Monday, May 8th, 2023 Rawalpindi was dusty, gritty, crowded, chaotic. We took a detour in a neighborhood with narrow stone alleys and beautiful old crumbling architecture, three- or four-story houses with electrical wires crisscrossing everywhere. We wondered out loud what they looked like inside. In one second-story window, the heads of three goats hung over the windowsill, chewing on the wires. A woman came outside and asked us, in Urdu, if we wanted to see her home. And then it hit me; this was the reason to do a women-only tour of Pakistan. I hadn’t chosen the tour because it was women-only; I chose it because Alex Reynolds had a very funny travel blog I enjoyed and a reputation for deep knowledge of Pakistan. But in an Islamic country, we would never have been invited into a home if we had men in the group. We followed the woman up…
