It had to be a mirage. A large frosted glass full of beer with a frothy head standing ten metres high in the Gobi desert, as the sands beneath were being blown into small drifts by the strong winds.
You don't need to wait for Virgin Galactic to get their act together. You can buy tickets for a rocket today, down at the port of Sadarghat in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Of course this will not take you into space but down along the rivers of Bangladesh, and for a bargain price too.
This is the Passu Cathedral. The magnificent snow covered mountain spires that reach over 6,100 metres (21,000 feet) surrounding the small Hunza Valley village of Passu in north east Pakistan. My plan was to find a good spot for a photo, probably just off to the side of the Karakorum Highway on which I was travelling, and then head to the border town of Sost for an early bus the next morning into China. Yet, exactly as Rabbie Burns had predicted in his poem about the dangers of making detailed plans over two hundred years previously, things went awry.
It is easy to lose things.
I have lost count of the number of decent pairs of sunglasses I have lost in my
travels around the world. Yet to lose an arch, and not just any arch, but the
largest arch in the world, which could easily fit the Empire State Building in
New York into it with room to spare, well that seems to be a whole new level of
carelessness.
US Dollars. The greenback is useful in so many places in the world, not just of course the USA, and proved to be the means for my escape from Sost at the Pakistan end of the Karokaram Highway. I had been stuck at this frontier town due to a tit-for-tat dispute between the countries which had led to the international border being closed for nine days.
The Karakoram Highway, connecting Pakistan to China, regularly makes it into the top 10
most dangerous roads in the world, alongside the Kolyma Highway, or ‘Road of
Bones’, in Russia and the Yungas track, the ‘Death Road’ in Bolivia.
When you think of Pakistan, many images come to mind. Cricket, curries, crowded streets, maybe the capture of Osama Bin Laden. Castles tend not to not figure that prominently.
