Here we go again, this time my story begins in Agra India,
the airport here is rather small, so I would need to fly in something kind of small, I ultimately chose the Dessault
Falcon 50. For anyone who doesn't have this plane in their hangar, I highly recommend it, I'm positive I downloaded it from
SimV, you'll know which one it is due to the large file size, I believe it was at least 12MB.
So anyhow, there was no reason to fly back to Dehli, actually I found there
was very little reason to come to India at all, everywhere I went I crashed and there was nothing to see but the Taj Mahal.
I could have saved a lot of time and just flew from Kathmandu straight to Agra, but who knew. India sucked, that I now know!
Pakistan
My first destination in Pakistan would be Lahore, and the only reason I can
think of that I would even go there is because I found some scenery to download for the area, a couple of temples and
junk.
Also around this time it just so happened that I won the contest from FSInflight
magazine for the My Traffic add-on, now before you get all mad at me for winning, consider this; I enter tons of contests
online, almost every contest I come across I enter, and this was the first time in 10 years of being online that I've ever
won a damn thing.
So I downloaded and installed that program too, now I have realistic AI traffic,
I just can't wait until I get to a more civilized area of the world, so I can get a better taste of the real life AI traffic...uhh...real
life AI traffic? Well, You know what I mean.
The flight to Lahore was nice, I made a perfect approach, passing over one
of the temples while on the glide slope, which the AP actually captured and smoothly brought me in for a beutiful landing.
Man, I love it when it works out that way.
Obviously there was going to be a little sightseeing to do around here, I have been
making it a point to check all the FS sites for scenery once I know what area I am going to be in.
I'm going to go into a jabber at this point:
Let me tell you, this all started out as a simple sightseeing trip around
the world, playing with my flight sim game, but it has become this major project, MAJOR I say. Now I spend hours and
hours searching for and downloading scenery and airlines that are native to the areas I visit, then I take notes
on everything, and lots of screenshots that I have to sort through and resize for my website, I delete way more shots
than I keep, because with my clunky old dial-up connection, it also takes me hours and hours to write, edit and prepare
the material to publish on the web.
That's why I'm not updating my site once a week like I was in the earlier
stages, besides that (don't punch me here) I have been a little burned out on flying lately, but I still intend to finish
my trip around the world.
It could be that the places I've been the last few months have been quite boring,
I'll be going to the Middle East next, maybe that will be better, and after that, I am really looking foward to visiting Europe.
There are also other things I'm doing now that demand my attention, so I'm no longer
devoting 12 hours a day to flight simming, my plan now is to update my site like once a month, this will include continued
updates to Misadventures, maybe a new project for my Paint shop gallery and now I am going to start a page for reviews,
which will cover games, music, movies, whatever I have an opinion about that I feel like sharing, should be fun.
Enough rambling, on with our story.
I hopped in my trusty Kingair 350 and headed out to see the sites around Lahore, I
took shots of the temples that I had downloaded, there was one that actually had little people wandering around, I don't know
if you can see them in the pics, but they are there.
After cruising the area and hoping I found everything, I headed back
to the airport, requested clearance and was told I was clear to land, cool....hey wait a minute...as I neared the runway I
see some AI idiot facing the wrong direction at the end of the runway, and of course at the last minute ATC tells me to 'go
around', no way, I ain't goin around, screw you. I landed and that was it for Lahore, next stop Islamabad.
I don't really know why I wanted to go to Islamabad, I could pretty much
guess that there would be nothing to see.
I packed up a Pan-Am 727 for the short hop, the landing was perfect and I rolled
up and parked next to a UPS 757, or 767 don't remember which, wow, UPS goes to Islamabad Pakistan? I never would have guessed,
they really are worldwide.
My landing in Islamabad was so good that I watched the replay over and over,
moving the tower view all over and being all proud and shit.
Now I thought for sure that I added some scenery for this area, but when I
went siteseeing I saw no sites, this was my last stop in Pakistan, if you recall from an earlier chapter, I had already visited
Karachi, so it was time to head for Afghanistan.
Afghanistan
Now I always had this impression that Pakistan was a big ol' desert, but as
I headed out in my Kingair, there was a lot of greenery and fields down below.
Kabul was only 200 miles, in case you were wondering why I was flying the
Kingair, I just wanted to take it easy and fly kinda low and enjoy the mountains and landscape, this would be a VFR flight
to Kabul,
I could just make out the huge mountains to the north which were actually
the western Himalayas, I still wish I would have took the time to explore the Himalayas more thoughly, maybe some other day.
I recall downloading some kind of gateway or arch-type monument that is supposed
to be located between Kabul and Islamabad, but I never did come across it, and I wasn't searching up and down the border
for it either, oh well, poo.
Pretty soon I landed in Kabul, this place was a damn ghost town, not another
aircraft in sight, anywhere, no chatter on the radio or anything, I'm surprised ATC answered my request to land, it seems
like everyone done hi-tailed it from these parts, damn sure nothing to see here. Apparently Kabul is not a very popular destination,
or does everyone live in caves around here?
I stuck with the Kingair and headed for my only other stop I had planned
for in Afghanistan, Kandahar, I know I added some scenery for that area, so this might be okay.
The flight was simple but upon reaching Kandahar, I noticed something strange about
the airport, there was no runway!
The military scenery I downloaded was there but the airports runway was gone. Maybe
the army had it camouflaged fearing attacks from the Afghani airforce.......BAH..HAHAHAHAHAHA...HA!
I followed my GPS straight to where the runway should be and prepared for
a rough landing, which it was, I buried the Kingair up to the wings in the dirt, but the game never crashed me,
so I guess I did okay.
The air was full of Military choppers and there were some other cool military
related vehicles on the ground, this was indeed the scenery I downloaded, kinda cool with all the heli's buzzin' around.
I jumped back into the Kingair once the repairs were complete and cruised
around in case I added anything else, but I didn't find anymore sites. This time I managed to land safely in the dirt and
rolled over to the parking area, this was the airport alright because there were other airliners parked nearby, I guess the
add-on scenery ate the tarmac runway, who knows..who cares.
Well that's about it for this leg of my journey, I've yet to decide where
to go next, originally I planned to go to Tehran Iran, but this is going to make it difficult to visit the rest of the
gulf area without backtracking, so I may head south towards Abu Dahbi and work my way north towards Iraq, either way Tehran
is kinda secluded from anywhere else I am going.
oh well, I will figure it out, and the rest of you will just have to
tune in next time to see where my Misadventures will take me next, and don't forget to tell all your friends.
Ta-Ta.
