Karachi The Travel Show

We are taking a trip through Pakistan's biggest city on a bus.

This might be a bit crazy along the way.

We are looking at dolphins in India from a paddle board.

Wow, did you see that one?

That was right behind me.

And we are crossing the great Canadian prairie on a train.

Hello and welcome to the Travel Show with me, Henry Golding,

coming to you this week from amongst the soaring skyscrapers of Singapore

where later on we will be meeting this week's global gourmet.

But first...

This is a country that some governments say

you shouldn't visit as a tourist. Pakistan.

Terror-related incidents, kidnappings and political turmoil

have all taken their toll on the country's reputation.

And as the country prepares to celebrate its

70th anniversary of independence, the Travel Show's Benjamin Zand

packed his backpack and headed for Karachi.

Pakistan is in the news almost constantly,

but coverage of this area is pretty one-dimensional.

If it is not focusing on the Taliban, it is about

the country's differences with India or cricket.

But there is a lot more to it than that.

The country is home to over 190 million people,

and 63% are under 25.

Many of these are fun loving, forward-thinking individuals

who are changing the world.

So I am on my way to meet some.

Karachi is Pakistan's most dangerous and notorious city, but a security

crackdown over the last few years means it has got a lot safer,

and for a traveller like myself that means an experience like few others.

It just might be a bit crazy along the way.

All right, so I have changed into more suitable clothing

because I want to get a taste of Karachi and when you think

of a tour you usually think of a friendly tour guide,

some foreigners, a casual stroll around the city.

But in Karachi it is much different.

It is done on one of these things. This is the Super Safari Express.

In a city linked more with bombs and guns than tourist trips,

the Super Savari seems a safe choice.

But this is a unique kind of tour bus, created to change the image

of Karachi not only locally but also around the world.

Main aim - to help Karachi's population

reconnect with their city.

And help the rich meet the city's poorest members.

In its early days, each tour will come with an armed guard,

but as the situation has improved,

it is now just this big, beautiful bus.

I love this bus, it's incredible.

Don't we all?

What is the history of it?

You see them everywhere in Karachi.

Well, you know, the concept works on the lines of this actually

being a representation of the brides of the guys who drive them.

Obviously, you can climb on the roof,

and who doesn't want to climb on the roof of a bus?

Why do you think a city like Karachi needs

something like this?

There has been a disconnect between educated classes in Karachi

and the general population.

What we have tried to do is eliminate that disconnect

and show everyone that the culture that you have, the history that

you have, and the city that you live in is for everybody,

whether you live in a mansion or you live in a slum.

And do you do this because you think Karachi is misrepresented and it has

a reputation it doesn't deserve?

I will just say that there is so much more to Karachi than we know.

The city just has so much depth.

It has depth in terms of the people who live here,

the cultures that exist, the lifestyles, the architecture,

there is just so much to see.

There is something special about this mosque

that I have to show you.

The tour takes visitors around the city

in an attempt to show its diversity.

You visit mosques, Hindu temples, churches, Karachi's version

of the Big Ben, and then it is time for food.

Sorry.

I am going to ruin your tea party.

What is this?

This guy says traditional Pakistani breakfast.

Yes, a traditional Pakistani breakfast is essential.

So you get chai and a type of an omelette, essentially most

things in Pakistan are made spicy, so the same with omelettes.

I have noticed.

My stomach noticed that a few days ago.

You dip some of that in the chai.

You actually dip it in the tea?

Yeah. I am just ruining your tea.

I have got soggy pieces of dough in your tea.

Our next stop.

So this is Lyari.

Widely regarded as the most dangerous area of Karachi.

Lyari has a pretty bad reputation, linked with gangs and violence

it is known as the worst part of Karachi, but I was here to see

what it was really like, and to play football.

That is because I am in town to meet the people helping to change

Lyari for the better.

And it starts here.

So here in Lyari there is only one thing people care about,

There's over 175 registered clubs, and that's because these guys,

like everybody else, absolutely love it.

Anywhere you look you see Man United tops, Real Madrid tops

and hopefully some Liverpool tops,

and I am here to find out a bit more about why that is the case.

This is our Lyari centre, in Lyari, a centre of excellence,

where we have approximately 100 kids that come across to train

four or five times a week.

We give them free football coaching, we give them life skills

sessions on top of it.

So I have been asked to have a game with these kids,

who look pretty good.

Because I am wearing a Liverpool top,

everybody thinks I play for Liverpool.

A huge crowd has gathered.

Yeah, look forward to me embarrassing myself

in front of everybody.

Here we go.

After eyeing up the opposition, we began.

Sand and heat, it is not a good combination.

Soon, though, we were losing by two goals.

Me and my new friend Michelle realised it was our moment and,

after generously being awarded a free kick,

I curled it into the corner.

Then two penalties later we had won the game.

After celebrating with my team, adequately named

Benjamin's Liverpool Warriors, I spoke to Michelle

about football here.

She runs the local women's team and is trying to get more women

involved in football and, amazingly enough, it turned out

I had just witnessed her first ever game on this pitch.

You were a little bit nervous about playing because you are

like the only girl here.

Is this the first time you have played here?

It is the first time I have played here without any other girls,

and if you were to look around, and there's a game going on there,

and there's an academy here, I think I am the only female

in this stadium right now.

Sometimes we go into an area where the culture is just extremely

male-dominated, and they don't want females to play.

Despite the resistance from some people here,

Michelle says things are getting better for female footballers.

They have just set up a new women's team.

I am really happy to say that we actually

have a girls' centre here.

From my point of view, it is brand-new for them, but the interest

is in that they are eager to play, they are keen to play,

which is something very difficult in Pakistan,

to get girls excited about sports.

There are 100 boys who come to the academy here,

there are maybe 35 girls who come.

That is about the ratio, but to me that is fantastic,

because two years ago, there was zero.

Up until about a week ago, I had no idea that anybody

played football in Pakistan, never mind there was this

conclave where it was huge.

Cricket is the dominant sport, but cricket also comes

from a colonial past, and football is picked up

in areas that have been otherwise neglected.

These guys have had to come up with their own recreation,

solving their own problems, and football is kind

of an inherited a game, solving your problems.

I kind of want to hear some rap.

So this really could not be more different from the image most people

get when they think of Pakistan.

Time now for this week's Global Gourmet, which this week comes

from here in Singapore, and today we are looking at a style of food

unique to this part of the world, Peranakan food,

and a restaurant that has made quite a name for itself.

What we do here is Peranakan cuisine with a slight modern approach.

If you see Peranakan food, you kind of have

the Malay flavours and curries, but at the same time

you also have Chinese dishes, and you also have pork.

So that is what is really unique about it.

We are going to do slow-braised pork ribs with a kind of a curry.

This is the dish that everyone recognises the Peranakan cuisine by.

We always say if you can cook this dish well,

it means that you can cook every other dish well.

The base of most Peranakan dishes are really what we call

a spice base, rempah, and typically they consist

of a few ingredients like shalotts, garlic,

nuts, shrimp paste, galangal, turmeric and lemongrass.

Shrimp paste smells to some people bad,

like socks that you have never washed for a week.

To us, delicious.

We are going to caramelise it with some oil until it dries up,

and it has this really nice depth of flavour.

There is something really rich,

and it adds something special to the sauce.

In our kind of food, you really have to take

time and be patient.

If you rush it, the food will not taste good.

So now you start to smell the garlic, the lemongrass,

the chilli and the turmeric.

At this point, this is the smell that I grew up with,

and that is really the thing

that always reminds me of when I was young.

So this is the base that we use to braise chicken or other things.

So the meat, after braising up to three hours,

absorbs all the spice flavours that we have put in

and also it is nice and tender and moist in the centre.

Slow-cooked pork ribs on the bone

in black nut curry sauce and a black nut sambal on the top.

It is probably the last dish I will want to have before,

you know, bye-bye. That is how much it means to me.

Still to come here on this week's Travel Show:

Planes, trains, boats and bikes in the dead centre of Canada.

So don't go away.

The Travel Show, your essential guide wherever you are heading.

My name is Spike Reid, I am an international mountain

leader, and in October last year with some team-mates,

I set off from the glacial source of the River Ganges

and paddle-boarded all the way down the river to the Indian Ocean.

We covered 3000 kilometres.

It took 98 days.

It was a tough journey.

But it was certainly memorable.

The expedition really began in earnest

when we launched onto the river at Devprayag,

which is where two rivers come together and form the Ganges proper.

There's already a lot of flow,

you have got these two raging torrents coming together.

You jump on, and suddenly you have got these waves,

you have got these flows, and it is like,

"Right, can I stay on this board?"

This is the mighty paddle board.

It is 30 inches wide.

It is virtually stable, I haven't really fallen in off it,

and it has got such a great glide through the water.

One of the biggest highlights on the whole trip

was seeing the Gangetic river dolphin.

They are one of the most endangered aquatic mammals in the whole world.

Wow!

Sorry, you are not seeing any of these.

They are definitely dolphins.

Did you see that one? That was right behind me.

Trying to film these was really hard work.

They never jump where you predict.

Throughout the journey, local people were fascinated

in what we were doing.

We were working with a charity that is doing a huge amount

of work here in terms of improving sanitation.

It was quite sobering to see how many people are living

without really any reliable clean water sources.

The quality of the water in the Ganges is incredibly low.

Another plastic cup.

One of dozens upon dozens I have seen yesterday.

We have been paddling seven, eight hours a day,

and northern India in November, December, can be tough.

Some mornings, the fog was so, so thick, it was like pea soup.

Those last two and a half days were tough.

One day I paddled 78 kilometres and was on the paddle

board for about 13 hours.

The end point of Ganges' delta is Gangasaga,

and when I got there I was like, "This is open ocean."

"There is no bank to my right, there is no bank to my left."

"We are here, we are here, we have made it!"

I felt so alive.

Nice and salty.

As well as learning a lot about the challenges

facing these communities, I think I now know how

far I can actually push myself.

Spike Reid and his epic paddle board journey down the Ganges

and if you are planning, or have completed an incredible

journey of your own, why not let us know.

And finally this week, the last of our films marking

Canada's 150th anniversary.

This week we are in Manitoba visiting communities that rely

on a fragile rail link to the rest of the country.

But that line has been closed by damage from storms.

Its owners say they can't afford to repair it and the communities

may have to take over the rail link themselves.

Oh, my goodness, I can't see the communities

surviving without the train.

It has been the mode of travel for years.

Cos it's an isolated community, so you have only got

the train or a plane, but usually everyone uses the train.

They rely on it, right, because how are you going to get food?

It will cost too much for aeroplane charters or helicopters to come in.

Yes, in the winter, providing you have a good winter season,

we can have the winter road from January to March,

three months, but that is it.

Spring and summer, fall, it is by rail.

Our elders, they all worked on the rail,

and I was born up north by the railroad tracks.

Growing up here, I used to go out and go fishing with my grandparents

and my grandmother, and I would go berry picking,

and she would cook me rabbit every morning for breakfast.

Pretty good.

We have grandchildren.

We enjoy watching them grow up here, it is quiet.

It has its challenges, this is where we actually started,

where our family was actually begun.

Can bears eat ants? Yeah.

What is that? Yellow Creek.

You know that giant mountain, like that mountain?

Me and Noel Nolan, we walked over there.

There is a lake.

This is the kids' playground. They know every inch of this land.

All this used to be a lake at one time.

We are surrounded by swamp, and we can't build a road

there because sometimes we would say bottomless, but it isn't feasible

for us to put a road in there and put in half a mile

of dirt in the ground.

Some of the challenges are getting our food,

our gas, our vehicles.

Everything is a challenge up here.

What I like is that the children here are able to go out anywhere,

and they are always watched by the whole community.

Especially after the school is over,

they go out biking, they go out hunting.

They really learn a lot from it,

because it was our way of life a long time ago also.

Owning the railroad, I know that our leadership

has been pushing and have been staunch believers in the rail.

It has been here for years.

I believe it will be here for a lot more years.

I am hoping that we will get partners who will want to help get

the needs and necessities into the communities.

That is all the time we have this week, but coming up next week...

I only know Justin Bieber.

You are a Belieber?

I am a Belieber.

Ben is getting in tune at a festival in Pakistan.

# What are you waiting for?

# What are you waiting for?

I am about to step in the ring with Momo, who is a top contender.

I am in Thailand learning the art of kicking.

Join us for that if you can, but in the meantime,

you can follow us on the road by joining our social-media feeds.

All the details are on your screens now.

But from me, Henry Golding and the rest of the Travel Show

team here in Singapore, it is goodbye.

Hello there.