<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } -->

This morning we finally made it through the border and into Pakistan, into GMT +5 and onto the left side of the road again. The border crossing was pretty painless - about 3 hours all up without us having to do much except get stamped out and in. The truck didn't even take long to get sorted, and as soon as our police escort arrived we were able to head away from the dodgy Pakistani border post (the Iranian side had been much nicer).

We drove across the flat, gray desert, which disappeared into haze on each side of the road. The road was pretty bad near the border but evened out as we went on. We stopped in mud-brick towns along the way to drop one ute full of armed police and pick up the next. It was about 8pm by the time we arrived in Dharbandi, a slightly larger town. The police just keep trying to push us through, since our being there is makes a lot of work for them and they'd rather not have to look after us. They told us there were no hotels in town (which may have been the case, we're not sure), but in any case they let us sleep on the roof of the police station. The building was large and square, with a courtyard in the centre and holding cells off one side that had a few prisoners in each. It wasn't the cleanest place we could have stayed in and the toilets were pretty horrible and there was absolutely no privacy at all, but it did the job. The policemen hung around the place and watched us as we set up to cook dinner in the courtyard.

We slept up on the concrete roof under the stars, which we couldn't see many of since it is so hazy in the desert. It was quite a warm night, and some of the policemen slept up on the roof as well - they were quite polite and didn't bother us much, even though we had invaded their police station.