Mountainous Weekend

Back in August we had a trip to Kaghan Valley, plan of which also included a trip to Nathiagali. But due to lack of time, we had to drop it. Consider it luck or consider it a result of sequence of events that I got an opportunity to be there this weekend.

In the previous week, Ahsan Ashja (currently at connect2web), Haroon Atiq & Danish Anjum (fastians batch of 1998) came to Islamabad from Karachi to attend Zulfiqar Naqvi's (fastian batch of 1998) Wedding ceremony. The plan was already made that a tour would follow the events and that they'll leave Islamabad on Thursday and I had to join them in Murree on Friday night.

I booked a seat in a 14-seater Daewoo van which costs Rs. 80/- from Rawalpindi to Murree. It's a nice van providing a comfortable journey. We reached Murree in around one and a half hour and as soon as I got out of the van, a taxi driver approached me to get me to the hotel. After a few words he recognized me as the one who'll be joining the rest of the crew from Karachi, interesting yeah?

It was very cold there that if it had been raining it wouldn't be water coming down. I reached Faran Hotel at which the rest of the three people were already staying and waiting for me. Then I came to find out that there was another friend of theirs with his wife staying in a different hotel and they'll be with us for the whole tour. A thought came to my mind that the tour would be ruined, but it proved wrong in a few hours.

After a couple of hours, we got out for a cup of coffee at Popeye, followed by a dinner and yet another coffee. At around 12, we were back in the hotel room and started playing cards (game being Court piece, also known as Double Siri). Haroon had to goto a school for a speech at 8 in the morning, so we decided to limit our games, but due to our fun-loving and adventurous nature we didn't sleep at all!

The next day, after having some sleep in the morning, we booked a land cruiser for Rs. 2800/- for a whole day at Nathiagali. In our way, we visited Ayubia where we also had a cable car ride. An airgun/balloon game was also played by me, though not knowing the rules, I was off for emptying the whole board, though I requested him to discontinue in the middle, but he resisted. In the end just 3 out of around 40 balloons were left which I couldn't finish (somehow!), thus I had to pay Rs. 100/- to him.

At around 4 pm we reached Nathiagali and started finding a nice hotel. This time of the year you won't find many people staying there, hence hotel rates aren't high as well. This is because of the v. cold weather and no snowfall (hence not a win-win situation). We got hold of an average hotel (Afaq Hotel in the main market) for a reasonable rate and had lunch cum dinner in an open restaurant at around 5. The scenery was great!

At night, when an era of boredom started, a request was made by Zaid's wife to have a small trip to Donga Gali, but to our surprise it was closed down and there wasn't anyone there. We returned back to the hotel, played cards till 12 and slept. At around 6:30 sunday morning, we returned back to Islamabad in our land cruiser.

All in all, it was a very good, though short, trip and everyone enjoyed everything about it, may it be cold weather, the comments passing, the journey, the sight seeing or friendship building.