This will be a live-updated series of posts following the Pakistan expedition…
I am writing this from Winter Park, Colorado, when James and I should actually be 30,000 feet in the air, a few hours out from Islamabad, Pakistan. Unfortunately, plans are made to be changed. and COVID only increases the odds of this.
Jumping back a few days, 12 hours before our flight to Pakistan, we received an email saying our flight was cancelled. No explanation and the Qatar Airways help line was busy - for hours. Finally around 10pm that night we finally got through to a real person. Our flights was not technically cancelled, but we were booted off due to reduced capacity due to COVID. Easy: reschedule to the next available flight, not so easy: the next available flight was 3 weeks later…
There was a couple hour window where we thought Pakistan may not happen. All flights into Pakistan from the States were in the multi-thousand dollar range. Our backup option had always been Peru, so we resigned to the fact that maybe Pakistan was out and Peru was the next best option. Flights two days later were reasonably priced, no visa requirements, open to tourism and climbing; check, check, check and check.
We thought through everything again and decided that maybe Pakistan could still happen. Maybe there was a way to link together flights and avoid paying an arm and two legs to get there. We needed a reasonably cheap flight from the states to a country near Pakistan, where said country had to have minimal or no visa requirements, and have semi-regular flights into Pakistan. I had emailed our Pakistan tour operator updating him on the situation, and around that time he emailed me back, telling us that if we could get to Dubai there were cheap daily flights into Pakistan that were not getting canceled (or at least not as much). Back in the game! We soon had flights to Dubai booked, and then booked flights from Dubai to Islamabad, Pakistan. We had a few days to wait as the earliest date with a reasonable price ticket was four days later. 2am we went to bed exhausted but with all our ducks in a row (albeit a very crooked row).
Fast forward to present: we wrapped up final packing of all our gear and are headed down to Denver tomorrow afternoon, where we are staying with a friend before catching the first leg of our flight at 5am Friday morning.
It’s been chaotic, momentarily disappointing, and almost fun(?) to try and make it all work. Yes, I wish all went as planned, but when does that ever happen…?
