ISLAMABAD

Here is the latest following the car bomb blast at the Danish embassy here yesterday (Monday 2 June). As I said yesterday, we were outside, & facing the direction of the blast. We heard it go off, & we saw the plume of smoke that followed a few seconds later. We knew almost immediately that it was not normal, & it was surprisingly close, only 1.5 km away apparently. Within 10 minutes it was on local TV, & by mid afternoon it was all over the media thru CNN, BBC etc. I found the whole thing pretty disturbing, I must say, & didn't sleep too well last night.

The reason we are still in Islamabad is that we are awaiting our Iranian visas, which has been an ongoing saga all on its own. Islamabad has a secure Diplomatic Enclave containing most of the foreign embassies. Evidently the Danish embassy is outside that area, & is located in a residential street, so it was easy for the bomber to just drive straight up to it.

Late last night we got an email from our intermediary in Iran notifying us that the Iranian visa application had the OK from Tehran, & was ready for collection from the local embassy. We are not even sure that they will give it to us straight away, it may take another day or so to process here. We were apprehensive about going to the embassy, but had no choice, so we took a taxi to the Enclave. There were police & army absolutely all over the place, including machine gun emplacements with sandbags, the whole bit. All the guys with weapons had large ammo pouches on as well. We knew then that this was not going to be a quick process. It turns out that you can only get so close to this area in a car anyway. You get dropped off at a special bus station, & go through an identity check & a body frisk before you get on the bus which then takes you on a tour of the Enclave, & you get off when the guy calls out your particular embassy. Sort of like a very down market version of Florida's Disney World!! After going through all this crap, we finally got to the Iranian Embassy only to be told by a pair of eyes & nostrils poking through a small hatch that it was closed today, because of a holiday (in Iran, if you don't mind), so we have to go do it all over again tomorrow. I am beginning to despair of ever getting the ******* visa at all. However, we are on the brink, & will soon be heading west into bandit territory. Hope to be in touch when we get to the other side.