Day 33 – Lahore

Thursday 18th October 2007

A lie in, such a simple thing, but so refreshing! We had decided the night before to give the organised tour of Lahore a miss and grab a tuk tuk and head out to the town Bazaar and we had a great day. The people of Lahore did not consider us to be a novelty, we were not mobbed or stared at and had a really nice time wandering around buying this and that as went, apart from accidentally stepping on a dead rat all was good!

Heading back to the hotel we discovered that many of the OzBusers had decided to do their own thing for the day and all seemed in high spirits, especially those that had got tickets to see South Africa play Pakistan at the cricket and ended up on the big screen and the local TV coverage of the match! Ozbus were treating us all to dinner tonight so there was time for a quick freshen up before meeting the rest of the guys in the lobby.

Dinner was fantastic, a buffet of mammoth proportions with our local guide happily explaining each dish to us, especially the more confusing ones. Some decided to not ask and ended up eating the after dinner leaf wrapped around spices in one go, turns out you are supposed to put it in you cheek and suck the flavour out but this fact was not know to our tour leader who told everyone they tasted horrible!

After dinner we went to a drumming ceremony, this is apparently a regular Thursday night occurrence and basically consists of a lot of men sitting around listening to drumming while smoking, eating anf drinking large amounts of hashish. With Friday and Saturday being the weekend in Islamic countries and alcohol being more illegal than hash this is pretty much the equivalent of Friday night down the pub with the lads. The main difference being that you don’t normally get a bunch of gawking tourists staring at you down the local.

A short bus ride back to the hotel and it was time for our last sleep in Pakistan, tomorrow India calls!