You get passport in morning. PIA put you in fancy hotel now. So we spent one hour getting to the hotel, one hour playing with the shiny fixtures in our room's bathroom, one hour sleeping, and one hour returning to the airport. There was still mass confusion but the soldiers got us back on a plane with our passports and we resumed our journey. Karachi's charms remain unappealing today but the airport does sport a modern, gleaming terminal.
Signs are all bilingual and moneychangers abound because the Pakistani rupee is fully convertible.
This means you can change your unspent rupee notes back into your own currency when you leave the country instead of rolling homemade cigarettes out of them and rudely smoking them in the departure lounge. When the Unit and I saw the changes, we breathed a sigh of relief. Each person could check a small bag but its content was limited to expendables like sleeping bags, malaria pills and half of the Unit's unmentionables. Mission critical or irreplaceable items like my journals, our fly swatter and the other half of the Unit's unmentionables went in the carry on bags. With ninety minutes to waste before our connecting flight to Islamabad, we sat down beside the luggage carousel to nap.