ASIANOVERLAND.NET KATHMANDU TO LONDON  DAY 126/38: KARACHI TO AMMAN,  JORDAN

“25th October, 1980

A long day – got up at ...3 YES three am!

I repeat THREE A.M.

Marion had arrived late – had a hard night I expect

Hard being the operative ward or is it just my imagination she’s been walking around with this happy grin all day.

Flight to Dubai to Amman – hot cold hot cold hot cold.

Have suddenly acquired a taste for ’Chateau Neuf du Pape

Having consumed 3 bottles.

Heady stuff.

Watched Robert Redford & B. Streisland on T.V. (censored of course)

WOW – could do with someone like him right now!

Doomed to disappointment!”

 

Most of the punters were up and ready to go as planned at 3am, and most of us met at the airport on time. Unfortunately, we had a few stragglers MIA, so I had to go back to their Karachi hotel (different to ours), to give them a hurry–up, or we’d miss our flight.

I was still feeling as sick as a dog from Delhi Belly, but when I entered the stragglers’ Hotel rooms, I found that the hard partying hadn’t stopped yet. I’d already given them the necessary warnings about taking drugs through international borders and on international flights etc, but the rooms were awash with drugs, dope, hash, bags of heads, Afghani Black, etc etc. I quickly made full use of the toilet flushes, which, fortunately, weren’t blocked, and managed to flush the drugs I could find, down the toilets.

I finally managed to get the hung over/partying punters into a taxi and to Karachi International Airport, with the punters still crying and screaming at me for destroying their drugs, even as we entered the airport, when Pakistani plain clothes drug officers put their hands into the girls’ handbags. When the girls complained at the Pakistani bag searchers, instead of continuing their verbal  tirade against me, the Pakistanis said they were Drug Enforcement officers.

 The punters who had been partying all night with locals, were showing the effects all too obviously, so everything was searched. Or maybe the locals who provided the drugs to the punters also gave a tip off to the DEA, because there was NO time gap between our entry into Karachi Airport and the girls’ handbags being searched. However, NOTHING was found!

I couldn’t believe our luck – I had somehow managed to locate and flush down the toilet all of the drugs, which otherwise could have been in the punters’ bags!!! I’m SOOO glad the punters were late that morning, and I had to go back to their hotel to get them from their rooms. But was it a coincidence that the same handbags I had emptied of drugs half an hour earlier, were now being searched immediately upon entry into Karachi airport?

While the punters’ bags were being searched for drugs, a Pakistani drug enforcement officer told me that the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) trained and paid for the Pakistani drug enforcement operations.

In the light of our Karachi airport experience, and that since then, the Taliban had nearly destroyed the heroin/opium industry in Afghanistan, which has boomed since the US invaded Afghanistan, I couldn’t resist a quick visit to the US DEA website:

“DEA’s Middle East Region is a very large and complex region, with over 40 very diverse countries that are covered by relatively few DEA offices.

The region provides the majority of opium for the heroin consuming world. As such the primary function of these DEA offices is to encourage both bilateral and multilateral cooperation and pursue a regional approach to combating opiates and other regional drug threats. DEA offices work closely with regional and other international counterparts to identify and target major traffickers ...”

The effectiveness of the DEA in Afghanistan compared to the Taliban can be found at Wikipedia:

“In July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, collaborating with the UN to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan, declared that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world's most successful anti-drug campaigns. The Taliban enforced a ban on poppy farming via threats, forced eradication, and public punishment of transgressors. The result was a 99% reduction in the area of opium poppy farming in Taliban-controlled areas, roughly three quarters of the world's supply of heroin at the time. The ban was effective only briefly due to the deposition of the Taliban in 2002.”

Upon arrival at Amman airport, I’m relieved to find that we now have a replacement double decker – GRUNT, and our new driver is a Kiwi, Les Stringer. We head towards Amman Citadel (pictured) which has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years and was fortified during the Bronze age, sometime around 1800 BCE.

The debate about double deckers compared to camping and/or hotel trips has always raged. But I was extremely relieved to board a double decker again, cos the ease of travelling overland in a double decker far exceeds any benefits hotels may have, even in Karachi, where, astonishingly, we actually had air con in our rooms, and the toilet pit was handily placed beside the open shower and the bed.

↑ Day 125 ↓ Day 127