Clifton Beach and Hawke's Bay... in Pakistan
Ours isn’t the world’s only Hawke’s Bay
Abeach hut was raided by police at Hawke’s Bay on Sunday, March 31. distressed young man yells at TV cameras in protest at the raid. In another shot he holds his face, a cut under his swollen eye seeping blood.
It’s Hawke’s Bay, but not as New Zealand knows it.
It turns out Hawke’s Bay (apostrophe included) is not just a bay and region on the East Coast of the North Island.
It’s also one of the mostloved beaches in the sixthmost populated city in the world, the sprawling madness that is the city of Karachi, Pakistan. In another weird coincidence, just to the east in Karachi from Hawke’s Bay is Clifton Beach.
Tourist guides describe Pakistan’s Hawke’s Bay beach as popular, even “famous”.
Every day hundreds of people from the city of Karachi visit to picnic, fish, swim and ride camels along the beach.
Photos show the beach dotted with the huts at the centre
of Sunday’s raid. The huts, which can be rented out by tourists, were built on the beach as a result of Yorkshireman Bladen Wilmer Hawke, later the ninth Baron Hawke of Towton.
Hawke had a beach house there, roughly 20km south of Karachi’s city centre, in the 1930s which he used at the weekend.
His friends then built other huts around him, and the beach was eventually named after him. Hawke’s Bay, Karachi, still has plenty going for it today. Endangered green sea turtles use it as a nesting ground. Photos show whales have stranded in the recent past.
As with any beach that doesn’t have a surf livesaving patrol, it’s had its fair share of drownings — a Shia pilgrim in 1983, four boys in 2015 and a particularly dark day in September 2017 when 12 people from three different families died.
The area has changed a lot since Hawke’s days.
Hawke’s Bay Town was built around the beach, starting in the early 1980s.
The Karachi Development Authority built it as a residential scheme for low- and medium-income people. Approximately 250,000 people were displaced by the establishment of Karachi’s Lyari Expressway.
Some sectors of Hawke’s Bay Town were assigned to those displaced residents, some sectors to media and government workers, and some were assigned in a public ballot.
The development doesn’t appear to have affected the beach much — it still looks like a nice place to visit.