It had become time to leave the Wild West of the Pakistani mountain regions and head to the Wild Wild West of Dara.
I had teamed up with John, a young English guy, after that infamous falling out with my Pakistani friend.
Western tourists were so rare in Pakistan, that I was always happy to meet other travellers and travel together for some time.
While Westerners stood out already in the mountains of Pakistan, John was even more outstanding. 😉
While I had began growing a beard while still in Germany, so I could blend in better in a region where a man without a full grown beard and a Kalashnikov was no man, he had no facial hair of any kind to show.
He had long blond curly hair, no beard whatsoever, not even some moustache like the Pakistanis from the plains and of all the colours he could have chosen to have his shalwar kameez, the local dress, made in, he had chosen purple. So whatever the mountain people took him for, a man it was definitely not.
So quite a few times Pakistanis would ask me that hilarious question:
“Is he your wife?“
Which of course I truthfully negated.
However difficult life is for gays in countries like Pakistan, being mistaken for one there is already also no fun.
Those mountain people simply could not understand how somebody with long hair and no beard, sporting very feminine colors, could be a man at all, but I guess they booked him under “Mad dogs and Englishmen“ the label for all sorts of eccentric foreigner behaviour.
So we reached Peshawar, de facto capital of the Afghan resistance against the Russian occupation for some time, but now, with the Russians gone and Najibullah imprisoned, quite at ease.
Little did we know at that time, that the menace which would mean serious trouble for Pakistan and Afghanistan in the coming years was just about preparing to raise hell, the Taliban were getting ready to take over Afghanistan.
In 1992 Dara was situated in North Western Frontier Province, the old British name, which was renamed to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010.
I don´t know what´s it like today, but in 1992 you had to get a special permit from some government agency in Peshawar to be able to visit Dara as a foreign tourist and you were officially not allowed to stay there overnight.
NWFP was an autonomous tribal region, where Pakistan´s authority was limited and tribal leaders were in charge, but at least the Pakistani government wanted to control the movement of foreigners in the area, hence the special permit.
So once we got our permits we took a bus to Dara.
There were a few other foreign tourists on that bus, because Dara´s lawlessness was of course very attractive to a certain kind of travellers.
At the entrance to Dara there was a Pakistani army checkpoint where our permits and passports were checked and we were registered.
Then all the foreigners were put together as a group and escorted by an armed guard into the village.
We were told to stay together as a group and to not wander off on our own once inside Dara.
Our guard was an old guy, but his gun must have been even older, a carbine which looked like it had already seen two world wars in his life time.
As we were traipsing along behind the old man, toward the bazaar, we suddenly heard the sound of what we all had come here for, guns, guns, guns.
Suddenly the sound of gunfire seemed to be everywhere, whole volleys echoing through the air.
John looked at me and smiled.
“Sounds like some serious action. Finally!“
Gun manufacturing in Pakistan
Since this has now become a serious series of even more serious travelling, check out the last part too.
There you will also find a link to the previous parts.
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