Pakistan - Page 5

Ah yes, the infamous Afghani restaurant of Chitral. My friend Oskar was bitten by a scorpion here, and I got sick from the food. That tank on the outside is the sink where you wash your hands before the meal. Then you take off your shoes and sit cross legged on a big elevated table and eat from the same table. Oskar was blissfully unaware of the scorpion occupying his sandal while he went through this routine one day...

One day a group of us travellers that had sort of collected together to go up to the yearly Shandur Pass Polo Festival were waiting around in Chitral trying to find transportation. We weren't having much luck, all of the vans or jeeps going to the next town were already full, or filled very quickly. So, bored of waiting, Arato started playing a diggery-doo he had bought in India and Hiro started performing pantomime. The crowd that gathered to watch didn't have a clue as to what was going on, they had never seen anything like this before.

When Arato finished playing, one older man closely inspected the diggery-doo, and he spoke a little English so asked us "This is only for this purpose, to make noise?". I guess he couldn't understand why a traveller would haul such a thing around the world just to make noise with... I don't either.

View from a town called Buni, on the way to the Shandur Pass. The mountains here rise impossibly high above the terraced valleys below. Most of the valleys are used to grow wheat, apricots and other fruits, sometimes to grow corn and to raise a few animals. Life up there is simple and tough, the people are completely snowed in for much of the year.

Cooking up some sheep intestines (to be eaten with a piece of flat nan bread) at the Shandur Polo Festival.

Each summer, Polo teams from Chitral and Gilgit meet for a three day tournament. I suppose they reached a comprimise because the do it at the top of the pass that separates the three day journey between them. The Shandur Pass is at 3700m and is said to be the highest Polo Ground in the world. Many many local people turn out, as well as some big politicians sometimes, and a tent city is set up for three days at the pass. People watch a lot of Polo, drink tea, eat simple propane-stove-cooked foods, hide from the dusty winds and make a lot of noise singing and dancing at night. This was probably the highlight of my trip through Pakistan, it was a fantastic experience, and an aweful lot of fun.

The musical accompaniment to the Polo match, they play faster when the game starts to get really exciting.