😎 Likedeeler goes rubbing 😎

Mary Jane, the flirty flower,
once basked in her sexy power,
but a gnome did not,
like her on the spot,
and gave her a golden shower.

As I stepped off the train in Rawalpindi, no bandits had tried to stop the train during our trip, sorry! 😘, I was greeted by a bunch of guys, all offering their services or products, porter, taxi, "Chai, chai, chai!", "Samose, samose, samose!", hotel, etc. and also some were just looking on in surprise since I was the only white guy coming out of that train.
But a few Urdu words from my friend and all that was left for them was to show us the direction to the minibus to Rawalpindi`s modern twin-sister Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, to which Rawalpindi had lost the capital crown after stealing it from Karachi herself.

In a few months another chapter would be added to Rawalpindi´s long history of violence, when a mob attacked Hindu temples in retaliation for the destruction of the Babri Masjid in India by Hindu extremists, but when I visited, Rawalpindi was on its best behavior.

I don´t know if it´s me, but this is something I would notice quite a few times during my travels, shortly after I had visited a place, the place would erupt.
Sometimes literally, like in the case of some volcano, but usually it was people killing each other.

Who would have thought for example that a peaceful place like Gilgit would see Sunnas and Shias at each others throat just a few days after I came through, leading the Pakistani army to step in in force and imposing a curfew, preventing me from visiting a second time on my way back from Skardu?

Well, now, with information easily available via internet, I did some reading up on the Gilgit region and found out that trouble had been brewing there since May 1988 when Shias had started to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr after sighting the moon while Sunnas were still fasting because their religious leaders had not sighted the moon yet.
What sounds ridiculous to us Westerners actually led to the killing of an estimated number of 700 Shias by the enraged Sunnas, of course some Sunnas were also killed by Shias in retaliation.
This event has been described by some historians as a watershed in the history of Gilgit-Baltistan leading to a permanent trust deficit and in the years after that event more sectarian clashes occured.

In the big scheme of things, this seems to be another proxy battle between Shiite Iran and Wahhabite Saudi Arabia, causing endless suffering.

Lucky me did not know anything about all of this while traveling through the mountain regions of Pakistan in 1992, sometimes ignorance is bliss.

So we took a minibus to the Overland Camp in Islamabad.
Overlanders are people like the amazing Hive account@bubke, who travel from Europe to India in their own car or truck.

During our short trip from Rawalpindi station to the camp I had already noticed a very familiar smell.
I don´t know how the situation is today, with the war on drugs and stuff, but in those days I came to the conclusion that, to my knowledge, Islamabad must have been the only capital city in the world situated in the middle of a cannabis field, them plants were everywhere.

At the camp we met a bunch of other Westerners, all of them without cars, who invited us to share their sleeping area, which was situated under the roof of a terrace of some building, with them. Since this was a camp for people supposed to have their own accomodation inside their trucks or tents, there was no proper accomodation for us, so we were prepared to sleep outside under that roof, but, there were showers😉.

As the sun was about to set, our new-found friends burst into a joyful “Let´s go rubbing!“
We followed them into the forest of cannabis right beside the camp where they picked some leaves and started rubbing them between their hands to extract the oil, or resin or whatever you call it. I´m neither a botanist nor a producer.
But nevertheless, after some time of diligent rubbing your hands were covered with some sticky stuff which was supposed to be more potent than if you just smoked the fresh, undried leaves.
Ah, the things you learn while travelling! 😁