So, to the newspaper, DAWN. Michelle picked up a copy at the front desk while we were waiting for the guys to return from the bazaar where they went to have the tyre changed. I was nose deep in my copy of ‘Among Muslims‘ by Kathleen Jamie (a wonderful story, if you get a chance). Michelle started reading the paper, front page, front section, sport, reviews etc – her usual order. She was very quiet and her body language was definitely shouting something, only when I noticed I couldn’t quite work out what it was….

I asked what was happening in the world, her reply was stilted. I asked again and she said “you don’t want to know”. Now if you know me, you know what that would make me do. I took the paper, front page story was “Bomb blast in Peshawar Bazaar!”. Here I must add that we were coming down from the Northern Provinces and just about to cross the Swat Valley into the North West Frontier Province, direction Peshawar. I felt sick. The story was graphic, what happened, who was injured, maimed, where it happened, what time blah blah blah – you have to read a Pakistani paper to understand the descriptive detail they go into, the only uncertainty was Why it happened and WHO was behind it. Plenty of theories but nothing concrete. Not that it mattered, there had just been a so called ‘attack’ on our next point of call. The rest of our evening had effectively been ruined.

Next morning was the drive to Swat. We had to go over the Shangla Pass, 80 odd kilometres which was expected to take a good 4-5 hours. It did. The road was atrocious. At one point quite early on there had been a landslide so the army had closed the road and didn’t expect it to re-open till 12 noon. It was only 7am. We were stuck in a queue of traffic at a point high on the road with a dozen or so other vehicles, unable to turn around or advance. An enterprising man had set up a makeshift pakora & tea stand and was doing a roaring trade with the locals, if it wasn’t only 7am and fried pakora wasn’t fried I would have been the 1st in line.

Again we settled in for the long wait. Again, luckily for us, a policeman happened to see us in our elegant outfits (and we were really playing the part this morning, with shawls covering our hair) and after a few short bursts on the walkie talkie the road was magically opened early for us. The fact they opened it early was one thing, but it was not nearly ready to be opened. We had a regular car, most people were in buses fairly high off the ground, and we had to drive over rubble about 4 feet deep of medium sized boulders – I was positive the car would give up on us halfway, but again, thanks to our wonderful driver Asghar we made it over without a hitch to a loud cheer from everyone following us.

The Swat valley was beautiful. The houses were colourful and quite large covering the hills with immaculate terraces and character. We got to the bottom of the valley and travelled along the river for some time and it was gorgeous, before remounting and heading for the narrow pass. At the top was our last police check-point of the Northern Areas, and we must have been the only visitors that day because we were offered some tea & a chat with the mean looking, yet extremely friendly & inquisitive armed forces.

(Really, I must stress again, how gentle & kind the Pakistani people were. All of them. All the time. We were treated royally.)

At the top of the Pass we all of a sudden returned to the real world. Phones crackled to life, reception was restored. The first thing on my list was to phone my mum to tell here we were allright. After the descriptive news report I had read the night before I felt I should just give her a quick call let her hear my voice and then carry on. The call went something like this. “Hi mum a very quick call from Pakistan to let you know we’re fine, we weren’t involved. Involved in what? The bomb blast in Peshawar. WHAT???? WHERE ARE YOU? WHAT’S HAPPENING??” In hindsight it was probably not the smartest thing to do. But there you go, my intentions were good, it seems like the news hadn’t made it as far as Australia!

The trip down the other side of the mountains was much quicker. We stopped for a car wash, we slowed down in a few little towns to check out the gun shops on the side of the road, but other than that we sped into Saidu Sharif as quickly as possible. I was hungry and determined to hang on to reach the magnificent Swat Serena instead of stopping to squat just anywhere…. to be continued…