Waiting for the Boom — page 3

There are small airports around the world that have the immediate effect of making the tourist relax, secure in the knowledge that he or she has indeed arrived in paradise. Gwadar's airport is not one of them. Men in uniform with automatic weapons guard the perimeter and far outnumber those civilians who have come to receive passengers. Also, there are no taxis. Instead, there are for-hire Toyota 4x4 pickup trucks that look like the vehicles Taliban fighters drove in TV footage of the 2001 Afghanistan campaign.

I nod to the driver of one of these, negotiate a rate and hop in. I ask him to show me sights he thinks are particularly beautiful.

"Do you want to buy land?" he asks me.

"No. I'm a writer. I want to see places you think are unusual. I want to know their stories, the stories of your area."

"I will take you to where land is a million rupees an acre."

"I'm not here to buy land."

My driver, Faisal, insists again, and eventually I give in. We race out into the desert on a remarkably smooth road. Suddenly, he stops. "Here," he says.

I look around. Empty desert stretches out in every direction. In the distance, sharp hills mark the horizon. "What is this?" I ask, puzzled.

"Good land."

I see sand, stones and some scraggly bushes.

Faisal tells me that there will soon be houses, and he points to a network of pylons and wires snaking off to our left to show me that there is already electricity. When I ask if he really thinks the city will reach this far inland, he says Gwadar will be huge one day and that this will be near the center.

Faisal takes me to Golden Palms, a luxury development I have seen gleaming from numerous advertisements in Lahore. When we arrive, I see a sign with the words "Golden Palms—Bringing Dreams to Life," a single-room shack announcing itself as the site office and what appears to be empty desert except for rows of white stakes in the ground.

For the first time, I begin to wonder if Gwadar could be just a mirage, a speculative boom built on flimsy fundamentals. But I don't want to believe that. I've come here looking for hope. So I tell myself that I'm no urban planner or civil engineer. All this really could be a paradise waiting to be born.

Much to my relief, the town of Gwadar is indeed spectacular in its setting. Its low, rough buildings fill a slender isthmus stretching out into the sea and culminating in a massive, cliff-ringed hammerhead of rock. The port nestles beside these cliffs, wonderfully protected from the open water, and on either side, gentle bays curve away in long stretches of beach that lead eventually to steep, sharp-edged mountains.

But physical beauty aside, Gwadar is essentially a poor fishing village, a rough-and-ready little settlement with a very visible paramilitary presence. Women are kept well covered and do not often stray into public areas frequented by men. There is little evidence that much work on the luxury hotels I've read about has even begun.

As I walk along the beach one afternoon, watching the day's catch being off-loaded from small wooden boats onto carts pulled by donkeys knee-deep in the surf, a local boy named Abdul strikes up a conversation with me, asking if I have come to buy land. I shake my head and ask him what he thinks of the new hotels that will be built here.

"We are excited," he says. "We want people to come. I am a good swimmer. I can teach them to swim. I will tell them not to be scared of the sea snakes."

"Are they poisonous?"

"One bite and a grown man is dead."

There is excitement in Abdul's eyes as he talks about the future. But try as I might, I just don't see it. I cannot imagine a tourist paradise developing here, in a place where women are not allowed to do their shopping outside of the women's section of the market, let alone put on swimming suits and venture out into the sea, and where lethal sea snakes lurk beneath the waves.

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