On our last day in Swat Valley we sat at a restaurant eating breakfast. The laminated menu was extensive and full of elaborate claims. Going by the pictures, the streetside cafe apparently served meatball subs, cheesecake, burgers and – least likely of all – stacks of pancakes with maple syrup and…bacon. We’d ordered what they actually did have: nescafe, aloo paratha, channa and curd. Not that I wanted a meatball sub for breakfast (ok. I did want one), but I always want pancakes and bacon seemed dangerously exotic. Plus the very smell of channa had started getting on my nerves. I loved it on arrival in Pakistan but had ordered it one too many times, it seemed. I’m fickle with food. ‘They put everything on the menu in the hope that they’ll have it by chance one day’ said Oyv, as an explanation for the lengthy and unlikely selection. That sounded about right. We’d seen plenty of menus like it so far.
We also saw a lot of really terrible food-hygiene practices as we travelled around in the countryside. One night as we ate dinner in a typical local place a delivery of some kind of meat – I believe it was a goat – arrived. When I say ‘a delivery arrived’ I mean a man walked into the room carrying an animal’s leg over his shoulder, and he threw it onto the table in front of another man who we’d thought was a fellow-diner.
The second man produced a knife from somewhere and cut the meat up directly on the table, occasionally handling the communal water jug and cups, not to mention the next table’s basket of fresh naan bread, as he went.
I looked down at my bowl of channa on our own table. If you wanted to be nice you might call it less than clean. Suddenly I developed a hankering for something, anything else. I found myself thinking wistfully about the canned horse we’d seen back in Kyrgyzstan.
After Swat Valley, ready for another dose of big city (or so we thought) we carried on to Lahore. Whenever we told anyone we were headed for the capital of Punjab province, they smiled approvingly. ‘Lahore is lovely’, they would unfailingly say. I’d been there before and always wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment. And Lahore is lovely, but sometimes you have to look hard, because at first glance you might see only the dirt, the nearly constant chaos, the cloudy fumes. And the loveliness of the Lahore in my memory was very much influenced by the cool, dry weather when I’d last visited in winter. This time during the summer monsoon, the city was blanketed in an intense, smothering heat and the humidity and smog were hard to bear, especially after the cool clean valleys and mountains we’d so recently explored.
Beside the heat, there’s also the traffic: it’s pure evil and the sound of relentless honking will haunt your dreams. Yet even sweating in the back of an Uber, we can always spot somebody who’s got it worse….at least we never found ourselves restraining a full-grown goat in an auto-rickshaw during rush hour traffic.
But the lovely thing is, in the midst of this snarl of rickshaws and crowded markets are beautiful pockets of calm and quiet, serene oases where you quickly forget your recent battle to cross the street and enter.
I’m referring to Lahore’s vast collection of Mughal-era monuments. It’s as though the long-dead Emperors somehow knew their capital would one day sprawl into an Asian mega-city. At the height of the Mughal Empire in the 17th century they commissioned mosques, palaces, parks and gardens that today are the city’s major tourist attractions and yet, unlike tourist attractions in almost any other city, these sites make great escapes.
Inside the Old Walled City, there’s Wazir Khan mosque. After Oyv was nearly flattened by a runaway trolley overloaded with utensils and pots and pans bound for the kitchenware section of the bazaar, we ducked into the mosque’s grounds to get away from the crowds.
There’s been a fort standing on the same spot in Lahore since the 11th century, but the one we can hide from the traffic in today dates from the 1500s when Emperor Akbar laid the foundations that were later added to and expanded upon by his successors.
My favourite retreat is the most famous Mughal mosque of all, Badshahi. One of Lahore’s most iconic landmarks, and the second-largest mosque in all of Pakistan, Badshahi Mosque was built by Emperor Aurangzeb in 1671-73.
Today, even during busy times, it’s so vast that it doesn’t feel crowded. At some times you can have it almost to yourself. And at any time of day it’s a friendly, peaceful place, where the other visitors are either quietly absorbed in prayer and meditation, or, just kindly welcomed us and struck up chats about everybody’s favourite topic: ‘How do we like Pakistan?’
And then there is (Fort) Food Street. A modern tourist-creation, it’s a gated row of restaurants that has nothing to do with Mughal Emperors at all, other than offering great views of their creations to families eating desi food on the rooftops of converted havelis.
Also, the entire street is blessedly pedestrianised and you can stroll along eating icecream and watching spontaneous cricket matches on the stretches of grass beside Badshahi Mosque.
Another lovely thing about Lahore is just how much Lahoris love their food: enough to devote whole streets purely to eating. If you feel the fort Food Street is a little too touristy, there are other more authentic local food streets too, like New Anarkali Bazaar.
Wherever we went, we never could get a table for two: there aren’t any. In Pakistan everyone goes out for dinner with all their relatives, never dining with fewer than ten people of all ages. I know, I checked the reservation book at one of the more popular restaurants when the hostess wasn’t looking.
Of course, away from the Mughals and the madness there is another side of Lahore. The fancy side, where the streets are quieter and lined with trees, and designer shops. Or, as I like to think of it, ‘The Side With the Best French Toast Ever’.
No channa in sight. No chopping up goats on the table, either. It seemed we wouldn’t have to resort to the canned horse after all.
And then, stuffed with french toast, it was time to leave. Not just to leave Lahore, but Pakistan altogether. Indian visas in our passports, we were now only around thirty kilometers from the Wagah border. Much as we were sorry to go, Amritsar – another lovely city – awaited us.
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For more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Pakistan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.
