First step: leave the country

"Why are you going to Pakistan?" asked a colleague of mine at work the other day. Interesting considering he's an investigative journalist who has done a bit of work on terrorists in his time. He had a point though - I live on the edge of Whitechapel - one of the largest concentrated areas of Pakistani expats in the world.

Nevertheless, a week later I was picking my way through the cardboard rubble of a collapsed tower of Pampers boxes whilst being prodded by about a dozen different elbows and narrowly missing the swinging fists of more than one baby's tantrum. Once I'd worked my way through the human obstacle course, the man at the check-in desk looked at me and raised his eyes in apology. Behind me, several younger members of one family were being instructed to sit on their luggage and shrieking while their father, with a severe degree of concentration on his face, pulled the zip. All around was the low level gabble of Urdu. There was a kerfuffle when someone pushed their trolley into the back of someone else's calf, creating a near-catastrophic domino effect.

And I hadn't even left Heathrow yet.

The female steward next to me spoke into her walkie talkie. "We have a serious bottleneck situation here," she said. The crackle on the other end asked her which airline she was on duty with. She smiled. "Guess."

And so I found myself the only white girl on a Pakistani International Airlines flight to Islamabad, with not even so much as the promise of a glass of wine to calm my nerves in front of the in flight meal. I'd forgotten before I set out that Pakistan was a dry country. Brusing your lips with a beer can can cost you several years in prison, if you're one of the 97 per cent of Pakistanis who are Muslim.

Half-dozing and trying desperately to avoid the mouth-open-dribbling that is the inevitable result of sleeping upright, I peeked around me and saw, through the noisy rabble, huge families that nonetheless really and truly cared about each other. Older babies yanked up out of their travel cots (seatbelt sign bell or no) and passed around the cooing family as if they were born yesterday; brothers feeding airoplane biriyani to their younger sisters, some of them buzzing excitedly about the weddings they were going to or returning from. Call me idealistic, but the Muslim sense of family is something most of us have lost. I couldn't fail to feel warmed by the idea, an emotion that was not quelled even by the fact five minutes later there was nothing but whitener for my tea.

I still have not got used to the novelty of getting a croissant for a plane breakfast. It's almost inevitably chilled and slightly fridge-moist, and so chewy in the middle it takes about five minutes to masticate each morsel. These croissants are the same no matter where you go: Australia, Delhi, New York, South Africa, or in this case, circling Islamabad. I'll bet you won't get one anywhere near Charles de Gaulle airport though.

Islamabad airport is more than slightly depressing. My first experience of Pakistan was signs that pointed in precisely the opposite direction to where you need to go, as if the hoodlums from some backwater hamlet in Gloucestershire had gone out after dark and swivelled them all around. Unfortunately, the writing wasn't upside down. It was just that someone had forgotten that domestic departures was left, not right. Same goes for much of the gesturing I've experienced so far - point in any direction, it seems, when you don't know the answer. Five fingered directions I believe they call it in India.

In any case, I finally found my way to the departures lounge, in which I had barely planted my rear on a seat when a small man who had clearly inexplicably come to work dressed as Manuel from Fawlty Towers asked me if I wanted chai or coffee. Taken unawares, I decided 'no' was the safe answer. I would get some myself from the little kiosk, which happened in any case to be about ten feet from my chair. But no sooner had a reached the counter then he popped up next to me like a whack-a-mole and protested. I was forced to accept his table service. Same happened when I tried to buy a chocolate bar two hours later.

The tin pot plane that took us to Lahore rattled us around like Perudo, terrifying the Chinese businessman who shared it with me, along with a Pakistani Bono look alike. The sang a prayer he had written on a scrap of paper in his pocket, and whenever the plane took a particularly vertical dive, took out his passport and started stroking the different visas inside - US, Canadian, Indian - as if saying goodbye to moments of his life slowly in case they later flashed before his eyes.

In any case, we landed, and the balmy air in Lahore seemed already much friendlier than Islamabad's fug. Until we passed through about five military checkpoints in a ten minute drive. Saad, the driver who picked me up from the Aiport, reliably informed me (with a slight quiver in his voice) that we were only being ushered through because he had a blonde white woman in the car. I wasn't sure whether to take it as a compliment.

Pakistan can never forget the decades of military dictatorship they lived through until recent years. In fact, many take the beat 'em join 'em aspect. It might be that soldier's wages are decent (they aren't unless you've just come from being a ragpicker, apparently) or that the job is secure, or it might just be that without the army Pakistanis are aware that everything would crumble in a messy - and likely bloody - heap without it. It might also be Pakistan's Napoleon complex with India or otherwise the real fear of keeping the Taliban as they soak through the Afghan border on the other side of the country. Pakistan is clinched in a vice, and its army is the bolster that saves it from being totally crushed. And its presence is felt everywhere.

I met my friend Michelle at our hotel - we went to Columbia Journalism School together and worked at the Times of India before she went off to join AFP in New York. She, being the intrepid explorer between us, had already surveyed the lay of the land in her usual unorthodix way, and managed to ride on a motorbike with a strange man (who is, even now this evening, waiting outside the hote window for her) and jump in a boat with a crew of rowers training for competition on a canal by highways. She apparently told the taxi driver to stop on the verge of the motorway and just ran off.

I was told at a function later in the evening by a female Dutch journalist it wasn't a good idea to go out by yourself in Lahore, even though it was one of the safest cities in the country, only a short drive from the relative safety of the Indian border

"No kidnappings have happened recently," she said. "But then, no one wants to be the first one."

Great.