My Travel Adventures

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.

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.