Pakistan Ahoy!

The time has come, my friends, to talk of many things…of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings…and Pakistan!

It is that time of year again when I get itchy feet and go off travelling to some far-flung destination. It’s become something of an Anilan tradition! This time it is Islamabad, where I am going to visit one Danny Cutherell in his natural environment. It is somewhere I kinda thought would be a cool place to see, but tis only very recently that the notion of it became concrete.

If all goes to plan, he will be meeting me bright and early at 6am tomorrow with his morning face which should be funny. What is even more funny is that given my arrival time is approximately the middle of the night in the UK and the history of my capacity to sleep on planes or any other mode of transport known to man, I should arrive even more sleep deprived and ratty than him, and he will have to reconcile the girl he once knew with the monster before him…

Getting a visa was traditional Anila fare i.e. not a walk in the park! I simply must have a shady looking face, because I am always stopped for security checks and the like, and visa issue people don’t like me too much. After a spanish inquisition style interview, and lots of raised eyebrows and hushed voices in my general direction I finally managed to wrestle a visa out of the guys at the Pakistani embassy. I thought the hard part was over.

Oh how wrong I was. HAHA. I returned from two weeks in southern Spain only to find that Kiran (the younger twin) had decided that my hiking bag was just the thing he needed to take on a week long camping trip to the Lake District. I could not believe that where my lovely bag had once been there was only air. To say I completely lost it is the understatement of the year. This was not just any bag… This was a rather expensive women’s fit super deluxe…you get the picture. So I went crazy, only the perpetrator of the ‘crime’ wasn’t around so it was my poor mum and brother who had to hear my frantic cries/tears. I told Thomas later that if Kiran were around I would have probably put him in the bag and sold the whole package on Ebay.

Anyway Mum and Ash helped me calm down (liquorice allsorts were instrumental in this) and we tracked down a replacement bag at a camping store in Lakeside. EXACT REPLICA bag is now packed to the Brimble with all my stuff which weighs in at a hefty 15kg…

With that I need a few minutes to get the bag from the floor onto my back… So i’ll be signing off, and with any luck I will be back soon.

Thanks for reading!