The Princess of Hope

A rock princess on the Makran coast, named by Angelina Jolie

A natural pinnacle of rock in Hingol National Park on the Makran coast of Balochistan, a hoodoo or fairy chimney that can be read as a crowned and skirted woman gazing out to the horizon. It stands about 190 km from Karachi and 717 km from Quetta, in country cut by gorges and full of strange shapes of mud and rock carved by erosion, on the coastal strip called the Makran that runs on into Iran. The name came from the actress Angelina Jolie, who visited Pakistan and the park in 2002 as a UN Goodwill Ambassador; she called it the Princess of Hope on the spot, and the name stuck. Close by stands another eroded formation, the Balochistan Sphinx, which looks like a crouching sphinx, and the two make a fine stop on the road along the coast. Both stand inside Hingol, the largest national park in Pakistan, declared in 1988 and spread over about 6,100 square kilometres of the Gwadar, Lasbela and Awaran districts, where desert, plains, mountains and the estuary of the Hingol River meet the Arabian Sea.