A day trip to Thatta

Hi friends

Today I'd like to introduce another city of Saints, and monuments known as Thatta.

Thatta is located in Sindh province, around 100 km east of Karachi and 100 km southwest of Hyderabad.

There are 2 stories/rumours about the name of this city.

1. Thatta derived from Persian term TAH TAH, which means layers over layers.

2. That name Thatta originates from (Thatt) in Sindhi it means place of getherings.

Although I have lived all my life in Karachi, but I never visited this city.

One of my childhood friends is from Thatta.

She wanted to pay a visit to her father's grave and asked me to accompany her.

So we four friends got ready to go, we planned early morning to start our journey, because I wanted to visit famous UNESCO world heritage sites in a day light too.

We started our journey around 7 am in the morning, on N-5 National highway. According to her plan we would stop at a famous Cafe Imran fora breakfast.

I love long drives, so I decided to drive, nobody objected, because I'm a good and careful driver 🤗.

Karachi is very busy and always a crowded city, so it took almost an hour or more to reach Cafe Imran at Dhabeji town ( famous for a water pumping station, almost 70% of Karachi water, pumped from Indus River through Dhabeji pumping station) crossing steel Mill (Pakistan largest steel manufacturing hub )and Port Qasim (Pakistan's 2nd largest Port, handling roughly 40% of nation's sea cargo).

We had our breakfast, which was great, our friend was actually our tour guide too, because rest of three ladies were visiting for the first time.

So she told us this cafe Imran was a small road hide cafe with only 2 to 3 sitting arrangements, only serving chai and biscuits.

But Allah gave him success so now he owns a big restaurant with around 50 plus staff and large menu of breakfast, lunch, hi tea, ans dinner opened 24/7.

Now he is planning to open a hotel.

After breakfast we started moving further.

Scene changed from an urban chaos of buildings, crowded markets, rush roads to rural areas, open arid plains, farms cattle grazing, sky filled of birds, local field workers tending to the land.

One thing which always keeps me ticking on highways is Pakistan's fascinating truck art with funny quotes.

Love reading it loud to make my fellow travellers laugh 😂.

Pakistan truck art is very famous .

I had few pictures of that but sadly couldn't found now, I will definitely share whenever Ifind.

Next town was Gharo, famous for its large scale of charcoal kilns and surrounding wind power projects.

After Gharo we crossed Sultanabad and Gujjo small towns and finally reached Thatta.

It's only 100 km but it takes 2 hours to reach there because of single and broken roads.

Before going to Qabristan ( cemetery) we stopped at her cousins' house for freshen up and fresh our ablution to enter Qabristan.

They were nice people who served us with tea and refreshments.

Our first visit was her father's grave yard, we recited Duas and moved to our next destination Makli.

Makli Qabristan (necropolis) is located at Makli hills, A UNESCO world heritage site.

One of the world largest funerary sites, spread over 10 square km, filled with hundreds of intricately carved stone tombs of Royals, Sufi saints, and scholars.

We rented a golf cart at a gate, bought our tickets and entered to a different world.

It was not possible to visit each and every tomb, but we make sure cover as much area we can, after this our target was Shah Jahan Mosque.

17th century masterpiece, made of brilliant hand painted blue glazed tiles and 93 striking domes, designed to optimize acoustic echo.

Mosque was built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan.

On our return we stopped at local street side cafe for dinner, we ordered fresh water fish.

It was very tasty
(Sindh province fresh water fish and Karachi's sea food is very famous)

After we started our return journey back to Karachi.

I dropped everyone at their repective houses and came to mine.