Happy Ramadan to everyone out there. I m sorry for wishing a little late (like that matters ). Anyways, enjoy the pictures.

For those who might not know what Ramadan is… it’s a holy Month in the Islamic calendar, during which Muslims all over the world fast.

This holy month is considered to be a blessing upon the Muslims, where the Satan is locked up. Every act of act is blessed with bonuses. Even the very small acts of everyday life are rewarded.

For people who’d like to know more about Ramadan, here’s a wikipedia article.

Fi Amanallah.

Pictures at the end of the post.

On the 23rd of last month (July 2010), me and a couple of my friends (+new friend on the trip) decided that we’re going to hit the Northern areas of Pakistan (read: we wanted to go on vacations).

I’ve added the nicer pictures here but if you want to see all the pictures (minus the ones I didn’t upload), you can easily find them on my Facebook profile, here are the links: Nathiagali, Karachi to Rawalpindi, Abbotabad to Naran, Stuck in Naran, Naran nights & dew, Getting out of the flooded Naran, From Naran to Jheel Saif ul Mulook.

The trip was amazing, not only did we get to see one of the most beautiful sights in Pakistan, we got to experience alot of things first hand which were amazing. Like say we hiked and climbed to Jheel Saif ul Mulook from Naran which is approximately 8km up hill and gets steeper as you go. It took us about 4 hours, and alot of energy and 150 bucks for the horse I took for the last 2 kilometers. Yes I had to use one, I was dehydrated with a bad and empty stomach, not a good combination at all you see.

By the time we got back to Naran the weather had started to shift, it started raining and things took a very steep turn. Talk about landslides, roadblocks.. we were stuck in them. With no way out and low on cash we had to take survival measures, which got us to leave our cosy room and shift to a camp. Nice experience there too. We ended up evacuating those too.. the threat of the area being flooded pushed us to a higher location. So we ended up at Pakistan Tourism Development Centre (PTDC) area. Since one of friends (Fahd) had called up his dad for help, he got a small room arranged for us here at PTDC free of cost (amazing I tell you).

So we shift into our new room, and we have no toilet. Now thats messed up you say.. but wait, by evening one of their officers came by and shifted us to a nicer room, with a good toilet and other facilities, and another bunch of neighbors. This was a good thing incase an emergency broke out. So we’re like chilling and relaxing in the room after carrying our stuff uphill from the camps and we’re watching ‘The A team’ and suddenly we hear loud knocks on our door, turns out we need to report to the reception which is about 500 meters away from our room. Do we carry our stuff, and the guard wasn’t sure so he said no.. (WOW, jacko!) So we report at the camps and they tell us things might turn for the worse and they’re happy we’re safe and at the reception.. but oh! where’s our stuff…? Go get your stuff.. so we hitch hike back 500 meters to our room to get our stuff and come back to the reception, thats roughly 1500 meters in about 20 minutes (Amazing), oh did I mention the route to and from the reception & our room was all mud, dirt and all a very rough route, without any proper pathways.

So finally we’re at the reception all safe and settling in for the night, when we’re told we can go back to our rooms, things are safe. We’re relieved and we head back to our rooms, where we find water flowing into the area our rooms are. We panic a bit and go back to the reception and stay there till about 3 or 4 am. By roughly around 4 am I m like F**k this man, lets go back to the rooms, so we grab our stuff and march back to the rooms, water seems to have found another way and our rooms area is clean. 10 minutes later the guys next door knock and tell us water’s back and the level’s higher. We’re like F**k that we’re sleeping, and we do! 2 hours later the guard’s back to tell us to go back to the reception (OH WOW). Now we’re later given another couple of rooms till we end up in a safer one, during this we ate super less.. We were on a super survival diet and we lost quite some pounds.

When we finally started to get out of Naran, it was almost a 28 hours back to back travelling to Karachi, during which we had only one not so filling meal.

We’re planning K2 base camp next year Inshallah. Let me know if you want to join in.

I was in Hyderabad yesterday, to attend a friend’s wedding, umm actually it was a Valima. I enjoyed the wedding  a little and had to go through a major travelling mess.. no kidding.. add to that the effed up situation at the Intercity Bus Stop.

I went with a few other friends from my Dubai work place, and yeah I knew Riaz from there. So it was me, Tauseef and Shahzeb. The first trip from Karachi to Hyderabad was alright, since we hired a car to drop us there. From there on we called Riaz’s friend in Hyderabad, who picked us from the stop and took us to the Hall. We were among the first to get there, so a long boredom session was in place.. Thank you

Anyways, a little later we started see some familiar faces, that was nice we got to do some catching up with folks from Dubai plus it was a bit of help from the boredom session

Once we were done with food and stuff we headed to the bus stop from where we were called back and were asked to travel with the bride’s family, which was a pretty nice gesture.. 15 minutes into the journey back to Karachi this guy starts talking about god knows what, but what I liked was that when I was playing NFS on my iPhone I was gathering up crowd.. iPhone loves crowd. Then this guys starts to talk about iPhone like he knows the world about it, it was easy to shut him up, which was what I thought an accomplishment, but guess what.. he didn’t shut up.. he started playing “Name Place Animal Thing” on voice with kids on the bus.. I was like “F**K No” what followed was a three hour noisy crappy game.. What we were left was a bad head ache, not to mention a backache from the journey.

I would congratulate Riaz on his wedding, Mubarkaan.. and oh I m not going to attend a wedding in a different city on a bus.. unless it’s a very cool one.

Congrats to you bro.

Cheers.