We chose to arrive in Quetta at night because we heard the escort service was already in place from Khairpur (400km southeast of Quetta) and we wanted to avoid them. It turned out to be a good decision as the police checkpoints were mostly unmanned or with only one or two men standing guard at night. Only the last 20km or so were we stopped and had to follow a pick-up loaded with sleepy guards.
After overnighting at the heavily littered backyard of the police station in Quetta we went to apply for our NOC the next morning. The whole process was slow and involved a lot of waiting around and going to different ‘commissioners’ for signatures but thankfully we got our NOC at the end of the day. I should not complain because what was a day’s work for us was for some, like a Turkish traveller we met, three to four days. He arrived on a Friday and since the police station has the weekends off it meant he stayed there for three nights. He seemed to be pretty amused by the unhygienic condition of his sleeping quarters in the station, showing us photos of the dirty kitchen and telling us stories of policemen spitting on the floor of the room, centimetres away from his feet. That was the right spirit to be in for a border crossing of this obscurity.