Geckos & Guns: The Pakistan Years is the latest installment of Sharon Bazant’s riveting travel memoirs. Following on the heels of her 2019, Nine Years in Bangkok: Lessons Learned, this new title Geckos & Guns tells of the time before Bangkok. It is a prequel that follows the first impulses of the Bazant family to break out of the mold, to leave their comfortable Canada home. Bazant brings her gift for detail to this story and paints a beautiful backdrop with her words.
Where Nine Years in Bangkok is a tale of Bazant’s personal soul journey, the focus of Geckos & Guns is the Bazant family’s time in Pakistan—a time of adjusting to new and different surroundings, of embracing cultural differences, and of recognizing imminent danger. In the five years the Bazant family spent in Pakistan, they learned to love the temperate climate and the stark beauty of the countryside, the spicy curries, and the exotic weddings, but they also learned to negotiate constant power cuts, flash floods, trips into opium country, bombings, a family emergency and more.
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