Day 14 - Bahawalpur
No police car escort this morning, today we just picked up a policeman standing on the side of the road, he sat in the front seat of our van for about 20 minutes before swapping with another one.
We stopped along the drive to watch some women picking cotton. They were fine with us taking photos though most of them tried to hide their faces. Our guide told us these were nomadic workers, who would travel between farms to follow the different harvesting seasons.
We continued through the Thar Desert and reached Derawar Fort, built in the 9th century and once a stop on the pilgrimage route between India and Mecca. We stopped outside the fort to get a view of the whole structure with 40 circular bastions in total, with different patterns built into the bricks on some of them.
Once we entered we found a number of buildings in various stages of disrepair, though some renovation and reconstruction work was underway on the royal family quarters above one of the corner bastions.
Next to the fort was the Abbasi Mosque, made from white marble and with only a caretaker there apart from us.
A short bus ride away was a well preserved royal graveyard with mausoleums for the nawabs who had ruled the area from the 18th century to the early 20th century, including one for the last nawab's English wife.
From there it was on to lunch and then back to our hotel in Bahawalpur for a second night.
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