The alarm goes off at 07:00 and at 08:00 we leave for Quetta. Quetta is the first major city after the border crossing and it is located 630 km from the border. The navigation tells me the first exit is in 615 km! We will never achieve that in 1 day, because the 2 Vespa riders in our group have a top speed of 70 km, with a tailwind.
During the morning we indeed have that and it still makes good progress with sometimes even 80 km per hour. We drive behind the pickup truck with 2 armed Levies in the back. Towards noon, however, the wind changes and we only reach 65 km per hour and the temperature rises to 32 degrees. The landscape is really great, high, black pointed mountains and pieces of small sand dunes.
Then we suddenly stop at a small 'Levie station'. A stone building of 2 rooms with no more than a carpet on the floor, along the road, in the middle of the desert. The Levies tell us that further on the road has been closed due to an 'incident' and that we will rest here until the road is clear again. We use the 2 hours we stay there to get some sleep and chat. Fortunately, the wind is blowing nicely and it is manageable.
We leave again late in the afternoon and arrive in the dark at a police station in the small town of Dalbandin. We receive a warm welcome and are allocated a large room to sleep on the floor, as is customary here. Each of us has the equipment for this, so that's no problem at all. Chicken Masala is fetched for us and after dinner we drink tea with the police officers. In the courtyard is also a real prison. One large space of bars where about 6 prisoners stay and have a beautiful view of our engines.
The squat toilets have probably never been cleaned and the shower is just a tap with cold water in a small space, but I'm glad we can take a nice shower. We are also allowed to sleep on the roof of the building and that actually appeals to me more than the six of us in a small space. There is even a kind of bed (also used here to sit) and I have a wonderful night under the Pakistani starry sky.
