Welcome to Abbottobad...


Welcome to Abbottobad 


Mohamad welcomed us to Abbottabad with joy and excitement although the city was really overcrowded with rubbish all over the road, was very dirty, quite in contrast to the beautiful mountains we had been through. 

Mohamad’s mother father and sister were all welcoming and very interesting. We learned a lot through conversations with them all. It’s great to be able to talk openly with such intelligent and interesting people in a place so strange and interesting to us like Abbottobad. 

Pakistanis are very proud of their nuclear missile capability to such an extent that this roundabout had a missile on it. There were also a number of Indian military hardware items we assumed that were captured, like a helicopter and a tank. Quite strange to us but there are clearly a lot of problems between India and Pakistan.




It is of course famous for being Bin Larden’s home/operation centre and interesting was only a few streets from Mohamad’s house. The area is now just a broken walled scrub area having being flattened after the raid. 

Mohamad’s Dad was well connected and had arranged media interviews for us the next day at his office. He turned out to be the chief executive of several hospitals and training centres in the area which proved very useful for sorting out a tummy issue that was plaguing us for a while. 

The journalists were also interesting providing a great insight to the area and trouble issues and that Abbottobad was pretty safe because it’s where most of the militants families live. Ok that gives us some useful perspective! 

His advice, not to put anything on publicly available internet until we leave the country. Getting high profile here whilst we were here is not a good idea, the interviews will not go public till late September then. Our Pakistani TV interview on the first day over the border maybe not such a good idea then, however fortunately that broadcast was delayed too. 

 Its a strange feeling listening to automatic gun fire throughout the afternoon and being told this was probably just celebratory fire for a wedding or birthday. It appears normal to shoot guns from your house here and we were not to worry!!



Imran Kahn, having just been elected here, is shaking things up a lot with changing all senior police making them work in different areas and clamping down on police and political corruption. I guess that that they probably have more things to worry about than us. 

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