Mason Inman - science journalist

2007-08-02, 19:16:22

Here's the view from the balcony of the house where we're staying in a posh area of Karachi. The brightly flowered tree at the bottom attracts a lot of birds who hop and chirp around. The lone tower is part of the nearby mosque, where they broadcast the call to prayer, or azzan, five times a day, competing for our ears with two other nearby mosques. And this is in a not-so-dense area of town. (You can click on any of the images to see a larger view.)

Here's a shot of one of the neighbors' plots, to give you a sense of the neighborhood.



Sarah said, "That's cheeky" when she saw me taking the photos. Not surprisingly, most of the city is not like this. I'll show some more representative shots of the city later on.

As with the rest of the world, Pottermania swept over Pakistan.

Sarah had told me that nearly everything that can get reused or recycled here, does. But still, I was surprised when I got a sandwich at the airport (10 rupees, or about 15 cents) and they served it to me on this tray, which was a cardboard insert for a pair of thermal underwear, creased to make a little tray.

Sadly, just before boarding, our flight got canceled on account of bad weather. There's no radar coverage of a critical part of the country near some mountains we'd have to fly over, so it's often not safe to fly that way. If a plane got caught in a lot of cloud cover, it could wind up crashing into a rock face, I guess. At least our flight didn't take off, get halfway there, and then decide it wasn't safe, and then turn around, which happens a lot when trying to visit the Northern Areas, we've heard.

This triggered a flurry of calls between our friends in Karachi and their friends in Islamabad to find a safe place for us to stay. The standoff between the government and a large group of armed militants holed up in the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) had just come to bloody end, with police finally raiding the place and killing nearly 100 of the 1000 or so people inside. The government got praised by many newspapers and commentators outside the country for playing tough with these Islamic extremists—who had been challenging the government, and threatening to resort to vigilante justice to enforce what they saw as strict Islamic law. But still, as you can imagine, we were a bit worried about Islamabad being on edge. So we were happy to wind up at the Chancery Executive Guesthouse, with a stout wall and two somewhat scary guards, who lounge around on plastic chairs holding snub-nosed shotguns.


Before our taxi drove into the grounds the first time, they searched under our car for bombs with this high-tech device. It's just a mirror on a stick, with a flashlight attached. This is what, in Sarah's field of work, is known as "appropriate technology": it's only as complicated as it needs to be, and it's easily fixable in-country.

The national garb here is the shalwar kameez, which is basically a shirt (the kameez part) with a really long body, and very thin and breathable, coupled with pants (the shalwar part) with a waist that's literally a prepostorous 70 inches or so around, which you cinch closed. The men, the favored color reminds me of dirty dishwater. They didn't start white, though; they choose various shades of light grey, light beige, and occasionally light blue. The workman in this picture with teh yellow shalwar kameez probably gets teased mercilessly by the other roughnecks for wearing such a flashy outfit.



Surprisingly enough, our sources told us it was not only safe enough for us to travel around Islamabad, but even to walk around and go the markets. But sadly, Sarah didn't think it was a good idea for me to whip out my camera at any of those places, so I didn't get photos of the markets. We did go bowling, though, at a place called MEGAZONE, with big lit-up letters on top of a mall/fun center in the middle of Fatima Jinnah Park, named after the little sister of Pakistan's founder.




Sarah decided to forgo the bowling shoes, like many of the other people at the alley. As with many places in Pakistan, they had a big sign saying that you must wear bowling shoes, and that street shoes weren't allowed on the lane, but no one seemed to pay any attention to this. The place was pretty racy, too. We actually saw a couple holding hands in public—the only time we've seen that so far.

One of the most striking things here are the buses, dumptrucks, water tankers, rickshaws, and basically any commercial vehicle, in which every available surface is covered with a profusion of gaudy geometric designs, paintings of animals, short phrases written in the curving, almost-Arabic script of Urdu. Here's a shot of one, with more to come later.