The Hunza valley

We made it to Karmabad in the Hunza valley late Saturday night. The road from Skardu to Gilgit was fine (although a bit scary), but once we were on the Karakoram Highway... well let's just say "Karakoram dust path with lots of craters in it" might have been a more accurate name!

Hunza is beautiful. As we hoped, the women here don't have their heads covered, which means I don't have to, which is MUCH more comfortable. The scenery is very spectacular, with snow covered peaks all around. We hiked up to Ultar Meadow today, which involved a lot of scrambling up scree, but was worth it.


The food in Hunza is different to anything we've ever tried before. Current favourite is Hunza Pizza - kind of a chapati sandwich with miced meat and veg inside. And apricot kernel soup was a surprise winner last night.

There are hardly any tourists around and lots of empty hotels. The place we're staying offered us a 60% discount without us even asking. It's sad that a lot of these places may well go out of business. (In Skardu we paid published price because the guesthouse owner was the Baltistan coordnator of CAI (of Three Cups of Tea fame), so we thought we were supporting a good cause).

The people are much less pushy than in India - walking through town they stop to say hello, but don't ask you to come in their shop or hotel or restaurant. Even when we walked outside the airport in Skardu there were a buch of guys standing there with hotel fliers, but noone aproached us until we went and asked them to see the leaflets.

In all, we are very pleasantly surprised by Northern Pakistan and would certainly come back. The weather is amazing (cool enough to hike, yet sunny enough to sit outside), the people are great and we're having a superb time. If only wine were as readily available as dodgy Chinese beer, we'd all be happy...

Gemma

Skardu(sty)

We're now on our way from Skardu, the capital of Baltistan in the far NE of Pakistan, to Karimabad on the main Karakorum Highway to China.

I've been to some dusty towns, but Skardu beats all of them. The Indus river makes a wide meandering river bed in the Skardu valley and, between the time that the valley itself thaws and the snow and glaciers high in the mountains start to melt, it leaves hugh expanses of sand and silt exposed. This gets whipped up into the air by the wind for a few hours every afternoon, blocking views across the valley and covering every surface. Really unpleasant, especially for contact lens wearers.

Its not like there is much to see in the town, either. The bazaar is at best passingly interesting and the local beauty spot, a lake in the hills above town, has been disfigured by the ongoing construction work for a Chinese-funded dam. The lake was pretty enough if you only looked in one direction and the trout and chips we had for lunch were good. It's quite a conservative shiite town and there were no women around at all, so Gemma wore a head-scarf for the first, and perhaps only, time in the trip. The rest of the places we're heading to in Pakistan are largely ismaili muslim and supposedly she won't need to cover her head.

The main attraction of Baltistan is the scenery. The area is home to something like 5 of the world's 20 highest mountains, and the views are awesome. There are also some nice villages nearby, with old forts and wooden mosques, and good walking. Balti food has nothing to do with the dish of the same name in UK Indian restaurants, but is really good. My lunch yesterday was the best of the trip so far, despite the unpromising menu description: "Local bread cooked in mutton broth". It turned out to be tasty pasta-like pieces in a spicy and nutty sauce with pieces of meat.

Baltistan became part of Kashmir when the British sold it to the Maharaja of Kashmir after capturing it during the Sikh Wars, and Skardu is only a couple of hours away from the Line of Control between India- and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Surprisingly, there is not a heavy Pakistan army presence in the area - in contrast to the other side of the border in Ladakh and the Kashmir valley itself. I guess that, unlike the Indian army, the Pakistan army have got bigger problems. The locals here have some strange ideas about the Taliban (although people in Islamabad were well informed). One of our fellow bus passengers today, like many Europeans, thinks that America is to blame for all the world's problems. Our American friends will be glad to know that I lept to your country's defence; pointing out that at least Kashmir isn't America's fault. He claims that America are both (still) funding the Taliban and the Pakistan army. He didn't have a particularly strong view on why America would want to do this. I guess general malevolence would need to be invoked. More extraordinary was the owner of the restaurant we ate in a couple of days ago. He told us that his 'friend in the Pakistan army' had told him that the insurgents he had killed in Swat are uncircumcised and therefore obviously Indian soldiers pretending to be Taliban. The Indian press have claimed things at least as extraordinary as this about Pakistan, so perhaps this kind of thing is to be expected here also. I was more concerned about the removal of enemy casualties' undergarments. I doubt this is specifically covered in the Geneva Convention, but it is clearly against the spirit of the agreement.

Getting to Skardu ended up being a bit easier than we'd feared. The landing involves circling down within the valley and has to be done visually. It wasa tterrifying. Sensibly, they cancel the flight when it is windy or cloudy, and the flight had been cancelled on 5 days of the week before we wanted to travel. There was a big back-log of people with tickets wanting to travel. Luckily, we got chatting with the manager of the main PIA ticket office in Rawalpindi and she managed to find 2 seats on the next flight.

Finally, apologies for the title of this post. Gemma insisted and I'm an indulgent kind of guy.

We've now enabled comments on this blog. This is somewhat ambitious, given that we only have one reader that we're aware of (hi, Vanessa!)....

T.

Things BBC World is consistently getting wrong today

1. They are out on 'local time' in Pakistan by an hour. No wonder hapless travellers miss border opening timings when they are reporting the time difference incorrectly (and it's totally counter-intuitive anyway);

2. Security in Islamabad is not exactly 'beefed up'. We have seen a few traffic policemen lounging in the shade and a lone sniper hanging over the wall of the sister hotel to the one in Peshawar.

G

The best laid plans...

We rocked up at the airport this morning to catch our flight and were told that because we hadn't reconfirmed it in person in an office in Rawalpindi (a half hour driver from Islamabad) yesterday, our seats had been given to waitlisted passengers. Genius system. And because the Skardu flight hadn't gone for 5 days, the waitlist was LONG.

Despite our best efforts at the airport this morning, they weren't letting us on. So off we trotted to the PIA office to try and confirm for tomorrow. To cut a long story short, 5 hours later we have confirmed tickets. Now we just have to keep fingers crossed for the weather (which is why the last 5 days were cancelled).

A room of 400 Pakistanis waving tickets and trying to shout their way onto one flight tomorrow doesn't make for a very interesting picture, so here's one of Trev in front of Asia's largest mosque, a gift from King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, instead. Islamabad's sights don't get much more impressive.

Sad news this morning about the bomb in Peshawar. But for those who are worrying (Mums) we are nowhere near what we knew was a dangerous place, we're staying in a small guesthouse not a 5 star target and we're not going anywhere that has a higher threat rating from the FCO than Mumbai does. And we're being very careful :-)

And as long as the weather holds in the mountains, we'll be in the safe haven of Kashmir by lunchtime tomorrow.

Gemma

Living the dream

Beer and steak in Islamabad. Steakhouses a plenty... Beer available as long as it's ordered in a whisper.

Happy holidays!

Hello Pakistan!

(Picture of Trev exiting India)

A late arrival into Amritsar, but luckily we had booked a hotel right by this station so after only 10 minutes of fending off 'wanna rickshaw? Wanna hotel?' type requests we were in bed.

This morning we had our last breakfast in India (a disappointing, but classic, fried egg on toast) and headed to the border. The log book suggested there'd been 6 other foreigners in the last week... we are not alone!

The only other guy trying to cross at the same time as us was a Russian. He didn't seem to have read any kind of 'How to seem inconspicuous to border guards' instructions. He was still being questioned as we left the border, but his answers didn't seem to be making him particularly welcome...
- where are you from?
- Russia
- what is your profession?
- pilot
- what is your purpose in Pakistan?
- flying planes.
Right.

We had organised a car from a guesthouse in Islamabad to be waiting for us on the Pakstani side. We were 90 minutes late after messing up the time difference (who knew Pakistan would be ahead of India?) And then a power cut meaning the immigration computers weren't working. But we found the car easily and the drive was fine; on the Grand Trunk road for the most part. The standard of driving (accelerate towards the vehicle in front and beep manically until it gets out of the way) is confirming our suspician that the biggest risk to us being here is road safety and access to medical care, rather than anything to do with the Taliban.

6 hours later we've arrived into Islamabad. The guesthouse is nice, the people friendly and most women don't have their heads covered (phew!) The roads are in better nick than in India and there seems to be less rubbish around. So far, so good.

Gemma

...and they're off

It's been a crazy week and a bit since we got back from the UK. There have been lots of very late and drunken nights and very busy days as we've finished various work admin jobs, packed up and shipped all our stuff, said goodbye to friends and staff and Gemma has run around Delhi buying the few handicrafts we didn't already own.

Its quite a relief to finally be on the train to Amritsar after such an emotionally and physically tiring week, and we're even looking forward to a forced detox in Pakistan. We've been touched by the number of send-off events (and presents...) that people have organized and will miss everyone in Delhi. The prize for saddest farewell goes to our driver Prasad, who has been breaking into tears periodically all week. We've probably spent an order of magnitude more time with him than anyone other than each other over the last 3 years, so perhaps that's not too suprising.

We're staying in Amritsar tonight, crossing into Pakistan tomorrow morning and staying in Islamabad tomorrow night, then flying up to Skardu early on Wednesday. We'll then be making our way North into China for 10 days or so.

We've been monitoring the security situation closely and this route avoids Swat and anywhere else we probably wouldn't want to be at the moment. I guess we'll know for sure soon.

Trev.