My old blog, which ran from March 2004 to January 2007, is still at mileshotel.blogspot.com.
Love Wild
2007-08-10, 14:54:03
One of Sarah's favorite things in all of Pakistan is the roasted corn from roadside vendors. This guy (below) was selling his stuff along a stretch of windy mountain road near Ayubia, in between villages. (There was a sharp drop-off down the cliff just behind his little make-shift shop.) He used the coal method, where he puts the cobs directly on some smoldering coals, giving the corn a smoky taste. Sarah got hers with lime and chili on it—so it tasted like fresh lime-and-chili corn chips.
This other guy, in another village just outside Ayubia National Park, used the even better salt method. He had a big pan—like the ones the old-time gold miners used during the California gold rush—full of big-crystalled salt. He kept this heated over a small fire, and then would bury the cobs in the salt, turning them with a strange curved blade that must have been designed originally for some other purpose.
The monkeys here love the roasted corn too. Here's a bunch of them hanging out on a trash-strewn hillside in one of the villages.
People here don't seem to have the concept of littering, but I'm sure that's in large part because most people don't have regular trash collection, and also because they take the natural beauty where they live for granted.
There were corn sellers next to monkey hill, and they seemed to be making a good business off selling corn to tourists (we were the only white people there; it's a popular honeymoon destination for Pakistani couples) to toss to the monkeys, like in this video:
Our tour guide said, "In Pakistan, even the monkeys are cricketers," since they caught the corn the same way that cricket players catch the ball. (Pakistan is nuts about cricket, more so than England. A few days ago, when we were in the waiting room at an upscale restaurant in Lahore, they were showing a classic cricket game from the 1980s, between England and West Indies.)
Walking around the forest, we saw some amazingly beautiful scenes, like this one, which reminded me of a Chinese drawing of a mist-hugged mountain:
Here I was trying to get arty, with this shot of the juxtaposition of the rocks and the mountains...
In the forest, there were inspirational and thought-provoking signs tacked onto trees, like this one:
I think the sign might have inspired these flies we saw (not safe for work).
This place also had the most tame butterflies I've ever seen. This one landed on the foot path and stayed put while we took a few close-ups of it.
After our hike, we had lunch in Ayubia, and then a Taliban trooper gave Sarah a shooting lesson.
OK, he's not actually with the Taliban. But when we got invited to shoot some balloons, it cleared up a mystery from earlier in the day. We'd seen a few guys walking around the village carrying boards covered with balloons, and rifles slung over their shoulders. Sarah said she'd thought, "Do the balloon salesmen really need to carry weapons?" Armed guards—usually with snub-nosed shotguns, but often with assault rifles—are common in Pakistan outside jewelry shops, banks, and what not. But this guy's gun was just an air rifle, it turned out.
The guy who ran the restaurant and inn we ate at (which seemed to be deserted) told us our lunch would be free if he could hit three balloons in a row. On the second one he missed, so he actually needed four shots to finish three balloons. We let his wager slide, though. He then asked us if we wanted to shoot, and we said no, but he insisted and said it was on him. Then when we were leaving, he not only charged us for lunch, but wanted us to pay the balloon guy, too. Our driver and guide, Ali (who owns a company called Real Tours, and who we recommend highly) talked us out of that one, arguing that wasn't the deal. The restauranteur ended up giving half of what we paid for lunch (200 Rupees, or about $3.10) to the balloon guy.
