Pinocchio

Hello.
Yes, i am alive and have not been eaten by mutant fish zombies.In case anybody wondered where I was for the past couple of weeks, I was not in Karachi, and then when I came back, I started watching heroes, and got completely obsessed with it, so all I did was watch that for a few days. And then when I kind of got over that obsession, the tcf summer camp that i was volunteering for started,which completely tired me out, aur us kay oopar, I was (and still am, i guess) hyperventilating about applying for college, which I will dedicate a whole other post to later.

I haven't felt like writing anything lately, which is strange, cuz every time something happened, i would be mentally typing it in my brain, but did not feel like typing it all out. I haven't been on blogger in a while either, and i just noticed all the zillions of other posts that have been posted while i was away.


I'll just tell you about the first couple of weeks of my disappearance.

I had gone to Fairy Meadows with my family. The name sounds made up, doesn’t it? When I told my friend, she told me I needed to stop going to imaginary places in my brain. (I’ve only done that a couple of times. More often, I just talk to imaginary people.)

It is real though, and it is gorgeous. It's near the base camp of Nanga Parbat. For those of you who don’t know your Pakistani geography, the Nanga Parbat is the ninth highest mountain in the world, in the Himalayan range and is one of the most dangerous mountains.

On Friday, we left Karachi for Islamabad.

Islamabad is so clean.

And it's so pretty. so many trees, so little pollution.

So different from Karachi.

The area where my cousins live is so safe, that the houses don't even have gates! and you can go outside for a walk or whatever by yourself whenever you want.

But it doesn't look half as pretty as Karachi does in the night time.

For some reason, when I went, I initially didn’t see any Islamabadi people, i saw lots of Pindi people on the way from the airport, but in Islamabad, I didn’t see anybody. maybe i just wasn't paying attention, or Islamabadis don't come out at night. But in the morning, when i saw the backs of a group of boys, i got really excited because this was the first time i remembered seeing Islamabadi people. But I got kinda disappointed when they turned around, because they looked just like most other Pakistanis.

I don't know WHAT I was expecting.

My brain just likes to set me up for disappointment.

we had to leave early from Islamabad the day after arriving, but the van (yes, van. it was not big enough to be called a coaster, which was what we had wanted) came late, so we went for a walk, and we went up a small hill, and in the middle of the tiny pebbles that were scattered everywhere on the ground, there were 3 tiny speckled eggs. Whatever creature had laid them, had gathered the pebbles around the eggs like a tiny nest. We decided they were snake eggs cuz even if they were on a hill, what bird would lay eggs on the ground?

It was a two day drive from Islamabad to Raikot. we stopped at Besham for the night in a PTDC hotel thing, which was actually really nice. it was right next to the Indus river, and we went down to dip our feet in it, until it started raining really hard and we had to come back inside.

The car ride was SO HOT. everybody was burning, and it made everyone get a bit cranky, and also a little bit kooky. the heat does strange things to you.

It was such a relief to get to Raikot.

From there, we had to take an open jeep up the mountain. it was a very steep and narrow path, around ten feet wide, and the jeep was less than a foot near the edge the entire time. it was very bumpy and very scary, cuz we kept going higher, and we started around Maghrib, so it kept getting darker, too.

Then we reached Tatu, by which time it was completely dark, and there were so many stars it was crazy.

My family saw a lot of shooting stars. I didn’t though. This saddened me.

There’s a song (I don’t remember which) that has a lyric that describes stars as something like holes punched in a backlit canopy, but that’s not what these stars looked like. It looked like there were zillions of tiny little lights hovering around in space.

We had to stay the night there, and there was no electricity, so we had to use torches.

In the morning, we left for fairy meadows. It was a three hour long trek UPHILL and it was so difficult, I was huffing and puffing more than the big bad wolf, and had to keep stopping to catch my breath. Eventually, I reached, and it was so amazingly gorgeous, it was worth all that effort getting there.

Where we stayed, we had the perfect view of Nanga Parbat.

It was beyond awesome.

There were these little log cabins, and we went to the forest everyday to walk, and there were such CUTE little animals!

A baby cow AND a slightly older than a baby goat both licked my hand. It made my day.

There was heather everywhere. We collected lots and lots of it, and when I came home and opened my bags, I found heather everywhere.

We ate French fries everyday, we only drank fresh water from the glacier that eventually turns into the Indus River, and there was a bonfire every night, because it was so freezing cold we had to wear jackets meant for snow. (Us Karachi people can’t handle the cold, no matter how much we complain about the heat.)

We saw all kinds of weird tree bark, some of which looked like wall paper, and some even peeled off and looked just like regular notepad paper. I am convinced this is where man got the idea from.

On the second last day, we walked to Bayyal camp, from which we all started to go up to the view point which was even higher up than Fairy meadows was (eleven and a half thousand feet), and in the end of that journey, there were less than half of us left, cuz most of the people had decided to stay back and rest. Suddenly, when the climb up got steepish, I started panicking because I couldn’t breathe, as the air was so thin. My dad had to calm me down, and I decided not to venture up any farther. That was scary.

The man who owned the place had set up a water turbine, from the water from the giant glacier, with pipes made from hollowed out logs, and we went to see that. it was quite cool.

Imagine living in a place where it's so gorgeous, and so cold, and the electricity never goes! 

But it's impossible to live there in the winters because of the weather, so the people who live there only live there for about half the year.

On the last day, it started raining, and then there was a rainbow. at first it was really light, but then a darker rainbow formed right next to it, and it was just like the drawings every little kid makes in nursery school, with the mountains and the trees, and a full rainbow that disappears into the mountains.

it was so amazing. I want to live there when i grow up.


I'm going to go read some of the zillions of posts that i missed now.

ps: the title has nothing to do with the post.