Llew Wanders the World

Passu is the farthest north I got in Pakistan, sitting barely 100km from the Khunjerab Pass and the border with China. It’s a quiet little town, but has started to see some tourism activity in recent years due to the many wonderful day walks in its vicinity. I’d really wanted to do some solid trekking in Pakistan, but the fact that it was early in the season (most trekking routes open up in early June), as well as Pakistan’s worst winter in forty years meant that I was pretty limited. Since I was unable to cross the still-snowbound passes, I hoped that the pleasant, low altitude day trips from Passu would give me at least a taste of what I was missing out on.

After my ordeal with the landslide on the way there, I was very pleased to arrive at Passu. I was dropped off at the only hotel near the town itself (most others were a few kilometres away on the highway.) It was fortunate I’d met some people who’d stayed there already. Had I not, I would likely have assumed the place was closed.

As it was, I sat around waiting and eventually someone appeared. Now, when I say I waited for someone to appear, I don’t just mean someone from the hotel. I mean I waited for ANYONE to appear. Passu was a tiny little town, and was very, very quiet.

The young man who showed up ran into the village and alerted the hotel manager to my presence. The guy was a very quiet fellow, but he had a shy smile on his face almost permanently, and spoke excellent English.

After our chat I went out for a brief walk around town with the specific goal of finding a nice spot from which to phoitograph The Cathedral. The Cathedral was a series of incredbily jagged mountains across the valley from Passu. So rugged were they that they scarcely looked real. In fact they appeared to be more the sort of thing that you’d see in airbrushed paintings full of dragons, wizards and rainbows than part of any real landscape.

I had a short chat with him about my plans for walking, to which he listened and made a few suggestions. Shortly thereafter I went for a quick rest in my room, which turned into a several hour-long nap.

By the time I woke up it was almost dinner time and the hotel had another pair of guests. They were a couple, both Canadian, both from Vancouver, and both (I’m sad to say) very irritating. The guy was a big, muscular fellow with bleached blond hair who sat out in the hotel’s front yard, shirtless, playing his guitar and singing Pearl Jam songs. The lady was a very pretty, but very precious young woman who went so far as to request that the hotel owner make her chicken pulao with breast meat only. None of this would really have bothered me much at home, but in a tiny town in northern Pakistan I found it pretty grating.

Towards the end of dinner I started to get a terrible pain on the right side of my lower back. A kidney problem? All I could do was take some painkillers and lay down in bed, hoping for sleep to come soon.

It didn’t, but eventually I drifted off. The next morning I woke up early, the pain in my back almost gone. After a quick trip to the town dispensary, where they kindly provided me with antiseptic and band-aids for a foot I’d scraped walking across the landslide, I headed out on my first day walk. The hotel manager had suggested I take a trip up the jeep road along the nearby Shimshal valley.

The walk along the KKH to the mouth of the Shimshal was pleasant in its own right (indeed, pretty much the whole of the highway would have been a spectacular trekking route in its own right were there not a highway there already.) The day was clearer than the previous one, so I got a nice look at The Cathedral, as well as some of the larger, snow capped peaks that lay to the south of Passu.

Upon arriving at the entrance to Shimshal I was even more impressed. The valley was wide, but quickly narrowed into a gorge with towering rock walls on either side. The road itself was a marvel as well, if anything it was even more impressive than the Karakoram Highway. While it WAS only a jeep road, it had been squeezed into some very difficult spots. What’s more, the Shimshalis constructed most of it BY HAND. They wanted a road into their village, and the government didn’t seem ready to provide one, so they went ahead and built it themselves (towards the end, Islamabad did provide explosives and funds for bridge construction.)

During the early stages of my walk up the valley the jagged peaks of the Cathedral rose high above me on the left side of the road. Soon these gave way to (or were obscured by) equally rugged, if lower, mountains.

I kept going, expecting to run into the town of Juljul soon. After quite a bit more walking, however, I came to the realization that the building I’d seen earlier WAS Juljul. I hadn’t been expecting much, but still, marking a single unoccupied stone edifice as a “settlement” on the map was one of the greater cartographic exaggerations I’ve ever seen. For all that, its shade and beautifully clear spring water running over pure white marble made it a welcome rest stop.

After some four hours of walking through the spectacular steep rock of the valley, I came to a small suspension bridge that, while it had obviously been designed to carry jeeps, was now missing so much of its deck that driving across would have been impossible. I jumped over the gaps, excited to get somewhere a bit off the beaten (or at least tire-flattened) track. The path didn’t last long, soon returning to the north bank via a much better maintained bridge. As it did so, the valley showed signs of widening out. The slope of the walls had lessened somewhat, and their sharp tops had been replaced by flatter, only slightly less dramatic ones.

Shortly after returning to the river’s north bank I took a look at my clock and realized it was about time to be heading back (assuming, pretty reasonably, that I didn’t want to be walking in the dark.) Unfortunately, the pain in my back had returned, and the sun was setting more or less in my face as I returned, so while the valley was pretty, it didn’t have quite the same magic as it had on the way in.

Thankfully, before the pain got too bad I arrived back at the mouth of the valley and crossed the wide, flat expanse that led me over to the highway and back to Passu.

As I walked along the KKH, I was invited in for tea a couple of times, but (despite feeling quite guilty about doing so) I had to decline the offers in order to get back the hotel and give the manager my dinner order before it got too too late. In the end I’d walked a total of 38km that day… A monster trek, even if I was only carrying a day pack.

Upon arriving back, I was surprised to learn that someone was looking for me! Apparently an older fellow had appeared during the day in search of a trekking partner. Apparently, when he’d come by earlier and asked the hotel manager about who was staying there, the manager had replied “a young couple and an old man.” I choose to interpret this as a failing in his (otherwise very good) English. I’m sure he’d meant to say oldER.

As I was sitting outside waiting for dinner to be finished the man appeared. He was a wild looking old (perhaps 60, so I think he was genuinely near qualifying for “OLD” rather than simply oldER) fellow who I’d met briefly in Karimabad. When we first met, the fellow had told me that he was from “Yunan.” I’d (I think quite reasonably) assumed that he meant the province in southern China (which, incidentally, has a high number of Muslims resident, so it would make some sense for him to be in Pakistan.) I later learned that “Yunan” is Urdu for “Greece.” It’s something of a testament to his odd appearance that I was entirely willing to accept that he was either Chinese or Greek. The guy had long, wild grey hair, leathery skin and few enough visible teeth that you could count them on one hand. We discovered that we’d both been planning on doing the Yunz Valley walk.

Never one to judge simply on appearances, I said I’d be happy to go for a walk with him the next day. I soon came to regret this. The pain in my back and my relative tiredness made me keen to just sit down and have a rest. My new walking companion, however, had other ideas. He ensconced himself in a chair outside my room and talked on and on and on about his views on how to cure diarrhea and his ill planned onward travel aspirations (most notably cycling through Sibera then taking a [non-existent] ferry to Alaska or [impossibly] riding across the Bering Strait on the ice.) I was relieved when it came time to eat, but still dreaded the prospect of spending eight to ten hours walking with the man… His blathering alone would drive me nuts. Before taking leave, I set up a possible excuse for the next morning by (not untruthfully) saying I wouldn’t be going if my back still hurt.

The next morning I was in a much better mood and despite the previous day’s trepidation was happy to set out with Nicholas at 07:30.

The Yunz Valley trip wasn’t didn’t have quite as much dramatic topography as the Shimshal had, but it still provided a number of memorable moments. The most obvious of these was the spectacular view of the Passu glacier as the trail headed up its lateral moraine to the top of the Yunz Valley whose mouth was perched on the cliffs above. The trail leading up the moraine wasn’t easy to forget either. At times it became VERY narrow, sloping away from the walls. I was very nervous during the walk up it. One (very possible) slip and I’d be smashed on the rocks below, probably with several broken bones, if not worse. To my confusion, save for one section where there was only about 3m to fall, which had him very nervous, Nick was pretty complacent about the whole affair.

Just before we reached the tops of the cliffs, we met up with a group of women and children who were driving their goats up to the summer pastures of Yunz. We’d heard them long before seeing them, with their whistles, clicks, whoops and shouts directing the goats along the path.

The Yunz valley itself was pretty dreary. Indeed, both Nick and I were amazed that anyone would bother to bring animals there to graze, since its only vegetation was small clumps of juniper growing very low to the ground. The walk along the valley was a nice, easy break from the climb up, however. And whether it was due to lack of oxygen or some other reason, chatting with Nicholas wasn’t the same exhausting experience it had been earlier.

At the far end of the valley we came across the shepherds’ huts. Most were empty, but the residents of the sole occupied one invited us into the smoky, shadow filled stone dwelling for tea. The pair in residence were an old Pakistani woman and her grandson, who was actually a student in Islamabad but had come up for a visit and to bring her supplies. The young man was hoping to join the Pakistan Army (given the number of young men aspiring to it, obviously an honourable goal.)

After tea, the young man was headed down to Passu, so we followed him along, down into the valley formed by the Batura glacier (at 58km, one of the longest outside the polar regions) and then along a nearly invisible trail on the slope high above it. He explained that there were several trails back to Passu, but that this was the easiest. I had some difficulty believing this, given the number of scree slopes we had to cross or lumber down, as well as the grade of some of these, but if it really WAS the easiest, I’m very glad we had

On the way down the final hill towards the highway, our “guide” asked us whether I liked Bush or Bin-Laden. “Neither,” was my answer. He seemed more or less to agree with me on this point, and also didn’t seem to perturbed when, as usual, I tried to stick up for the American people, most of whom weren’t in and wouldn’t get to Passu explain their positions. “They aren’t bad people,” I tried to explain. “Most of them are very good, but many are afraid, having been mislead by their politicians and others.” (Obviously the above is merely my own editorial commentary…)

All of this led to Nicholas starting up on a vast conspiracy theory of his. I couldn’t let it go without comment, but it didn’t take to long before I tired of trying.

Our final stop on the day was at our guide’s uncle’s home, in Old Passu (most of the people had relocated to the new town a few km away after several years of heavy floods washed away the good agricultural land in the old.) After a pleasant cup, as well as a look around the house (it was neat how they got hot water for themselves by running the water supply pipes through their wood stove) we headed back to town. Nick took his leave as we passed the hotel, and I foresaw a lonely afternoon back at the guesthouse.

I could scarcely have been more wrong! When I arrived it seemed that there was a little Karimabad reunion going on. There were six of us, all of whom had been staying at the Old Hunza Inn in K’bad, all of whom had spent happy (when I wasn’t sick) nights at the communal dinners and walks through town afterwards. Three of the others were just up in Passu on quick jaunts, but two of them, Phil from Ireland and Nick from Australia, were staying for another day or two, so we made plans to do yet another walk the following morning. Before dinner several of us took a walk out to get still more photos of The Cathedral. (This was becoming almost a ritual for me… Twice a day, once in the morning, once at night.)

The “twin suspension bridges” walk was definitely the least strenuous of the bunch, but it was made tougher for me by the fact that I’d checked out of the hotel and brought my whole pack along, planning on carrying on after the end of the hike to a camping spot higher up in the mountains.

As with all other trips along the KKH, the walk to the bridges was quite nice. As we walked past the Glacier Breeze restaurant, a man came running down to the road and handed me a postcard. To my amusement it was from Fin and Jewel, the two Taiwanese girls I’d met in Karimabad. They’d already been there for almost two weeks when I arrived and I’d teased them several times about the fact that they seemed to have become a permanent fixture in the town and would likely never depart. Apparently they’d left the card there for me just to prove that they had, in fact moved on (if only briefly.) I have no idea how the guy from the restaurant knew who I was, and I suppose that it will have to remain one of life’s mysteries.

A few minutes later, we headed down towards the river on the wrong trail and were re-directed away from a small village by an irritable woman (though I suppose I might be irritable too if I had to deal with lots of tourists accidentally wandering into my quiet little community.)

The real highlight of the trip was, unsurprisingly the bridges. My guidebook described them as “Indiana Jones” bridges. Both of them were rickety suspension-type structures, with cables stretching 200m or more across the valley. The deck of each consisted of widely spaced pieces of wood (note, pieces of wood, NOT actual boards) each connected to the main structure by friction-fitting cables running above and below. Despite their rough appearance, both are regularly used by residents of the valley.

The first bridge took us across the valley. As I crossed it, I looked down into the rushing waters below, and was a bit disoriented. It felt as though the water was more or less still, but that the bridge and I were moving along the valley. A very odd feeling, especially combined with the bouncing and swaying

On the far side, we had a long, hot walk up an alluvial fan, then across a wide, multi-channeled ravine. (During the crossing of the latter I had a scary moment when I set my pack down on a ledge to negotiate a tricky bit, only to see it tumble down the whole way end over end. Thankfully the contents were unharmed.)

After the ravine, the hard work was finished, and Nick, Phil and I had a delightful walk, chatting away as we passed through the pretty pastoral lands across the river from the village of Husseini. The walk ended with the crossing of the second bridge over to Husseini (even more rickety than the first bridge, since it was under repair when we crossed it.)

On the far side, we stopped for a cup of (salt as it turned out) tea, offered by a pair of little girls who were bringing it down to the men working on the bridge. We headed back up through Husseini to the highway, where we had a nice rest in an un-finished hotel. The owned (a Pakistani-American) yelled down to us and invited us up to have a look and to be the first people to sign his guestbook.

Rest completed, Nick headed back to Passu where he hoped to get a jeep up the Shimshal Valley. Meanwhile, Phil and I walked up to the (disappointing) Borit lake where I had a (disappointing) lunch of chicken-liver biryani. I was further (disappointed [of course it doesn’t belong in parentheses, but I became habituated while writing the previous sentence]) when we looked up the Borit Valley towards my intended destination and saw dark clouds rolling in and covering the mountain tops. Disappointed, I decided to head back to Passu with Phil.

Save for a nice alternate angle view of the Passu glacier, the walk back wasn’t particularly beautiful, but it was something of an adventure. This reached its height with a slide down a long (50m? 100m? more?) scree slope.

After our scree-sliding, the trail down was pretty simple, following the top of the Passu Glacier’s moraine, though there were a few moments when I almost lost my step, due entirely to the incredibly vocal party of Pakistanis who were yelling, waving and doing whatever else they could to attract attention to themselves on a ridge high above us. The final portion of our walk took us through Passu itself. It was a very quiet little place, and I had the feeling that tourists were welcome around the town, but that within the village people preferred to keep to themselves.

We arrived back at the guesthouse two surprises. First, the hotel manager was surprised (though quite happy) to see ME, and second, we were surprised to see Nick. Apparently there hadn’t been enough passengers, so the service to Shimshal hadn’t run that day.

It was still fairly early, and we spent the rest if the afternoon and evening in the garden talking amongst ourselves and with the manager (also owner we learned) of our guesthouse about the changes in Passu over the years. He told us that he’d been running his place for 28 years, since shortly after the first jeep road came to Passu. The intervening time had brought first the KKH, then electricity, then the steady flow of summertime tourists that made up most of his business. When he was a young man, the return trip to Gilgit took ten days. We’d completed it (one way) in about three hours (save for my trouble with the landslide.)

We all sat around in the hotel dining room that evening, continuing our chat, but with a keen eye for the clock as well. We were all quite tired but, as early as we’d been sleeping recently, still couldn’t bring ourselves to go to bed before 20:00. Finally the magical hour came, and we all rushed off and prepared ourselves to catch the early-departing southbound minibus the next morning.

Unlike most of its kind, the vehicle was blissfully empty of passengers (Phil was even able to lie down for a while.) The driver was right in line with Pakistani tradition, however. In fact, really went above and beyond in his efforts to uphold the wild reputation of subcontinental drivers. It takes some pretty serious effort to make oneself seem reckless by Pakistani road standards.

While it was a bit un-nerving, it DID mean that we got to Karimabad in less than an hour. I actually got my only really good, unobstructed view of Rakaposhi that morning. Nick took his leave of us there, promising to re-join me in Gilgit the next day. Another hour and a half took us through the police checkpoints and into Gilgit, where Phil jumped onto an Islamabad bound bus that was just departing the yard as we arrived.

I headed into town on the public bus (apparently the Suzuki drivers were on strike over rising fuel prices) and settled myself into the Madina Guesthouse, happy to return to something like civilization, but a bit sad to have left the very best of the Karakoram behind me.

Tags: Pakistan

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 5:38 am and is filed under Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.