kidnapped swiss-not us

We can reassure everyone that the two kidnapped swiss tourists were not the Kunz family. We are in Islamabad at the moment and will drive to Lahore tomorrow. From there we’ll cross into India on monday. We had to stop in Islamabad for a few car repairs. The 1200 offroad kilometers took it’s toll on Nanuk.
The region where David Och and Daniela Widmer were kidnapped is Balochistan, which you need to cross in order to go to Iran or the other way round. We came through this area about one month ago and we saw the entries of the two in all police checkpost books.
As a foreigner you always have to sign into those books, including your passport number and so on. And from those entries we knew that the two were 5 days „ahead“ of us. We always hoped we would meet them somewhere in Pakistan.
But obviously they had just crossed the country and went straight to India. From there they re-entered Pakistan on June 28th. We suppose that they were on the way back to Iran.
They were kidnapped in the Loralai region, south of Quetta, which comes to a surprise to us, because were not allowed to take that route on our way to Islamabad. May be you remember our posting from Quetta. We had to make a 700 km detour at the time, exactly to avoid passing through the mountains near Loralai. Now we know that this was probably a good thing and those extra kilometers were not wasted in the end.

We wish the two swiss travellers all the best. And we can only reassure their families that all kidnapped people in the past few years were only hold hostage for money and never radical political reasons. But we also know that some were held up to three months.

Although we never met you guys- we still think of you a lot! We hope everything will turn out fine for you.