It was an awkward moment.
My friend Hannes, with whom I had shared a flat for seven years, downed thousands of beers together, visited countless punk rock gigs, got into the occasional fight because of some girl, fought quite a few battles with German riot police, Hannes, who had gotten me into some well paying construction gigs all over Germany, but also some in Austria, Netherlands, UK, giving me those 40,000 DM to fund my adventure, had driven me to Frankfurt Airport.
We went to a pub for one last beer and then it was time to say goodbye, one of the saddest moments in my life, but boys don´t cry. 😉
I had booked my one-way-flight to Karachi with Kuwait Airways, so I had a stopover in Kuwait.
The waiting area at my departure gate for the flight to Karachi looked pretty grim. There was a big clock, sadly hanging down from the ceiling, unable to move its hands, maybe still in shock from what it had witnessed in 1990/91, but the bullet holes in the wall next to it, were more than willing to tell the tale.
I wondered what it must have been like here in the summer of 1990. I had read in the papers that passengers had been harassed by Iraqi soldiers then, and a group of British Airways stewardesses had been raped in the arrival hall, but maybe this was just propaganda like the incubator lie.
But anyway, just imagine yourself doing a stopover in some foreign country and getting into an invasion.
Looking back, those bullet holes at Kuwait Airport, were the harbinger of things to come, the literal writing on the wall, written in bullets, but of course I did not know that in that moment, I was just happy that in March 1992, the situation was different and peace prevailed in Kuwait.
The passengers in the plane from Frankfurt to Kuwait had been the ususal mix of Middle Easterners, Indians, Pakistanis, some German tourists, including some German hippies on their way to India, but when the time for boarding the plane to Karachi came, this all changed.
All the other Westerners who had been on the plane with me were now lining up at the neighboring gate to board a plane destined for Bombay and I was the only white guy in the queue of Karachi-bound passengers.
My heart rejoiced. This is going to be good, I thought, no tourists in Pakistan. I had no idea how good it was going to be in wild and wonderful Pakistan.
It started already on the plane.
The Pakistani guy beside me was a resident of Dara. He gave me his business card and invited me to visit him there. “When you come to Dara, give me a call, we will smoke hashish together, no problem, no police in Dara.“
Who in his 28 year old right anarchist mind could have refused such an offer?
No police? Count me in!
As the plane started to sink down into the Karachi night, I was beaming with anticipation.
Vorfreude ist die beste Freude, as we say in German, anticipation is the best joy, and we even call it prejoy if you´d translate literally.
Since, according to George Carlin, every child is special, I always tried to be very special, like Very Special Agent Anthony Dinozzo, so the first thing I did to meet my own expectations, was to not take a camera on my trip. So I can proudly tell you, that while quite a few shots were fired during those years, not a single (photographic) one by me. At the time I had one of those small cameras with a fixed 35 mm lense, good enough for landscapes, but whenever I had gotten into taking pictures more seriously during my other trips, I got frustrated by its limitations, so it was either buy a new camera with a couple of different lenses or at least a zoom lense, carry the weight and worry about losing it to thieves or whatever, or not take a camera at all. So I chose to save my money for traveling, for actually experiencing instead of documenting experiences, you did not really have in the first place anyway, because the camera got between you and the experience.
Aren´t you also sick and tired of all those Youtubers who film every stupid rickshaw ride they take, trying to pose as big adventurers?
So I have no pictures of my own to show, apart from a few which were taken by other people and given to me as a gift. But hey, do not despair, in this day and age of everything available here and now, I can get you all the pictures you might want from the net.
So while refreshing my sweet memories of Dara, the sound of gunfire and the smell of tons of hashish, I had this brilliant idea to check out Dara on Youtube and sure enough, meet the madness! Tada!
I am a bit confused here. In the video he says they are crossing Khyber Pass to reach Dara, which means they go from Peshawar westwards, toward the Afghan border, whereas, in my book, Dara is in the Tribal Area south of Peshawar.
Maybe @sharoonyasir, our @eco-train correspondent in Lahore, Pakistan can shed some light on this?
Since this is supposed to become a series of serious travelling, you can check out the first part here.
For more inspiring stories and a group of inspiring and supportive people check out @ecotrain.