Blööh. I am feeling a bit sick in my stomach right now and I’m sitting in the back of Blue driving BACK from the Myanmar border. We did not get into Myanmar. There is no other easy access to Thailand besides Myanmar. We are Fucked! Maybe, maybe not. In the bordertown Moreh, we got information that through a travel agency there might be a way to access myanmar, so we are now driving back to Imphal to see if we can go this route. Right now we are just driving, we have no clue. Volli started drinking and some of us who don’t smoke had to have one. The morale is low by now. We considered some other options too. One of them would be trying to get a visa to Bangladesh and get on a cargo ship from there to Thailand, maybe Malaysia. Other option would be to dump the cars somewhere, hopefully sell them and jump on an airplane from Imphal and fly to Bangkok. A step at a time for now. Since I wrote the blog last time before christmas, I’m gonna try to bring you up to speed with what we’ve been up to so far.
Pakistan. Pakistan was a headache. Since we entered Pakistan and to the moment we exited, we always had an armed escort. Constantly we had to stop in police checkpoints, take all our passports go fill in paper work to move on. Sometimes we didn’t give a fuck about the escort and the military and just kept on going, but always soon out of nowhere or from the next police checkpoint we would have another car ahead of us that we had to follow. To be honest it felt safer with the escort but the problem was that police checkpoints took so much time (sometimes we had to wait for a new escort for an hour) and the other problem was that the escort always drove ridiculously slow. Sometimes we didn’t care about that either, we just drove past the escort and we showed them what speed we want to drive, sometimes it worked sometimes it didn’t. By the end of it every person in uniform, anything that resembles a police checkpoint, makes me want to throw up. It’s incredible actually how free we are back home.
When we first entered Pakistan, we were in the Balochistan territory, as I understand the Balochis and Pakistani do not get along very well. And we thought that Balochi territory must be exited quick, because Taliban is there and we always had an armed escort with us. We thought that once out of Balochi territory, everything would be reallly nice! Freedom after all this crazy Turkmenistan, Iran and Balochi military police crap. But somehow the Balochi territory did not want to end. After a good daylong drive along the Afghanistan border (we didn’t see any Taliban – just empty land of rock, nothing there), we made it to Guetta, a city not too far from the Afghanistan border in the Balochi territory. As we were used to by now, we just wanted to cruise into the city find a nice hotel and settle in for the night, but just before the city we were told not to go anywhere, we had to wait for the local city police who was going to escort us to the hotel, we told them a random hotel name we found from the gps. The escorts switched every 10 minutes and it felt like I was in some active military zone. We got to the hotel but it turned out to be a shithole. Another convoy was arranged to another hotel, I think at some point we were even escorted by a steel plated armour truck, what the fuck was so dangerous in this place?! They told us that everything is okay, and yes all the people were very friendly to us, helpful, they arranged a safe escort for us, so the thing was that there was suppose to be this 1% – terrorists that were causing shit, so all this armed forces crap because of 1% of some assholes. I don’t know what they are fighting for though, maybe it’s a good cause?
We got to the hotel that was gated off, had a thick high brick wall built around it and patrolled by the cops and military, it was like driving into the most secure government building.
We parked our cars and by the looks of it that random name of a hotel we gave to the police wasn’t gonna be the cheapest but it was getting late and getting around the city was extremely difficult so we chose to stay in a nice clean four star hotel for about 65 euros per face per night in a shared room. But it felt good to be in a civilised place, it also felt like outside of the walls of the hotel was a war going on. We had some late lunch around 1am in the hotel lobby, surfing the internet seeing what was going on in the world.
It’s crazy what has happened lately in some of the places we just drove through. In Volgograd, Russia there was a terrorist attack. Driving through it, I never thought it could happen there, it just didn’t seem like that kind of a place at all. I’m suspecting some false flag crap. Close to the border of Pakistan and Iran where we drove past was an American drone attack, many people killed. If an American drone would have killed me, I would have been a bit angry at Washington for sure. Having been to these places, the local everyday people are so friendly and nice when they talk to us, even though we look white, but this Political shit is really fucking everything over in this world. Fuck greedy politics, trying to control pieces of land, trying to steal resources, we all live on the same planet, sharing the same air, same resources, people really do live in their little worlds, think just for their own good and don’t see the bigger picture.
Anyway, the next day we were gonna keep driving, starting our way towards Lahore and out of Palouchi territory but in the morning waiting for the police escort to come and guide us took so long that eventually they didn’t let us leave the city and we drove to another hotel, a lot cheaper this time.
Vello and Indrek took the time to fix Red’s water pump, well replace it for a new one and the other guys asked the hotel receptionist if he can find us some vodka to drink. Being unsure of the local food and the bacterias found in it, we thought some preventative vodka drinking was necessary but this time the local Pakistani vodka turned out to be something that we should have been afraid of. I only had maybe a shot or two of that vodka and was the first one to puke my guts out in the middle of the night, shivering and having bad stomach ache, it was one of the worst nights on the trip for me. In the morning the alcohol didnt want to leave the bodies, when finally Toomas forced his vodka out on the side of the road. We still laugh at the sounds he was making in the back of the car – aaahh ööö Salam Salaaam salam salam salam salam oooeeehhhhh. I think two three days later people were still feeling it. Who knows what was in it – so remember, vodka made in Pakistan might not be a good choice unless you want to cleanse your inner organs orally.
Oh yes, out of the hotel we made it out without an escort, we just didn’t wait for them, otherwise we would’ve probably been stuck in the city another night. It was nice to be driving freely again. I’m not sure when but at some point we got ourselves an escort again. We were driving south and by night we were hoping to find a hotel, but none of the people who escorted us didn’t know where we could find one. We drove miles and miles and I think that was the night where I passed out and woke up in a police station. That was the hotel they arranged us, in the Balouchi police station. We didn’t get any beds but we were given a very dusty room where we laid down our sleeping gear on the floor and settled in for the night. In the morning I noticed there was a hook on the ceiling in the middle of the room and Jürgen noticed some blood stains, so I’m not sure what this room was normally used for, but probably not for accomodating tourists.
We had breakfast in front of the police station where the police had to keep away local people who came to peek over the wall and slowly tried to make their way through the front gate to watch seven white dudes eating.
When we finally got to the Pakistan territory the only thing that really changed was that the escort system was better. We didn’t have to stop anymore at checkpoints and wait for the new car to get ready, new cars came on the fly, so we were making good speed to Lahore. We thought Lahore was going to be a perfect place to settle down for couple of days, have a rest, sleep in a nice hotel and take time off. As usual, the nice hotels we end up in are not really that nice. Usually there’s no hot water to take a proper shower. The power of the building comes and goes and at times runs on a generator, which is a bitch for me to transfer film footage to hard drives, basically impossible because at any given moment I could lose power and it would fuck up the whole process and I’d have to start all over. This time the room Toomas and I were sleeping in was so humid that it was very uncomfortable and the window didn’t open so it was hard to get the moisture out.
The good thing we thought was that now we were in a hotel and the police was gone, we could sneak out and go explore the city on our own without having anyone up our ass. Welll….. After we got out of the hotel, we got to walk up the street for about hundred meters when all of a sudden this random looking guy starts giving shit to us about why we’re here and that this is a dangerous place and what was the purpose of us wandering around here. Soon he wanted to see our passports. Thankfully the police stepped in after a bit to see what’s going on and hopefully he was gonna get this crazy guy off our ass but instead the cop seemed to be afraid of him and jumped into his car and took off. Finally we got him to go away and we walked back to the hotel.
Because walking around was complicated, we jumped into the tuk-tuk, the local taxi, which is a small gas operated motorcycle slash car slash birdcage slash circus tent that we wanted to take us to the Walled city, seemed like an interesting part of the town to see. We did some gas refilling stops along the way and finally got off by the mall and had no idea which way to go and what made this more awkward was that everybody on the street stared at us and we looked like aloof headcases not knowing which way to go, so we ran into the mall for cover. We asked for some directions to the walled city and browsed some pirated copies of audio cd’s and dvd’s. I remember Lepper bought a best of Oasis cd, an album that was originally never released.
We never did find the walled city but we walked around in a very hectic surreal town for hours, i guess the atmosphere you have to check from the photos but it was something of a… Um.. I had never been to a city like this before.
- by Press
