The Road to Lahore

Yesterday my colleague and I drove from Islamabad to Lahore. It's a four hour drive on the motorway, which winds over the Great Salt Range (think Arizona cliffs) and through scrubby plains. We lost a tire halfway to Lahore, then got a speeding ticket for going a whopping 5 MPH over the limit. Once in Lahore, we were delayed by a minor fender-bender on the canal road. A small truck had bumped a shiny new bus belonging to Lahore University. Men lept from the bus, dragged the truck driver out and beat him, while the truck driver's son cowered, hidden from their view, behind boxes in the back of the pickup. A police car was parked 500 yards down the road, so we stopped and told them what was going on. The cops were uninterested. Finally, they grudgingly said they'd "call it in." Call it in? The activity was 500 yards behind them!

Then we learned that our hotel reservation had not been made, and since the British cricket team is in town (and losing badly to the Pakistanis) all the hotels are booked full of cricket fans. We finally got a room in a place called the "Kabana", which looks about how you'd imagine a hotel called the Kabana would look.