Mason Inman - science journalist

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Mason to the Mountain

2007-08-09, 12:40:46 

Picking up where I left off last time with my notes from Pakistan (see below)... Sarah and I tried for three days to get on a plane from Islamabad to the Northern Areas, to a town called Skardu. But they only have only one flight per day, and each day it got canceled, so eventually we gave up. (If you can't get Mason to the mountain, pick another mountain.) We arranged a driver and tour guide to take us into some mountains that were much closer, a few hours' drive from Islamabad.

This area, called Murree and the Galis, was where the British used to move their government offices for this region each summer. These misty mountains are much cooler than the humid plains of Islamabad—so humid that despite boiling temperatures, there's often a thick fog, like what I'm used to from cool mornings on the California coast.

Driving up to the mountains, we had the chance to see a lot more of the trucks painted with gaudy designs, like this dump truck tailgate (click on the images to see bigger versions):

Here are a couple of typical scenes of the mountainside along the windy mountain road:

roadside view
downhill shot

Along the way, we saw this funky-looking mosque:
new mosque

... with a strangely worded tribute to its founder:
new muslim lady

The road is crammed with tiny villages vying for tourist dollars. The buildings are packed so tightly onto the sides of mountain slopes that as our car drove through, we could have reached out and grabbed goods off the tables of merchants' stalls, or roti out of roadside frypans. Most of the shops were surreally coated with Coke or Pepsi ads (or sometimes Mountain Dew or Sprite).
coke pepsi village

To my eyes it made the villages quite ugly, but our guide thought it was totally natural; the shopkeepers want to show that they sell quality goods, he said. They were certainly selling a lot of crap along the roadside, like big rugs strung up on ropes, blocking the view. But at least these umbrellas looked nice.
umbrellas

We didn't get any good shots of how packed these villages were, unfortunately. The traffic moved slow, and there were so many people aggressive begging or hawking things that we kept our windows rolled up whenever we passed through one of the villages. But before we realized that we had missed our chance, we passed through the last one of these pitstops and reached Nathiagali at the top of a ridge. Here's the view from near the place we stayed, in a dingy guesthouse on a primo spot:
Mountaintop