the Alcazar is closed on Mondays, I only visited the gardens at its base and then backtracked to the Museo de Santa Cruz. The museum, which is free of entry, has an impressive collection of art by El Greco, who spent half his life in Toledo and whose tomb can be viewed through a little window in the floor of the Monastery of Saint Dominic of Silos. The upper floor is mostly dedicated to azulejos and temporary exhibitions.

On my second free morning in Madrid, before my friends were up and running, I made a quick tour of the Royal Palace. Since I was not sure when during this extended weekend trip I would visit the palace (if I did visit it at all), I did not buy my tickets online, and they were all sold out by the time I had chosen a date and time. Still, I had read online that I could buy tickets in person if I turned up to the palace and waited in a long queue: I was advised to turn up half an hour before the actual opening time.

I had a free morning in Madrid as my friends wanted to go to the Prado, which I visited last year. Instead of joining them, I made a quick trip to Aranjuez, a town just south Madrid known for its royal palace and gardens – and for inspiring the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joa quín Rodrigo. My journey to the small touristic town was relatively simple: after reaching Villaverde Bajo-Cruce by metro, I boarded bus 423, which had arrived just late enough for me to eat my second chocolate croissant of the day. I had eaten my first upon buying a bag of three at a bakery in Madrid and ate the third once I made it to Aranjuez. Fortunately I still had cash on me, as the bus driver told me his card reader was not working.

I thought I was strangely well rested when I woke up before my alarm, but after a few minutes of lying in bed with my eyes closed, it occurred to me that I forgot to set it. As soon as I saw the time, I darted out of bed. I crammed all my belongings in my backpack and ran out to find a café where I could buy a small pastry to go. Armed with an apple and a slice of banana bread, I then made my way to the Silla de Felipe II, a lookout over the Escorial about thirty to forty minutes from the city centre. That, at any rate, was the time it took me in my frantic state. El Escorial looked small but majestic from the lookout, dwarfed by the mountain on whose slopes the city stands, and snow still capped the even taller mountains on the distant right.  

As soon as I arrived in Madrid on Thursday afternoon, I made a rookie mistake. I turned up at the airport bus station some five minutes after the bus for Alcalá de Henares was scheduled to depart and, after hanging around a little hoping that it was merely late, I went back into the airport to buy a sandwich. The next bus was supposed to arrive forty minutes after the first, but as I waited and waited, and as the forty minutes turned into an hour, it slowly dawned on me that pretty much every bus leaving the airport in that direction was departing with a delay of at least a quarter of an hour. In other words, the bus I thought I had missed left while I was buying an overpriced airport meal.  

On my last morning in Cyprus, I made a quick walking tour of Limassol. The city has a relatively new cathedral dedicated to Agia Napa as well as a very blocky medieval castle, but its most appealing attraction is its long, palm-lined waterfront. Even quite early in the morning, people were walking and jogging beneath the palm trees, and elderly men sat on the pier with fishing lines drooping into the water. Since the waterfront forms a gentle convex curve, one can view the new high-rise buildings of Limassol and the hills behind the city by walking out on one of the jetties.

I began the day at the Tombs of the Kings in Paphos. The site’s name is a bit of a misnomer: no kings are thought to be buried in the necropolis, but the tombs were originally thought too fancy not to have been built – or rather dug out – for royalty. While some are simply niches dug into rocks, several catacombs branch off from proper Greek-style courtyards with columns that would have resembled the living quarters of the buried.

Putting far too much faith in Google Maps, I left my hotel in Kakopetria a little after eight and, after making a quick stop to check the pressure in my tyres, arrived at the Church of Panagia tou Araka at nine o’clock. That was when the church was supposed to open according to Google but there was a sign outside saying that the opening time was actually ten. I probably should have expected this, as Google Maps has the correct opening times for several other churches in the area, including the lunch break between one and two in the afternoon.

I checked out of my hotel at half past eight and drove down to the Larnaca waterfront. The streets were largely empty as people were still waking up from New Year’s Eve, and there were plenty of parking spaces all along the road, but when I parked the car, I realised the ticket machine only accepted coins. Luckily, I quickly found a private parking place that took cards. It was opposite Europe Square, which houses the historical buildings of the district administration, the municipal art gallery, and the archives museum. Incidentally, Europe Square is also where one can find the statue of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism and perhaps the most famous citizen of Kition, now Larnaca.