Islamabad

Islamabad was designed from nothing in the 1960s by the Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis, who laid it out as a grid of numbered and lettered sectors — F-6, F-7, G-9 and so on — each meant to work as a largely self-contained neighbourhood with its own markets, mosque and parks. The result is a capital that feels calm and green to the point of quietness, with wide avenues, generous trees and low sprawl rather than a dense old centre, and it is exactly this planned order that strikes visitors moving between it and the tangled streets of Rawalpindi next door. The modern life of the city plays out in the Blue Area business strip along Jinnah Avenue, the cafes and restaurants of the F-6 and F-7 markets, and shopping landmarks like the Centaurus, while Rawal Lake and its parkland give the sectors a green edge.

The Faisal Mosque is Islamabad's defining sight and its visual anchor, set where the sectors meet the Margalla Hills. Completed in 1986 to a design by the Turkish architect Vedat Dalokay, it breaks entirely with traditional mosque form: instead of a dome it is shaped like a vast desert tent, a sweep of white triangular planes held between four slender pencil minarets, and its main hall and courtyard together hold enormous crowds. It was for many years the largest mosque in the world and remains the largest in South Asia. Non-Muslim visitors are welcome to admire it outside prayer times, and the approach across its wide marble forecourt with the green hills rising behind is one of the great set-piece views in the country.

What makes Islamabad rare among capitals is that a national park begins at its edge. The forested Margalla Hills rise straight behind the northern sectors, laced with walking trails that climb out of the city into monkey-inhabited woodland within minutes of the traffic. The best known is Trail 5, a steady climb up to the Pir Sohawa ridge and its hilltop restaurants, while the Daman-e-Koh terrace above sector F-6 gives the classic panorama down over the grid and the Faisal Mosque. Higher and wilder trails run on into the range, and the whole park is a favourite of the city at weekends, alive with hikers, families and birdwatchers — a genuine wilderness on the doorstep of the seat of government. At the foot of the hills at Nurpur Shahan, the shrine of Bari Imam, the capital region's patron saint, keeps a far older devotional layer alive beside the planned city.

For all Islamabad's calm, its other half is anything but. Rawalpindi, just across the southern boundary, is centuries older and grew up as a garrison and trading town on the Grand Trunk Road, and it delivers the crowded, aromatic bazaar life the planned capital lacks. The Raja Bazaar and the surrounding lanes are a dense warren of cloth, spice, jewellery and hardware markets; the Saddar area keeps the ordered streets and old churches of the British-era cantonment; and the food, from the kebab houses to the sweet shops, is where locals send you to eat. Seeing the two cities back to back — the diagram-neat capital and the organic old town beside it — is the most interesting thing about visiting either, and Rawalpindi is also where much of the region's transport, including the road north, actually begins.