This was my 4th trip to Pakistan, and while I mainly travelled there to see family, it's always a bonus if you can see and do interesting things when you're in another country. So by this trip, I had been to some interesting places already, but there is always something else to see, and in fact, my last trip was shorter than the others, and I had also been limited to what I could do at the time due to safety concerns. This was because one of those cartoons depicting the Prophet (PBUH) had been published shortly before my visit, and YouTube had thus been banned in Pakistan at the time, and a lot of people were in a tizzy such that travelling outside of Lahore would have had the potential to become dangerous with a white lady (my mom) in the vehicle. So I was excited to get the chance to go to the salt mines on this trip because we had driven through them on my very first trip to Pakistan in 2010 when travelling to the place where my mom lived at the time in South Waziristan, but because it was a long drive, there was no time to stop and explore the mines.
To drive to the mine, you have to take this road off the main motorway to Islamabad from Lahore, the M2. If you were to arrive with stiff neck and shoulder muscles and possibly nausea, no one would be surprised. The road leading there has so much heavy traffic from trucks transporting salt and other agricultural goods that it has potholes everywhere, and we also had to drive around a lot of construction. The mine is only 26km away from the M2 but took about an hour to get there because you have to drive so slowly.
Although you can walk to the main area where you walk around to explore, there is also a train you can take at extra cost that takes you to and from that area. While it was at least 35ºC outside and sunny, it was darker and refreshingly cool inside the mine, though much more humid than I expected. You can read some of the details as to the volume of salt produced and other info here, but the highlight is that it's the second largest salt mine in the world after Sifto's mine in Ontario, Canada, and it's the source of all that pink "Himalayan" salt you get in the store. I'd like to point out that where the mine is located is not in the Himalayans. But pink Khewra salt doesn't really sound as exotic as pink Himalayan salt, does it?
Once you get to the interior part of the mine, they have tour guides to provide you with extra information. Luckily there was an English speaking one, although I'm not sure if he had mainly memorised his script because when my mom asked a question, he had no idea what she said and gave an answer that didn't correspond to the question, so he might not have been prepare for spontaneous English use. Nevertheless, it was helpful. They have made a number of sculptures and supposedly have rooms for light therapy because according to the guide, when the workers develop dust allergies, they can be cured using light therapy in a pink salt room because the salt is healing, but I have yet to see a lot of scientific evidence on that practice. Anyway, there are also formations of stalactites and stalagmites where there is water seepage, and the caverns themselves are a sight unto themselves, with wavy patters of colour streaming along the cavern walls. That alone would have been worth a trip.
The guide here, I must say, was no former BBC staffer, and he didn't have the same photo training as the guide from Lahore Fort. We had some very odd photos taken of us, and I noticed a pattern with what he was doing as well as what others we were with were doing and yet others patrons of the places we had visited so far: they like to take photos from near the ground. I'm not sure why this is a value perspective. The end result looks bizarre, and one of them that was taken of us was even funnier because it reminded both my husband and me of a scene from Star Trek ("The Menagerie") where the Enterprise visits Talos IV. We ended up looking like the Talosians in the photo--the salt mine caverns have a similar background. The only difference is that we don't have giant heads!
In the end, my mom mentioned that the workers don't actually get paid a lot, and of course, in the tour, you don't get to see where the actual workers are, so we couldn't really tell under what conditions they worked or if they benefited from the profits of the mine in any way, other than what may be a pittance of a salary. For me, that's what makes the pink salt extra special, as it may be hard won by someone.
On the way back to the highway from the mine, we saw several caravans of camels, accompanied by people who, by the way the camels were decorated, were most likely Balochi migrants who had come over to that region for work. The camels were so beautifully decorated!
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