Beginning Of A Journey

Beginnings tend to be beautiful, nostalgic, for they mark a turn in your lifetime and unfurl the future into something new and unexpected. Wondrously, even an idyllic journey with an insignificant ouset, morphs into a transformative one, if we revisit it with a self-reflective eye.
This is clearly too dense an introduction for a blissful journey to North Pakistan with my maternal cousins. In fact, it reminds me of the poem "Woodspurge" by Daniel Rosetti as he insists that not everything in life needs to be dissected to reap wisdom:

"From perfect grief there need not be 

Wisdom or even memory"

so conclusively, for now I shall abandon the philosophical side of my nature and give rein to the connoisseur within. 
We began our excursion on the 3rd day of Eid-ul-Adha on 15th of September'16 by taking a flight with PIA from Karachi to Islamabad. If you do believe in omens, then maybe it's a good one that our plane flew exactly at the designated hour of 4 pm. For those who are unacquainted with the volatile performance of our domestic flights, let me enlighten you! PIA has gained great fame in recent years for cancelling flights, or delaying them for hours. So now you know how lucky we were! From there we went up to Skardu, Hunza, down to Naraan, and then straight from Islamabad to Karachi, a journey I will trace in the following posts.

A bird's eye view of Islamabad and the grandiose Faisal Mosque