Southbound in the Scorching Heat

WHO VISITS SOUTH?

My friend practically yelled at me in the voice note.

In Pakistan, people usually prefer to spend their vacations in the beautiful and colder northern regions of the country because the rest of the country becomes unbearably hot from May to September. So, no one in their right mind would plan a trip to the south — and that too in the month of June. But guess who did? I did.

My friend was asking me to plan another trip to the north — the same family friends with whom we had visited the extreme northern region back in 2023. She was shocked when I told her we had just returned from a vacation in the south. Her reaction was justified.

Temperatures were record-shattering high (50°C +) during our vacation week and we were travelling through the hottest region of the country at that time — Sindh. Most of that region looks like the picture below. There are some canals, Indus river and an arid land but what makes it look so remote is the slum life. People are living there in such dire and unhygienic conditions that it's heartbreaking to see the unimaginable magnitude of poverty.

^{📍Rohri Canal}

Anyways, when I say "south", I mean Karachi. We were travelling to Karachi and to reach there one has to cross the entire province of Sindh. The southern region (Sindh) of Pakistan is mostly underdeveloped — except for Karachi, which is quite the opposite. It’s the country’s largest metropolitan city. I won’t go into the details of why we chose Karachi this summer, but it wasn’t just on a whim — there was a reason, more than one actually.

^{Weather remained dramatic throughout}

Even in the biggest city and former capital, the intra-city transport system is so poor that we don’t think twice before taking our own car, no matter what corner of the country we’re travelling to. It makes getting around easier. So we had to cover over 850 kilometers in a single day, which we did in 14 hours. We covered half the distance in the first four hours — the remaining half took 10 hours. Remember the underdeveloped southern region?

Punjab is colourful, but as soon as you enter Sindh, it feels lifeless. The motorway goes as far as Sukkur, but once you go deeper, there's only the National Highway — in desperate need of repair and expansion due to heavy traffic. In the first few hours of the journey, our speed was 120 km/h and then it dropped to 50, 30 and at times we were barely moving.

As if this road-revenge wasn’t enough, there were no comfortable rest areas along the way. The fuel stations had hideous toilets and it got so scary at a point when 4 fuel stations in a row had no petrol and our car was running on the reserve. There was just one decent family restaurant where we had our lunch. I travelled on this road after six years and I was hoping for some development but nada.

The only thing I love about this long route are the date-palm trees along the roadside which run with you for hundreds of kilometers. In some areas there were even banana plants (or trees?) as well.

Khairpur, Gothki and Sukkur (of Sindh) are the biggest banana and date producing regions of Pakistan.

Another thing which I like about this route are rocky hills. There was a patch in which the hills looked like as if you got teleported from Sindh to Giza — you could clearly make out pyramids and even a sphinx. But most of that has been razed (or excavated?). There are parts of Sindh which were home to ancient civilizations.

All the pictures are so far from the first half of the journey except that of the traffic jam. I was extremely exhausted during the last 400km which weren't seem to be ending because of the traffic. The only thing that caught my eye as we neared Karachi was a windmill corridor. I don't know why but those gigantic windmills looked so cool. It had started raining again at that time and my window was dirty too, hence the blurry picture.

^{📍Jhimpir Wind Corridor}

After about two more hours, we finally made it to Karachi — the city of lights. There were a mix of places we visited during our stay there which I really wish to record here on the blog in the coming days while the memories are still fresh.