On Saturday morning arrived back in Europe. The trip is over! Though I'd been feeling that it really finished when I cycled into Peshawar a bit over a week ago. After 6+ months on the road and almost 12,000km I was feeling the call of stability and home, or more accurately to make a home since Geneva isn't really home just yet.
In between arriving here and my last blog update from Peshawar I traveled to Lahore by train. The train rolled from the the friendly but wild feeling Peshawar across the plains by the Indus river to the big city of Lahore. Mountains or even the hint of them were no more. Instead it was green and more green plantations and when I got onto the Lahore, a wall of heat and humidity. Lahore was quite a city. the humidity, heat and pollution rather got the better of me and the ceiling fans and convivial nature of my guest house meant I didn't that much time on the streets, especially during the hotter time of day which was from 10am to 4pm or so. Add Ramadan into the mix and venturing far from the privacy of the guest house (where cool water could be drunk whenever) became undesirable.
I did a fair bit of walking around, going to see the Mughal masterpiece, the Badshahi mosque at Sunrise and checking out the rambling Lahore fort. The old town was great, with plenty of shade in its narrow streets. I had been sporting a nascent beard, no shave since Kashgar, and figured this wouldn't be well received by Freddie in Geneva so had it removed for 10 rupies (about 15 cents US) in a barber shop. One afternoon the owner of the guest house took a bunch of the guests to listen to qawali or Sufi devotional singing at a shrine in the city. For about 2 hours a series of qawali groups, a single or pair of lead singers backed up by other singers, drummers and an instrument like an accordion. The music and singing had spiritual significance to Sufi muslims. Each group had around 5 minutes before being hussled off and replaced by a new one. The music was amazingly energetic and some in the crowd really got into it. The organisers of the event or even fans would come through the crowd collecting donations for the musicians, there was no entrance charge. From time to time groups of men would get up and toss handfuls of 10 rupie notes over the musicians or each other. Aparantly to toss notes over someone's head was a blessing for good health. Clearly the quality of the music encouraged people to do this, for the more popular groups the floor in front of the stage would be covered in money.
I flew out of Lahore early on Friday morning and had a layover in Abu Dhabi, a state in the United Arab Emirates. I wondered around town for a bit but being Friday the place was deserted. Its abundant oil wealth had been spent on building sparkling tower blocks. In the city centre around my hotel there seemed to be nothing older than a decade or so. It was so hot and humid and I was so tried from my red-eye flight that I spent most of the time lounging in my hotel room.
Another red-eye flight followed, dropping me off in decidedly autumnal Geneva and a very warm welcome by Freddie. It was so nice to arrive back in Europe!
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