owlinfestation

I like the idea of overland travel. The shifts between cultures and geographies are often so subtle. If you fly into India from France, the culture shock is intense, but if you drive there, you barely notice it. It's cool to see how everything fits together.

Weird... hmm. I almost crashed into an elephant in India. I was dodging traffic driving into the setting sun, so all the things in front of me were just dark blobs. I still don't know what happened with my brain, but there was this giant elephant blob all of a sudden in the middle of the road and I had to swerve to avoid it. I believe that elephants were so unlikely a road obstacle that I just had a mental block it was there in front of me. Kind of like the apocryphal story of natives not being able to perceive Columbus' ships.

Iran was a really friendly place. I was there when the British embassy was stormed, though, so tensions ratcheted up a bit just before I left. It was pretty clear from everyone I spoke with in Iran that the government was responsible for that event. I hung out with a lot of young people in Tehran, and they were fantastic, but suffering from the cultural oppression I think. We were smoking hookah with a bunch of girls, and they regularly let their headscarves fall off, and time after time, the shopowner would come by and tell them to smarten up - not even because he was opposed to it, but because the police would regularly check these places, and he would face a huge fine if such debauchery was discovered at his establishment.

Very few problems, none serious. This happened in the middle of nowhere in northern Pakistan. The exhaust pipe had rusted through and sheared at the flange. I'm trying to fix it, and a little kid pops out of nowhere with a piece of wire, looks at me, and slides under the car, jerry-rigs it and smiles at me and leaves. Like a little elven mechanic.

My car is in Bangkok right now. I plan to drive it back to Europe via Central Asia and the Caucasus.

In Peshawar (on the border with Afghanistan) I was being persuaded by a bunch of guys how I would make so much bank sending cars from Canada to Afghanistan and then smuggling them into Pakistan. I'm a little hazy on the details. Then one of them showed me his gun collection, and I said that I hadn't shot a gun before. We went outside and in the middle of this nice neighborhood just past dinner time, he handed me a handgun and told me where to aim. And as I unloaded the clip I definitely thought "what the hell am I doing?" But it was more in amusement than anything else.

Never really wanted to quit. I like moving place to place regularly, and in spite of the wretched conditions and traffic in Asia, the driving is a fun part for me. I did intersperse my trip with longer stays in certain cities, like 1 month in Islamabad, 1 in Kuala Lumpur, 1 in Istanbul, and so on.

In Iran, everyone drove like they were on a racetrack. The roads were in good shape, though. In Pakistan, drivers would wander around the beat-up roads, but all of the little cars there can barely muster the speed limit, so it was just annoying. In India, the cars were fast, the roads were terrible, and the drivers were downright psychotic, especially the bus drivers.