ASIANOVERLAND.NET KATHMANDU TO LONDON  DAY 123/35: SUKKUR TO MAKLI,  PAKISTAN

We arrived early in the morning at the pandemonium of Karachi railway station, and into the chaos of Karachi. Our trip book reads:

“22 October, 1980

Have arranged prices for tickets.

Cost 2,621 rupees for them. Lowest possible price could get down to.

Luxury AIR CON rooms for us punters – not the Top Deck norm.”

It’s decided. We’ll fly from Karachi to Amman in Jordan. In an early glimpse into the transition from Top Deck Travel to Flight Centre, Scroo Turner has been able to obtain excellent student discount prices on international flights, and ours were hastily arranged, but at a cheap price. This is important, because the punters must pay for the additional, unbudgeted flight. It soon became apparent that selling flight tickets was easier and more profitable than driving double decker buses from Kathmandu to London.

Karachi is the capital of the Pakistani province of Sindh, the largest city in ,Pakistan and seventh largest city in the world.

The region around Karachi has been the site of human habitation for millennia. Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites have been excavated along Karachi's northern outskirts, dating human habitation in the Karachi area to at least 12,000 years. These earliest inhabitants are believed to have been hunter-gatherers, with ancient flint tools discovered at several sites.

The expansive Karachi region was well known to the ancient Greeks. The ancient site of Krokola, a natural harbor west of the Indus, was the place where Alexander the Great camped to prepare a fleet and sail back through the Persian Gulf to the Persian Assyrian Empire, after completing his campaign in the Indus valley.  No other natural harbor exists near the mouth of the Indus that could accommodate Alexander’s large fleet, even though it was not large enough to transport all his army, so Alexander himself walked back to Babylon with many of his troops.

Makli Necropolis (pictured from our Trip Book), is one of the largest burial sites in the world, spread over an area of 10 kilometres near Karachi. The site houses approximately 500,000 to 1 million tombs built over the course of a 400 year period, mostly from the 14th to the 18th centuries.

The oldest portions of modern Karachi reflect the ethnic composition of the first settlements, with Balochis and Sindhis continuing to make up a large portion of Karachi’s population, though many of the residents are relatively recent migrants. Following Partition, large numbers of Hindus left Pakistan for the newly independent India, while a larger percentage of Muslim refugees from India settled in Karachi. The city grew 150% during the ten period between 1941 and 1951, with the new arrivals from India making up 57% of Karachi's population in 1951.

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