Overland to London - Sukkur to Quetta

 

Camels crossing the Bolan River, Bolan Pass, Baluchistan

Fri 22 February 1980 SUKKUR – QUETTA

                                            Distance: 393kms

Leaving Sukkur we drive first to the city of Jacobabad, named after Brigadier-General John Jacob, the British Administrator of what was then Upper Sindh, in 1847. At the time, Jacob was in command of an irregular cavalry regiment of the East Indian Company army known as the 36th Jacob’s Horse. At the time of his appointment to Khangurh in Upper Sindh, the area was plagued by predatory tribes which Jacob and his men soon defeated. Jacob then started building infrastructure for Khangurh and being a architect and engineer, he designed and executed the laying of a wide road network around the town. He solved fresh water problems in the town by having a tank excavated to hold water brought by canal from the Indus and oversaw the excavation of the Begaree Canal, originating at the Guddu barrage on the Indus which irrigated thousands of previously uncultivated land. John Jacob died in Khangurh, renamed Jacobabad, in 1858 and his grave in the town has been well-maintained by the locals ‘for whom he retains a cult status, and, according to BBC correspondent Mark Tully, locals believed he had saint-like status.’  We will make a short stop in Jacobabad before heading into Baluchistan and after making another short stop at the road junction at Sibi, we head into the spectacular Bolan Pass.

The road junction at Sibi, Baluchistan

Children in Sibi, Baluchistan

    The Bolan Pass is a long narrow defile, following the Bolan River, through the Toba Kakar Range. This strategic pass is the counterpart to the Khyber Pass and gives access to Quetta and Kandahar in Afghanistan from the plains of Baluchistan and the Indus Valley.

Mudbrick village of Kolpur, Bolan Pass

After Alexander the Great's conquests in Bactria and the Hindu Kush, he fought the Battle of the Hydaspes (River Jhelum) against, and defeated, the Indian King Porus, before withdrawing back towards Persia, While Alexander, with a portion of his troops travelled  down the Indus, his general Craterus, with captured elephants and a larger number of troops, took the route through the Bolan Pass and across the Baluchistan desert. Thie Bolan Pass was also used by Mahmud of Ghazni during his 10th century invasions of India.

   The British army that was annihilated between Kabul and Jalalabad in 1842 during the First Anglo-Afghan War entered Afghanistan by this route in 1839, capturing Kandahar and Ghazni before entering Kabul. 

    The British also constructed a railway through the Pass to Quetta in the 1880s. We will see sections of this railway as we drive through the Pass and will make a photo stop by the Bolan River. Once we pass the small town of Kolpur, it is just a short drive to Quetta, the provincial capital and largest town in Baluchistan. 

We stay in the Hotel Bloomstar in Quetta.

Sat 23 February QUETTA – o/night to TAFTAN

Distance: 632kms

Quetta is very much a frontier city and, ethnically, the people are Pathans. Quetta is at an elevation of 1680 metres, or 5510ft, so it could be a little chilly in the morning. The city had been occupied over the centuries by various invaders, including Mahmud of Ghazni, the Moghuls, and it became part of the Afghan Durrani Empire before being occupied by the British in 1876. The British developed Quetta into a bustling town with a several multi-storied buildings and it became known as ‘Little London’. It May 1935 the city was hit by a devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake which killed around 40,000 people. Quetta is also the centre of the main fruit-growing region of Pakistan. 

Street scene in Quetta, Baluchistan

Road sign outside Quetta - 5886 kms to London!

        After spending the morning in Quetta, we will be heading south into the Baluchistan Desert this afternoon, along some of the worst roads in Asia. It will be a long, over night drive and I suggest you purchase some food for the journey. 

    In the desert we may well come across groups of Kochi nomads making their way up to their summer pastures in what is now Soviet-occupied  Afghanistan. For centuries these nomads have made the round trip, of about 1000 miles, from the wintering grounds in the Indus Valley to their summer pastures in the Afghan highlands. In the main they are Ghilzai Pathans and speak Pashto, the common language of Afghanistan. James W. Spain in The Way of the Pathan  describes one such small caravan:    "In almost every string of camel there was one with a small child perched on top of a mountain of baskets and tents. Head bobbing in rhythm with the plodding camel, the small round face looked solemnly out on the world from beneath a gaily embroidered pillar-box hat. Sometimes a necklace of silver coins or a pair of startingly large ear-rings would indicate that the mite was a girl. Nearly always the little creatures looked happy, healthy, and at ease."

    The only town of any size that we will pass through on our desert run, late at night, will be Nok Kundi. On my last journey over this route, heading to Kathmandu, we stopped for an evening meal here, to be met by a jovial ‘restauranteur’ who greeted us with “Welcome, welcome – no gentlemen here, only Baluchis!” His food, however, of vegetables, rice and tea was good. 

Local transport - old & new - Baluchistan desert

Kochi nomads heading to summer pastures in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan

    We are driving through the night to be at the border post at Taftan when it opens tomorrow morning. It will take us several hours to complete both the Pakistani and Iranian border formalities. With a bit of luck we will have a couple of hours rest before the border opens.  

    On the outward journey, Colin Davidson and I arrived with our group at the Mirjaveh (Iranian) border post in the mid-afternoon to be told the border was closed - Immigration had gone home. As there was no village, or cafés, on the Iranian side, the Customs official, who had invited us to take tea with him (this piece of fraternisation helped get us through the border quickly the next morning), told us that if we followed the railway line, we would reach a wire gate on the border but there was a hole in it. Once past the gate it was just a few hundred yards to Taftan village and some place to eat but, he said, to keep in mind there was a 90 minute time difference between Mirjaveh and Taftan, even though they were separated by less than a kilometre!!

text & photographs ©Neil Rawlins 

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My paperbacks and ebooks on my Overland travels in Asia, Europe & Africa in the early 1970s and the experiences of a tour guide on the Asian Overland routes & leading Camel Safaris in Rajasthan in the 1980s are available from Amazon.