Dave’s Reise nach Osten

(Deutsch ein bisschen weiter unten)

It is not news anymore, but still: I made it to India! A month ago I crossed the border between Pakistan and India. I was so happy that I finally reached the goal of my trip!

The first few days I spent in Amritsar at the Golden Temple, the most holy place of the Sikhs. I really enjoyed it. It is a very special atmosphere.

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Ich bin in Indien! Das ist nun schon einen Monat lang so, aber egal, am 22.November erreichte ich mein Ziel Indien! Ich war hoch erfreut und den Rest des Tages überdreht.
Die nächsten Tage verbrachte ich in Amritsar beim Goldenen Tempel – das Herzstück der Stadt und der heiligste Ort der Sikhs.

Viele Pilger übernachten dort, draussen auf dem Steinboden. Es gibt auch Zimmer für wenig Geld, aber nicht für uns. Für Touristen wurde aber extra ein Tourist Dormitory eingerichtet. Massenlager, wie ein Hostel, warme Dusche und gefiltertes Wasser. Gratis. 3 Nächte darf man bleiben. Im Tempelareal gibt es auch eine Gemeinschaftsküche die rund um die Uhr geöffnet ist und immer das gleiche serviert. Einfach, schmackhaft, nahrhaft. Und gratis! Die Gastfreundschaft der Sikhs hat mich beeindruckt. Ich war auch beeindruckt von der Logistik, es werden etwa 30-40‘000 Mahlzeiten pro Tag bereitgestellt. Ich habe dann auch mal selber eineinhalb Stunden beim Abschwasch geholfen und gesehen wie das gemacht wird. Das Geschirr geht durch 5 Waschgänge, drei Mal Seife und zwei Mal Wasser. So ist sichergestellt, dass es am Schluss garantiert sauber ist.
[bild]
Um den Tempel rum ist eine wunderschöne heilige Atmosphäre. Im Tempel selber wird die ganze Zeit gesungen, die Musik wird per Lautsprecher in das ganze Areal übertragen, der Tempel ist von einem grossen Wasserbecken umgeben. Als ich das erste Mal dort stand, dachte ich daran, dass das doch so oft mein Ziel war. Der erste Ort in Indien, Amritsar, der goldene Tempel. Und jetzt bin ich dort. Bin mit dem Fahrrad dahin gefahren. Auch mal mit Bus und Zug, aber alles über Land. Und jetzt stand ich davor. Ich dachte daran wie ich von zuhause abgefahren bin, meine Lieben zurückliess, erst noch auf vertrauten Strassen fuhr und bald die Schweiz verliess. Und während ich um das Becken rum lief und langsam auf den Tempel zuging liess ich mir all die Erlebnisse und Begegnungen durch den Kopf gehen die diese Reise zu dem gemacht haben was sie ist. Es war ein wunderschöner Moment.

Cycling on the G.T. Road, not far away from the Waga border post, we stopped for a tea at a little restaurant (if you can call it like that). A few benches in a garage and a table outside on which the tea was brewed. Only after we ordered the five teas we realised that we did not want to sit inside, there were way to many flies. We sat outside against the wall of the shop.
The owner of the shop next door then brought chairs outside for us!

Could that ever happen in our country?

So what to do next? Flee the nannies! We took an overnight train to Rawalpindi/Islamabad. There I applied for my Indian visa and had to hear that I have to wait two weeks for it. Two weeks! What should I do? I had planned to go directly to India, skipping the beautiful north of Pakistan. But now, it sounded like an invitation to have a look at the famous Karakorum Highway, the Hunza Valley, the mountains. I left my bike in Pindi and took a bus up. But even without a bicycle, travelling kept being adventurous. Here are some stories.

In the bus up north

It was a 20 hours ride to get from the Indus valley up to Gilgit, the first station of the beautiful north. Distances are long and the road is bad. Really bad. The Karakorum Highway is just a path chopped into a steep mountain wall. And right now they are doing a lot of construction work. But back into the bus.

It got dark and cooler and cooler. The two little square roof windows were opened and I tried to close the one in the back, close to me. It did not work. Maybe it works electrically? I went to the front to ask if the driver or
the steward can close it. They did not understand what I want, but there was a nice man in the third row who spoke good English. And he told me: “We have a problem here. I am sorry. We need the fresh air. This man over there has a dead body with him.”

Na, da schluckt man erst mal leer.

I could then explain that I only need the back window closed, the steward came to the back and closed it with force. While turning around I had a discreet look at the mentioned man, but could not see a dead body.
At the next stop, my new friend explained the story. This couple had a baby, it got sick, they went to Islamabad for treatment, but were too late (or the treatment was not effective). Now they are bringing their dead child back to their village to bury it. Sad story.

Talking about India

In the hostel in Karimabad I started talking to some travellers about India. It is a strange situation, it seems like everybody has been there before, only you overlander have not. I asked for tips and where and how. And then something happened that has always happened, but still came unexpected. They told me better not to go to India! They told me it is nicer here in Pakistan, no touts, less hassles, friendly people. Again and again, wherever I go, people keep telling me not to go to the next place. And they are seldomly right. It took me a while to figure out that the one guy telling one bad story after the next was full of negativity and not a good reference. Sure, India must be a shock for the first time visitor who deboards a plane. But I did not come by plane. And in the ten days that I am here now, I did not get a bad impression at all. Travelling overland conditions you, I really recommend it.

A scene from a shop

I went to a shop which sold cloths and clothes. It was dusk and there was no light in the shop. We had to inspect the goods outside. Just after me, a lady with her daugther came to buy a jacket. She had a small discussion with the shopkeeper and then he said to me: “I have told her to coming during the daytime, so she can have a better look at what she buys. It is to dark now.”
Me: “Ou sorry, I did not want to come so late.”
He: “Nono, you are a tourist. That is alright. You tourist always have a lot to do. You always work in the internet and stuff.”

On the road to Multan everybody told us that Multan is safe. “Multan, no problem”, “Multan, safe”. So our expectations were quiet high. No police escort, freedom again. More opportunities to get in touch with locals.

We got disappointed. The local police chief seemed to have other ideas about the security situation. We had nannies all the time. And not just one policeman. No, it had to be a police jeep with six policemen! They always wanted to know our plans for the next day. Imagine five travellers who got used over months to always live in the moment, decide for the moment, people who don’t know where they will sleep at 6pm, but always find something and suddendly someone asks: When do you want breakfast tomorrow? What do you want to do tomorrow? What is your plan?

It was an experience. Imagine us going to the internet cafe. A jeep, two policemen in the front, four in the back, all with guns. All for a short ride to the internet cafe. And that in one of the supposedly safest cities in Pakistan. I may give you the image that Pakistan is really dangerous. But I think they were just übereager to protect us.

The only thing you can do, as always, is to make the best out of the situation. So we asked the policemen for a good and not too expensive restaurant, they brought us to one. They sat around a table, waiting while we were eating. We told them that we need to go to the hospital, no need for a taxi, they are our taxi, they even used the sirene. We want to see the shrines. They brought us there.

On the one hand, it was a cool experience, because it was so different. Always someone guarding you, we felt like VIP’s. On the other hand, always having someone asking where you are going is annoying, we felt like hostages.

After a long bus ride from the Iranian border to Quetta, we first took some days of in Quetta and got a feeling for the new culture. Also, we tried to get a permit to cycle to Multan. We went to the Home Department of the province, talked with them a few times, provided a detailed schedule and they told us that we are going to get a fax to our hotel. The fax never arrived. On the proposed day of our departure, the hotel owner simply called the police, asked for the required escort and of we went.

On our map were two roads, a red and a yellow one. We wanted to take the yellow one, less traffic is better, isn’t it?! Well, the first few kilometers of this wonderful yellow road turned out to be just an earth road. After that uphill, sometimes paved, most of the time gravel. Then the Diarrhea came. I continued cycling for the whole day, but definitly slower than my friends. The night in the police station of a little village. The next day is was not the only one sick. We hired a pick up truck the get to Ziarat, the next place with a hotel. The road was great, sad we could not cycle that part! Ziarat is a former British hill station, but there was not much except for that one teahouse that really reminded us of an English garden. Getting better, cooking on our own for some days. Then cycling on, always a motorbike with two policemen and a gun on it next to us. No traffic on roads with great scenery. Sleeping in police stations, cooking, cycling and some crazy interactions with locals. Also some very nice moments, I will remember the policeman who said: that over there is my house. It was lunchtime and so we got invited to eat there!

The ride ended with me and a friend being heavily sick again, so we decided to take a bus to Multan while the others cycled. They seated us in the back of this minibus. On the road were a lot of checkpoints, everytime we two had to get out, crawl over all the seats, write our names and passport numbers in a book and go on. These policemen on the countryside were mostly nice, but not really bright. Sometimes we had to explain that our visas are not expired. Was it the first passport they saw? But there were other names in the books before ours… The image that will stick in my head is a policemen sitting lazily on a plastic chair, holding a rope that replaced the boom barrier, stopping cars like that.

At dawn, shortly before D.G. Khan, at some checkpoint, the police took us out of the bus, with all our luggage. It needed a lot of protesting to get an explanation. D.G. Khan was supposely to unsafe for us, so they wanted to bring us directly to Multan. Well, that suited our plans well. We had to wait for the escort for some time. In the meantime, we got offered a shower at the police station    , and even a hot one! What more can you wish?

The crazy thing with police escorts is that they are always only the police men from the current district. So at every district border a new escort is waiting. For the less-then-100km ride to Multan, we had to change the jeep three times. Always new policemen, always unloading the bicycles and all the bags und loading them again. They also have different police districts in the big cities. Cycling out of Quetta, we cycled next to four different jeeps. But I was positively surprised that we almost never had to wait for the next escort.

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Read on for travellers: A recent thread on the Lonely Planet Forum about the same area.

There are certain things that help much to get an insight in how a culture works. Here are some suggestions for your next trip.

• Go to the hospital. Preferably as a patient.
• Post a parcel. Not with DHL – in the main post office.
• Use a taxi.
• Use an overland bus. Use a train. Use whatever else there is. For example motorbike taxis in Teheran.
• Try to find something specific in town. Things you want to buy. It is getting more interesting if it is a thing of high value, for example a car.
• Ask for a vegetarian meal.
• Ask for the way.
• Spend a day ore more in a small village.
• Try to talk to locals.
• Meet locals.
• Be in need of help.
• Do as the romans do and contemplate why they do it that way. Join their free time activities.
• Work on a local farm for some weeks. (http://www.wwoof.org/)

If you go to Pakistan, don’t go as a tourist, go for longer time.

That was the advice a friend got before going to Pakistan and it is true. You cannot understand this country by travelling through it, you have to study it to understand it. Nevertheless, I got some insights that helped me understanding at least a bit. The biggest insight came from understanding that Pakistan has a lot of illiteracy and poverty.

Illiteracy and Poverty

Half of the population of Pakistan can neither read nor write. I don’t know exactly how the school systems works and I heard different things. Some people say there are public schools for everybody that are free, but they are in a bad shape and if you want some good education you pay for a private school. Others told me you have to pay school money for every kid. We talked to one lady in Northern Pakistan and she told us she has to pay 2500 Rupees per month for every boy[1] so he can go to school but she does not have to pay school money for her girl. This lady was living in a small village, she had a garden, a simple house, two cows and seemed to be pretty happy. But I cannot really imagine where she could get the money for the school from. She herself had some education, about 10 years of school, but after that, her parents could not afford more school years for her next to the fact that she would have had to move to a city which is further away and which would take some money too, as there is no higher school nearby.
I realized that the state of Pakistan is not able to provide proper education to all its kids – or simply this government does not care. To be fair, it could also just be because they have problems right now that are more urgent than education. But thinking long term, it would definitely be of high value to invest in education.

Now imagine yourself living in a little village in Pakistan. You are poor, maybe you can’t read yourself, you barely survive and then you have to pay money for your child so it can go to school while it is in an age where it could already earn money. Would you let him or her go to school which cost you money or would you let him or her help in the household/restaurant/on the fields which would make your life a little more bearable?

I started to imagine the lives of the waiters when sitting in small restaurants in villages. I saw small boys washing the dishes and thought that the waiter maybe started his ‘career’ in the same age, under the same conditions. Maybe he is bound to that one restaurant, he survives, but he does not have
perspectives.

That also helped me understand why they sometimes react so helpless on me. Some people just stare at me, others don’t understand my simple order or giggle because of me. But there is no reason to blame someone who always lived in his village, who can’t read and therefore is hardly able to think outside his box.

If you are poor, you can’t afford good education for your kids. If your kids stay illiterate, they will never make a lot of money. They will live simple and so will their kids and so on. A vicious circle.

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[1]30 CHF/US$. But to get a better picture, imagine 300 CHF/US$ as a lot of things in Pakistan just cost the tenth of what they cost in the west). And that multiplied by three, because she has three boys.

Finally, I uploaded a selection of pictures from Iran. I hope you enjoy them.

Ich habe endlich eine Auswahl meiner Bilder vom Iran hochgeladen. Ich hoffe sie ergänzen euer Bild dieses Landes.

Teheran

Qom

Kashan

Isfahan

From Isfahan to the border of Pakistan

1. Learn to understand Indian English. It will be of much use to you when you deal with the embassy folks. If you don’t understand it you might find yourself in dialogs like the following:
   

   Embassy staff member: “***some really tough subcontinental English*** – do you understand?”
   Me: “No, I don’t understand.”
   He: “Can’t you speak English?”

2. Go to your own embassy and get a recommendation letter. Or first call the Pakistanis and ask if it is still needed: 66944888. In the Swiss case, it costs you 40 Swiss franks (today: 360′000 IR) and you can get it between 8.30 and 11.30. Have a look at the current opening hours.
3. Get a visa application form at the Pakistani embassy and fill in everything needed. To lower confusion:
   • It is necessary to provide an address in Pakistan, any hotel will do.
   • And they want the address of two persons coming up for the costs in case of an accident or such. That these two addresses were exactly the same, only the first name of my parents was different was not a problem.
   • There are also lines for the same thing with addresses in Pakistan, I left them blank, that was ok.
4. Next they want you to write a personal application. They gave me a blank sheet of paper and I wrote an application with my hand.
   

   Dear Sir
   I hereby apply…

   It feels weird.
   You should state why you want to visit Pakistan, how long, when and especially why you did not apply for the visa in your homecountry.

5. Hand in:
   • the application form
   • the handwritten application
   • three photos of you
   • the recommendation letter
   • a copy of every page of your passport that has a stamp or anything on it

   Hand it in between 9.00 and 11.00. But too early does not make a lot of sense, because they will let you wait until 11.00, then ask you a few questions and then tell you to call again in about 3 working days. They told me to call 4 days later, between was also the weekend (Thursday and Friday).

6. You call, you go to the embassy. They tell you to deposit money on a bank account. In my case 32 Dollar respectivelly 320000 Rial. Walk south from the crossing until the end of the street, then right, and just over the crossing you find the bank, badly signed. You go back, hand in the receipt from the bank and your passport and they tell you to pick up your passport a few hours later with a receipt they give you. This time use the main entrance.
7. For Swiss overlanders: Apply at home! You can get a three month visa with a flexible entry date within the next year.

Address of the embassy of Pakistan on Teheran:
Block No 1
Ahmed Etimadzadeh Alley
Dr. Hussain Fatimi St.
North Jamshidabad
14118 Teheran
www.parepteheran.org

I already stated that my texts are missing the view of women. Luckily I met a traveler who can provide it. Annika travelled overland from Berlin to Pakistan to study in Islamabad for a semester. (who calls me crazy anymore?) I am happy she provides a guestpost to my blog. If you like it, read more from her on her blog: traveleidoscopia.blogspot.com

From the eyes of a woman

„If I want to travel, I have to get a passport. To get a passport, my father or my husband have to agree on it. As they don’t want me to travel alone, I don’t get a passport. I’m trapped.“

The freedom of a woman or a girl in Iran depends a lot on the place where she lives (as not all of the places are as westernized as Teheran) as well as on the family (how much the parents allow). This is how I perceived it first.

One girl told me that she would love to travel but that her parents don’t allow it to her. Her only chance will be, as she put it, to marry an open minded man who let’s her go to travel. But finding such a person isn’t so easy in a gender separating society as the Iranian, where one of the first contacts with a person from the other sex is in university (besides the family relatives from the other sex that you might have contact with).And even if you get in contact with a possible open minded future husband: your parents will have to agree on him and what to do about it, if they want to choose or don’t approve your choice?

Women have relationships before marriage, but one women in Tabriz summarized what a lot of women I spoke to, expressed: „When you have a boyfriend before marriage, which most of the girls have, and you might have sex with him (which is forbidden), he will not marry you afterwards, because he thinks that you are a bad girl.“

But the daily problems go further than the decision about relationships. They touch the decisions made on a personal level for an independend life. It is hard for a woman to divorce from her husband without his agreement and renting an appartment is not possible without the father’s or husband’s permission.

A friend whom I was walking in the streets the other day told me about her brother’s wife. She had cysts and needed a life-saving operation. For this operation her husband had to sign a paper that he gives the doctors permission to make the surgery. Even before she went into the operation he was called again to confirm that he agreed on her being operated although she might loose her futility. And he was asked again and again how many children he already had and if he wouldn’t like to have more. (Well…how can he have more, when his beloved wife dies? Except of the idea of „replacing“ her…).

These are just kaleidoscopick minipixels out of the talks I had in the recent days in Iran with some women.

Friends and family asked me how I cope with wearing a hejab, the in Iran compulsory covering of your hair. It is just a piece of cloth. Wearing a hejab and a manteau for two weeks isn’t too bad. It is just some extra clothes that you have to get used to, despite the fact that most of the women wear the hejab more loosely than you might think. And by going into a catholic church in Italy you would also adjust to the dress code, I guess…

„It is not that we have to wear this“ said Afsane one day while pointing to the hejab, „or that we have to obey some extra rules and get along with our families: it is the whole society. Even if my family is open minded and I can do what I want, there’ll be neighbours, gossipping and rules that can make a women’s life hell here.“