After a few days of constant travel, having a couple of days in Hunza to unwind has been a nice change. It was also our opportunity to meet the local team from Silk Route Expeditions, who would be coordinating everything during the Pakistan part of our trip:

Didar Ali – Owner & Guide
Muhammad Shifa – Owner & Guide
Professor Sher Baz – Cultural Guide & local school teacher
Nazrab – Head of Security & retired police chief for Gilgit-Baltistan region
Izhar – Assistant Guide & Shifa’s son
Ayaz – Assistant Guide

Today was a very “local” day, starting with a visit to a non-profit teaching girls computer skills like web design and online marketing – skills that they can then sell as a freelancer. After that we went to visit the Aga Khan school, a private school for girls which is very selective about taking in the best and brightest students. The school was set on a lovely campus, and it was a delightful opportunity to meet and talk with some of these ambitious young girls. Inspirational stuff!

We rounded off the morning with a visit to a local carpet factory set up by Didar, where natural-dyed traditional carpets wee being made by hand – it takes around four months to make a 5′ x 7′ rug! Lunch was taken at our local representative’s Didar Ali’s house surrounded by orchard trees on a steep hillside just out of town.

In the late afternoon we visited Baltit Fort which looms above Karimabad village. For around eight centuries this was the seat of power for the local Mir (ruler) until he moved down the hill to more comfortable digs in the mid-20th century. The building then fell into neglect, but it was painstakingly repaired and renovated over several years in the 1990s and now looks as it did in its prime. It must have been quite a sight when the British army entered the valley in 1891!

It was a steep walk up cobbled streets through the old village to the base of the fort, where we were met by the curator who led us on a tour of it which included a painfully long video of old photos of the building and supposedly notable/historic people in the valley. Following tea on the rooftop as the sun dipped down behind the mountain ridge, we went into the old dining hall where we were treated to a dinner of local specialties accompanied by local artists playing traditional music and some dancing. In many ways – the layout of the room, the mood lighting, the music – it reminded me of Marrakech in Morocco. Interestingly, all the entertainment was performed by men and we didn’t see a single women while we were there – in the Hunza culture women would only dance at a private family event or gathering.

Given the length of the journey and terrain we had to cover, we had broken up the bulk of the trip from China to Pakistan into two days. Our first night in Pakistan was spent in Passu, a small village by the KKH. The next morning we continued south down the road towards Hunza, our first real “destination” in Pakistan where we would spend a few days.

The drive from Passu took us past numerous villages and the occasional Indiana Jones-style cable suspension bridge over the river, rudimentary structures with some gaping gaps between the wooden boards. At one point we reached a section of the road in pretty bad shape because the snout of the Ghulkin Glacier has been inching downhill in recent years, bulldozing everything in its way. Quite eery peering up from the cars at the terminal moraine of boulders and dirty ice!

After an hour or so from Passu we reached the end of the road at Attabad Lake. In 2010 a monstrous landslide dragged down a sizable chunk of mountain and blocked the river, killing 19 people in a village which was buried/wiped out. There were two major consequences from this event. Firstly, the landslide took out the KKH and no traffic was able to get up or down the highway – this explained the lack of traffic and belching trucks on the highway, and our guide told us that since then the volume of traffic has been only around 5% of normal.

The other major consequence from the landslide is that it blocked the river, forming Attabad Lake in the months that followed. The Chinese are presently building a new road and extensive set of tunnels to bypass the lake and reopen the KKH, but for the time being (next year or two) the only way to continue down the valley is to use one of the boats now on the lake to ferry from one end to the other.

The boats plying the lake turned out to be some surprisingly large home-made timber structures, with two tractor engines mounted on planks out to the side and long propellers affixed to the shafts and a driver in the cockpit above the stern. We loaded on to one of the boats with our gear, and once the two engines were hand-cranked to start we were on our way.

The first part of the boat trip was down a fairly rapid section of the river, and we were told the old KKH was about 100 feet below the waterline beneath us (extending to around 400 feet at its deepest point). The grey silty water if the river was soon replaced with quite brilliant turquoise water that took me back to some alpine lakes in Switzerland. The scenery for the next hour was spectacular, with the water color contrasted by the soaring cliffs and snow-capped peaks visible above the side valleys. For me, this was one of the highlights of the entire journey!

At the other end of the lake a makeshift harbor was in full swing, with boats being loaded and unloaded and bright, colorful Pakistani trucks waiting on the steep dirt tracks for their turn. I was able to rattle off a few quick photos but we were in a hurry to find the Toyota Land Cruisers we would be using for the remainder of our time in Pakistan. In a convoy of four vehicles we drove up over the enormous mound of rocks from the landslide blocking the valley and rejoined the old KKH just a few kilometers away from the upper end of the Hunza Valley and our hotel in Karimabad.