We’ve been sitting in the airport in Dubai for more than 4 hours when finally the check-in of our PIA (Pakistan International Airlines) flight opens.
We are almost the firsts in line; the guy checks our luggage: ok, our tickets: ok, our return tickets: “No, listen, we are with the motorbike, we don’t have’em…”
“Ah. Then you can’t board this aircraft”.
“Don’t joke, our motorbike is already on the airplane, our visa for Pakistan expires tomorrow: if we are stuck in Dubai while the motorbike is in Pakistan and the visa expires is a big mess…”
“No, no.”
[panic attack]
“Come on, call a manager, do something!!”
After waiting for a long time a well mannered old man shows up and after many quizzical questions and after checking that our motorbike is for real on this airplane, he lets us in.
Thomas blurts out: “… I had enough of this Pakistan already: it’s not easy at all to go visit it!” as a reply the gentleman pulls away our tickets and changes our sits numbers with better ones: “Welcome to Pakistan!”.
Thomas was about to cry when he saw the motorbike full covered with cellophane that was being lifted up on the airplane (you can see it on the left in the picture).
His rational mind soon took control again and he auto-assured himself saying: “I’m happy that the bike is on our same plane, if it was on a different one there was double the probability that something happened to one of us three…”. Luckily despite the crappy airplane and the fearsome shaking just before landing, we made it safe and sound to Islamabad, Pakistan.
To welcome us at the airport there is Kamran, a nice guy met on CouchSurfing that hosted us in Islamabad, and who came to pick us up with his blue cabrio Beetle! Now it’s too late so we’ll have to collect our motorbike tomorrow. We are so happy to be in Pakistan, after all the difficulties to obtain the visa and the run to had it stamp before it expired (we entered in Pakistan the day before the expiry date) now it doesn’t seem possible that we are here for real!
The next day we woke up early to go clear our motorbike from the custom. We arrive there around 9 in the morning and an agent offer us his help, after the experience in Bandar Abbas we accept. We start to go here and there in many different offices, the usual merry go round of stamps and papers and every once in a while we pay some taxes of some hundreds rupees; between a here and a there the waiting in huge, it’s incredibly hot and every few hours the electricity goes down and everything stops (later we’ll discover that the load shading are planned).
When it seemed we were about to make it, here it comes the lunch break…
At last it’s time to work again and one guy at one of the windows asks us 4000 rupees pointing at one of the entries of the receipt of the shipping agency in Dubai.
“No man, we are not giving you nothing, we already paid this in Dubai”, we are ostinate.
“Ok, I’ll make you a discount: 3000!”.
“No way, since when you can make discounts on taxes? We are not giving you any money”.
After a long arguing we resolve with: “Ok, I make you a personal favor, don’t pay anything”.
[From now on the Take from the Whites fair starts]
When it’s time to pay the agent he shows us a 17,000 rupees bill (almost 150€). If we don’t pay he doesn’t give us back the motorbike; this is basically an abduction with a ransom request!
We get pissed, start bargaining, but he, backed by the other agents who came to help him, insists. At a certain point fed up and disappointed we start to play our drama: Thomas, raging, goes to look for a manager who can end this situation, I start to cry sobbing “We don’t have any money, how will we do…”, as a result they panic and tell us: “Ok, give us 8,000 and go away”.
We give them the money insulting them and finally, almost at sunset, we take back our motorbike after all the process that this morning we were assured was going to be easy…
In the picture the receipt that starts from 17,000, was corrected 3 times until an agreed and countersigned “#8,000#”.
“Welcome to Pakistan” the agent dares to say as we are leaving.
“Ma vaffanculo, và…”
