Seeing green - at last!

After many days of desert travel with only tiny patches of vegetation, there is more green on the horizon for Mark this evening. He spent last night, according to his GPS tracker, in Quetta which, with a population of 750,000, is the capital of Balochistan and the largest city in the region. The following photo comes courtesy of Wikipedia and give some sense of the scale and beauty of the city which nestles in a basin surrounded by mountains rising to over 7000ft..
And a couple more which a search on Google threw up......and even a slide show from http://www.quetta-city.blogspot.com/ which has clearly been compiled by someone with an artisic rather than a geographical eye! The raindrops must be wishful thinking!

But to get back to this evening...... the GPS tracker and Google aerial views don't always give an easy impression of relief and you really have to look at an atlas to appreciate that today Mark will have descended about 2000 metres through the Bolan Pass from Quetta to Sibi which is on the edge of the Indus valley. If you look carefully, you should be able to make out both the pass and the Bolan River on the map.On the excellent http://www.cyclingtoindia.blogspot.com/ I found this good image taken in the Bolan Pass - it shows very clearly the nature of the stream beds of those seasonal torrents in the desert which carry large amounts of sediment from the mountains..... And this is Sibi - gateway to a whole new environment....... ...but that, as they say is a story for another day!