edit: photos are up:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hautebo...7627566504794/
A few months ago I came across this fare (
AA/GULF : HOUSTON-LAHORE (LHE) Rt. from $497 a.i. ). I started playing around with open-jaw itineraries, and eventually found one that priced at $456 into Lahore and out of Kabul. Certainly not your run-of-the mill mileage run destinations! Maybe not the best of times to visit Pakistan/Afghanistan.. but both were places I hadn't been before so I went ahead and booked anyway.
I also convinced a travel buddy of mine to go along, we planned to spend a week visiting between Lahore and Kabul. I started emailing travel companies in Kabul to see about arranging a tour/security there. I had heard good things about Afghan Logistics & Tours from other blogs. They responded back with an itinerary that sounded good.
The first challenge was sorting out the visa situation.. both Pakistan and Afghanistan require visas. There is a Pakistan consulate in Houston but getting an Afghan visa required sending passports off to Washington. GulfAir hasn't had the best track record with honoring past mistake fares, so I waited a few days after booking to make sure the ticket numbers remained active. Some countries require 6+ months validity on passports; my old passport would be expiring in January so I paid extra to expedite the renewal during that time.
I sent off to Houston for the Pakistani visa. It came back about 5 days later though they did email us to verify our itinerary. Next, we sent off for the Afghan visa. I was surprised to see the Fedex return tracking numbers show up only a day later.. I had to wait all weekend to retrieve the passports, only to find out that they had returned the passports with visa unprocessed since I hadn't yet signed my new passport. Doh!
So the passports go off a second time to Washington.. this time it took 3 days for the passports to be returned, this time with a shiny Afghan visa.. though it said business visa instead of tourist. Hopefully this wouldn't be a problem.
We still needed to get from Lahore to Kabul but we also wanted to visit Islamabad/Rawalpindi. So I found that Pakistan Airlines flies ISB-KBL certain days of the week. I was able to buy our tickets on their website.
So we were set... tickets, visas, tour itinerary in hand. Or so we thought...