KKH

Kashgar To Islamabad - A Drive Along The Karakoram Highway

Khunjerab Top

The first time I read about the Karakoram Highway - the so-called "Highway in the Clouds" and universally referred to as the KKH - was in the early 1980's whilst the road was still under construction by teams of Chinese and Pakistani road-builders. The Chinese call it the "The Friendship Highway". Many refer to it as "The Eighth Wonder of The World", linking the Central Asian Chinese province of Xinjiang with Pakistan's "Northern Areas" province through territory where, according to multiple surveys over many years by the top road-building experts of the world, a road would be impossible to construct. Nonetheless, the two countries decided that nothing is impossible and they did, indeed, make it happen. It took them, with more than ten thousand workers on the job, some 20 years to complete this road, constructing over 160 river and ravine bridges on the way and when they finally cut the inauguration tape at their common frontier, they had pushed a fairly dangerous but nonetheless negotiable route through stretches which often involved workers hanging from harnesses hundreds of feet long as they blasted ledges above river gorges. In other places, the repetitive movement of scree slopes rising from the roadside up and up and up into the sky often confounded road-building over long distances. The road traverses some of the most mind-bending mountain scenery in the world and it cuts through and partly rises above stretches of the three greatest of all ranges – The Western Himalayas, The Karakoram and the Hindu Kush. The road crosses the continental watershed at the Khunjerab Pass at around 16,000 feet and its total length from China’s Kashgar, generally regarded as the starting or end point (depending on which way one travels it) to Islamabad is some 900 miles.

Ever since first reading about this road, I felt that it would surely have to be a fascinating experience to be able to go drive it. For the first four years of its existence, the KKH was open to official and strategic traffic only. Then in 1986 the two countries decided to throw the road open to normal traffic in the hope of encouraging a little tourism. Over the last 15 years, there has been a steady, if still relatively small, flow of parties, individuals and even hardy cyclists who, sharing my own curiosity, have made it from one end to the other. KKH travel is fraught with unpredictability. The road has been driven through long stretches of steep, loose and unstable areas where rock-falls and landslides are common, particularly in times of rain or spring thaw. Frequent overhangs of thousands of tons of rock almost cantilevered above the tarmac are a reason for disconcerting awareness. Flash floods regularly wash up to a few hundred yards of road surface, complete with bridges, downhill and broken slopes reaching to the sky slide onto the road often on a daily basis. Consequently, road repair is continuous and allowance for delays is taken, on the KKH, as the norm. The area through which the KKH has been driven is one of the most shattered and geologically active areas in the world and it cannot, therefore, be considered a vital strategic asset for either China or Pakistan. It traverses an earthquake area and one quake could destroy the road for a substantial distance. In the event of hostilities, a few well chosen bombs would completely close the KKH for a very long time. It is in the Karakoram that the Asian continental plates meet with the Indian land-mass moving north by a few centimetres per year. As the latter tries to underlie the former, the tectonic pressures being produced by these movements are gigantic and have led American geologists to recently predict that the whole area could be the subject of an earthquake of vast proportions in the foreseeable future. Severe enough, they insist, to destroy Islamabad / Rawalpindi and Delhi in one cataclysmic catastrophe.The dreadful earthquake of October 2005 is dire witness to this.

Politically, the road constitutes only the narrowest of ribbons of relative security running between the instability of Kashmir to the east and Afghanistan to the west. In places the road passes not more than ten miles from the disputed Line of Control between India and Pakistan. The notorious Siachen Glacier where India and Pakistan shoot at each other daily is reached by a side turning off the KKH. At another point on the road, the triple border of Afghanistan, Tajikistan and China is just over a low hill to the west.

Nevertheless, for all those years, I often thought of driving this road but for one reason or another I did nothing about it. Then, early this year (2001) after suffering a small heart attack, I decided that if I didn’t finally now take the bull by the horns, I would be too old and unfit for such an enterprise. Consequently, I told Marian (my wife) that it was my intention to arrange, for the late summer, an individualised drive along the KKH from one end to the other. Somewhat taken aback by her husband’s decision to abandon his inertia and actually do something about it at last, her first reaction to accompanying me was unequivocally negative. Why, she asked, couldn’t I just arrange a cruise to Acapulco instead (like other husbands do)? However, when she realised that I was really totally set on this undertaking, she decided – all credit to her – to join me ("you need looking after", she said).

Little did we know that the two of us were going to be amongst the last tourists (if not, perhaps, the VERY last) to make the passage along this road before the Northern Areas and the North West Territories of Pakistan became sensitive war territory abutting, as they do, onto Tajikistan, Kirghizstan and Afghanistan, in the wake of the September 11^th attacks. As this is typed in late November 2001, the KKH is closed – winter conditions quite apart – to non-military travel on both sides of the common China-Pak frontier. Who can tell when this road will re-open to tourist traffic?

http://www.johnthemap.co.uk/pages/kkh/kkhmap.html

We started to plan for the trip in March and through the Internet we made contact with a travel firm in Islamabad who claimed to be experienced in arranging travel in Central Asia including over the KKH. They in turn worked with correspondents in China’s Xinjiang province and assured us that they could arrange our travel on both sides of the Chinese/Pak frontier. During the spring and early summer we worked on the planning of the trip and what seemed the best itinerary gradually evolved. This would take us from London to Islamabad on a Monday arriving early Tuesday thence onwards by the Wednesday morning once-a-week only China Xinjiang Airlines flight from Islamabad to Urumqi. The only alternative routing would have us fly all the way to the Far East - to Hong Kong or Shanghai or Beijing and then back again some 2000 miles or more in the direction of Europe from which we had come. That didn’t seem very sensible. Then having arrived in Urumqi on the Wednesday, the intention was to spend that day then the Thursday and Friday in the Urumqi area before flying by the same C.X.A. to Kashgar on the Friday night. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights were to be spent in Kashgar where we would have the Sunday browsing in the famous Kashgar Sunday Market before setting out on the beginning of the KKH on the Monday morning. If all went to plan, a Toyota Landcruiser would hopefully pick us up at our Kashgar hotel and take us over the course of the next two days through the Chinese portion of the road, then across the Khunjerab and down to the first Pak village of Sust at which Pakistani immigration or exit formalities are conducted. Chinese vehicle and driver, we were advised, can be licensed to take such cross-border traffic but the vehicle has to return to China empty. That seemed, to us, like one hell of a waste. At the Pak immigration area we were to be met by a Pakistani vehicle which would take us down the next 500 miles back to Islamabad.

As the date for our departure drew closer we had to obtain visas for both China and for Pakistan. We contacted the China Travel Service in London who sent us the visa application forms which we duly filled out and returned with the necessary payment. The next thing was that a pleasant young lady, obviously Chinese, telephoned us saying that she did not think it was a very wise thing for us to have shown Urumqi in Xinjiang as our point of entry into the P.R.C. The consulate, she said, would probably refuse to issue us visas. Xinjiang is a potentially separatist area and China preferred to keep tourists in Xinjiang and in Tibet under strict group control. Maverick travellers like us were viewed with suspicion and discouraged. She suggested that we re-submit visa applications showing Shanghai / Beijing / Xian as our intended movements in China and that she expected we’d then get our visas without any difficulty. Apart from thinking at the time that she was risking, if the telephone conversation was being recorded, a life sentence in the Chinese gulag, I was a bit uncomfortable with such deliberate subterfuge. How could we know whether there would be anything on the visa in unintelligible Chinese ideograms which indicated a permitted entry via the Far East only, whereas we were going to enter the PRC in the sensitive Xinjiang in Central Asia. Anyway, we had to take her advice and in the event, all was well. As for the Pak visas, we must have telephoned the London visa section of the Pak High Commission at least 20 times over a week or more. No-one ever answered a telephone which rang interminably until we always grew tired and put down our receiver. In the end I had the brain-wave to call their Bradford consulate whose people answered the telephone within three seconds and gave us our visas in 48 hours.

We set off on the trip in early September. Both British Airways and Pakistan International Airways served the Heathrow to Islamabad routes. BA’s ticket price in Business Class was £2250. PIA’s price for the same route in the same 747 Jumbos was £950. Not surprisingly, we chose PIA and were delighted to find that their Business Class was the equivalent of First Class in IATA airlines such as BA. There were more cabin crew than passengers in the front section and we were spoiled something rotten. The absence of an alcoholic drink was no big deal. After a pleasant flight across the Baltic, Russia and Afghanistan we were met at the Islamabad arrivals at 5am by a representative of our travel company and were taken to our hotel in Islamabad’s twin city of Rawalpindi where we were able to snatch a few hours sleep.

Tuesday afternoon was given up to a tour around the teeming city of Rawalpindi and the impressive purpose-built capital city of Islamabad, a short drive northeast of Rawalpindi. These two are nearly conjoined and are known in Pakistan as "The Twin Cities". Approximately half-way between the two, there is a delightful park, Sugar Gardens, at an elevated position, from which one has fine views over the one city to the South and the other to the North. There is also a fine view over to the Murree Hills dominating Islamabad’s skyline to the North. That evening was to be one of only two in Islamabad/Rawalpindi (the other was to be upon our return from the KKH before taking our morning service back to London the next day). We spent it pleasantly under the stars on the roof-top of our hotel, an al fresco restaurant with a huge buffet selection of Pakistani and Indian dishes.

The next morning saw us back at the airport, this time in the departure area. Security was very tight (even before September 11) and we counted some nine separate and consecutive checkpoints through which we were made to pass before we eventually emerged into the departure lounge. We had been a little concerned about what sort of aircraft China Xinjiang might use and had visions of pre-war twin-engined, tail-wheeled DC3’s battling their way up to 20,000 feet in order to clear the mountains to the north. This airline, we had found, had neither an office nor an agency in UK and we had not even been able to locate any website for them either. In effect, we knew nothing about what sort of airline this was going to be. We were relieved, consequently, to be able to look through the huge windows of the departure lounge at a very modern Boeing 767 standing close by on the tarmac elegantly painted with Chinese symbols in what was obviously the C.X.A. livery.

The departures lounge was not very full and since we had some time to wait, I asked Marian if she’d mind my wandering around. She had no objection but elected to stay where she was. Unfortunately for me, at the other end of the hall there were some Internet terminals for rent. Thinking that it would be nice to check for e-mails etc, I bought a half-hour from the attendant and became involved, forgetting about Marian sitting by herself at the other end of the lounge. In the meantime and quite unbeknown to me, the other end of the lounge had rapidly filled with a large group of Pakistani males. Before long Marian was the only female in an area now thronging with a hundred or more local gentlemen, all dressed in various flavours of shalwar kameez, many with sinister looking bushy black beards and even blacker eyes and not a few wearing turbans or similar headgear. Marian, increasingly disturbed that they all, to a man, seemed to be staring at this lone female with an undisguised mixture of lust and disapproval, quickly grew hysterical and rushed off to find her husband and protector. Having duly located me - blithely unaware of the impending crisis - sitting at the Internet terminal, she burst into tears and told me in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t going to stay in this terrible place for one moment longer and wanted to go home to UK and normality – but right this minute! How I was to arrange such a miracle with the next London flight due to leave two days later was another matter. Fortunately, after a little while, a combination of re-assurance, the humour of the situation and strategic change of theme by me helped to revert the situation from crisis back to mere drama. The onward trip was still in place but phew!, that was close!

The flight – around 3 hours to Urumqi – was full, mainly with Pakistani traders. We saw no other tourists aboard. I was fortunate to have a window seat and the views were quite wonderful. The flight took us directly over the top of the K2 Mount Goodwin Austen range followed by a good 45 minutes tracking northwards over the flat and featureless sands of the Takla Makan desert which unfolds from the flood plain at the northern foot of the Western Himalayas. We were surprised to learn that the Takla Makan, larger than the Gobi, is the world’s second largest desert after the Sahara. A rough translation of the name from Uighur (the main language of Xinjiang) to English is "The Desert of No Return". After looking out of the window at mile after mile of featureless flat sand, the name seemed appropriate. It was a long time before the first hints of green gradually re-appeared and not long thereafter we were in the descent towards Urumqi.

Area of K2 and Masherbrum massifs

After landing at Urumqi (or Urumchi - either seems acceptable), we passed through Chinese immigration controls without any difficulty. The visas which had given us cause for concern in UK and were supposed to have us entering the PRC on the Pacific seaboard were stamped without so much as a second glance. After emerging into the sunshine we were approached by a tall and good-looking young fellow who asked if we were the Gregory’s. He spoke impressively good English, told us that his name was Alim and that he had been detailed by the Xinjiang travel bureau to look after us until our departure to Kashgar two days later. At first he was reticent to discuss anything to do with politics or the would-be autonomy of the local area. Gradually he relaxed with us and we learnt that he was a university graduate in languages but that good jobs were few and far between so he was obliged to make what he could as a guide. Through him we learnt a lot about the Uighur (pronounced chwee-goor) people who make up the predominant population of Xinjiang province. China’s most northwesterly province borders the Central Asian republics of Kirgizstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. It also abuts onto Tibet and Pakistan. Despite official Communist Party disapproval of religion in the PRC, the area is almost entirely Muslim and discreetly active in observance of prayers, dietary laws and other aspects of Sharia. The relationship with the Han Chinese in the East remains uneasy, with a broad resentment against political domination from Beijing, over 2000 miles away. From time to time there are visible signs of disaffection such as riots in Urumchi in 1996 which were swiftly put down by the People’s Liberation Army and the news of which hardly reached the outside world. Indeed, since the fighting in Afghanistan after the September 11^th attacks, one has read how Muslim separatists from Xinjiang province have been amongst the ranks of both Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

We were amazed at the buzz in Urumqi and at the standard of the Holiday Inn hotel where we had booked. The city is the most land-locked in the World, which is to say there is no metropolis anywhere further from any ocean. We had expected something typical of old China, now modernised but still with the "feel" of a Central Asian city. To our great surprise, Urumqi is anything but this. It is a teeming modern bustling strategic and economic centre replete with high-rise buildings, intra-urban expressways and severe traffic jams. We thought that we should contact Ken Livingston when we got back home to tell him how Urumchi has sought to deal with its severe traffic problem. Vehicles with number-plates ending in an even number are premitted into the "down-town" area on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Those with an odd number at the end are allowed in Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. No exceptions and would-be "try-my-luck" drivers sternly given ticket fines by traffic wardens every bit as gaily attired as those in UK. What happens on Sundays? We never found out. Shops are crammed with, it seemed to us, every manner of consumer goods available to shoppers in the West. Lots of pretty little boutiques and other private shops line the streets and we visited a couple of five and six storey department stores which, take away the Chinese symbols everywhere, could have been in a major European city. According to Alim, for those who had money, anything and everything was nowadays available in the PRC. "In China", we say, "if you have money, you can get milk from a chicken". I needed more films for our digital video camera and feared that they were going to be unavailable in China since the DV technology is still relatively new. No problem – "which would Sir like – Sony or JVC?" Coffee shops full of laughing youngsters were everywhere. We could have been in Chelsea. The bicycle, that ubiquitous transport medium of China’s recent yesteryear, was nowhere to be seen. Marian took it all in her stride but for me as an old China hand of the ‘60s and ‘70s it was quite puzzling. What an awesome transformation, I thought, from those days some 30 years ago when I used to visit the Canton Trade Fair or other mainland destinations from Hong Kong during the Mao Tse Tung times. It those days the Mao suit was the one and only dress form and, walking in the street, one risked being mowed down by flotillas of bicycles both in Canton City and in Shanghai. All credit, I thought, to little Deng Xiao Ping, the political giant who instituted China’s economic transformation with his famous "Let a thousand flowers bloom". What we couldn’t, nonetheless, understand in all this was how the shops could be so full of all manner of modern international goods when the majority of people are so very poor. Incomes are abysmally low by European standards but prices are, as one might expect, similar to those prevailing anywhere. If the average man in the street couldn’t afford to buy, how could the stores be so stocked up with goods? What about stock turnover? What about costs of holding slow moving inventory? This was Keynesian economics and laws of supply and demand gone wrong. This was something that only brought a shrug of the shoulders from Alim and remains, for now, an intriguing economic mystery.

Downtown Urumqi

That evening, Wednesday, we invited Alim to join us for dinner in the hotel but he gently declined. When we enquired as to why, he explained that he could only eat Muslim food prepared under strict Halal supervision. I thought of my own complete indifference to the laws of Kashrut and felt guilty about not feeling guilty! So we suggested that he might care to take us to a restaurant of his own choice. He took us up on this offer. Might he please bring his girl-friend? We said "no problem". They took us to a restaurant serving traditional Uighur food. We found that, although in China, the fare bore no relationship at all with what we know as Chinese food and we ended up paying for a dinner which they enjoyed and we didn’t. Back in the hotel we compensated in the coffee shop.

The next day, Thursday, we were picked up early (of which more later!) to be taken on the three hours’ drive to one of China’s famous beauty spots, the so-called "Heaven Lake" in the Tien Shan mountains, a hundred miles to the South-East. The sun was shining and we spent a lovely day there at around 6,000 feet wandering the ornamental paths, reminiscent in their design of old Imperial China, along the lake’s shores and partaking of traditional hospitality at a small settlement of Kazakhs who dwell there year round in their "Yhurts" (round bell-topped nomadic tents). They cooked for us on an outdoors wood fire, producing an excellent nomadic lamb stew and served us a form of butter tea made with Yak’s milk. We thought Heaven Lake justifiably famous for its beauty and had we had more time we could have gladly stayed there for a few days.

Heaven Lake in the Tien Shan Mountains

The following evening, Friday, would see us back at the airport for our 2 hours’ flight across the huge expanse of Xinjiang to the old oasis town of Kashgar. Having spent a pleasant day at leisure exploring more of Urumqi and marvelling at the extent of the economic revolution – even here in China’s "Wild West" – we bade Alim, our guide, goodbye with a nice "thank-you" in US dollars when he duly delivered us back at the airport. After a pleasant flight, once again fully booked, we landed at Kashgar late on the Friday evening.

Ancient Kashgar, in China’s far west, is considerably more "Central Asian" than Urumqi. Whereas the latter has a distinct 21^st century feel to it, that of Kashgar is more reminiscent of the 19^th. Indeed, it was here in Kashgar and its surrounding areas, sitting astride the old "Silk Road" that the "Great Game" between the British and Russian empires of the Victorian and Edwardian days was played out. The old British consulate (last consul, pre-Communist take over of China, was Eric Shipton, the mountaineer of "Yeti" fame) has been turned into The Qinibagh Hotel where, unfortunately, we were to spend the next three nights. This establishment, extolled as the best hotel in Kashgar, is quite horrendous. In an effort to cope with the sensitivities of the slightly more discerning traveller, a new extension has recently been built alongside but was, as yet, unfinished. We were given the key to our room by a surly lady at reception who clearly viewed us with suspicion. Having climbed two flights of concrete stairs, we found our allotted room number and, having opened the door, we both turned pale. The curtains were drawn but partly detached from their fixings. In the gloom we surveyed a frighteningly concave double bed flanked on both sides by wall-lights devoid of lampshades. Wallpaper was peeling in several places and a chest of drawers had one drawer missing. The en-suite bathroom was clad with clinical white wall tiles and had all the plumbing runs externally wall-mounted in old-fashioned lead pipe. There was a cracked bath with a shower rose but no shower curtain. This room was obviously intended for wicked capitalists only. Since it was already late, we decided to grit our teeth and pass the night in these miserable surroundings but to try to move to the extension, which could not conceivably be as bad as this, in the morning. When we went down after a less than comfortable night, we tried to get breakfast. Another surly lady at reception looked at us in surprise. The hotel, she said, didn’t do breakfast. Go into town. We backed away and slunk across the courtyard to the extension hotel which had a reception of their own. "Do you have a room for the next two nights" we asked. The reception person disappeared into a back-room for some ten minutes before emerging to say that yes, they did. When we explained that we were in the original Qinibagh and would get our luggage and bring it across, the offer of a room was promptly rescinded. Impossible to change, they said – has not been pre-authorised. These things must be pre-ordained 600 miles away in Urumchi. I decided that the only chance of success would be to make a frontal attack and threatened to make trouble for them with the Xinjiang Tourism Ministry. This produced another nasty look from the reception lady but after a further disappearance to the back room, we finally won the day and were permitted to take up residence for the next two nights in the only marginally better Qinibagh Mark II. At least, the extension had a lift. One could also get breakfast of sorts. Over a cup of coffee, Marian and I talked about those television programmes one sees about "The Holiday from Hell". People visiting Spain or Greek Islands etc – "BBC cameras", we thought, "Where are you?"

When we got out into town, we perked up. The town is old and dusty but bustling and full of character. Gone were those traffic jams in Urumqi. Here, traditional bicycles and donkey carts were everywhere. These two-wheeled, rubber-tyred carts, being pulled by sad-looking donkeys often under their driver’s whip as they moved dejectedly by, also serve as public transport. The atmosphere is distinctly that of Central Asia. The town and its surrounds have a history stretching back over 2500 years. Straddling a major branch of the old Silk Road linking China with the Mediterranean, it has seen conquerors stretching back through Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane to Alexander the Great. The town is a fascinating melting pot of Uighurs (majority), Kirghiz, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Uzbekhs, Mongolians, Han Chinese and the odd Tibetan. Wonderfully wrought handicrafts are on sale in the bazaar which takes up much of the town centre and against our better judgement as to how we were going to get this thing back to Europe, we purchased, after much haggling and innumerable cups of tea, a locally made Chinese lute, beautifully veneered and moderately tuneful. The aroma of spices and street cooking permeates the air everywhere.

Kashgar – Street View

Kashgar – Street View (Tom, Dick & Harry)

On the Saturday, having done our duty, as good conforming tourists, of visiting all the mandatory mosques, graves and other landmarks, we awoke the next day (after a better night in Qinibagh Mk.II) ready to visit the famous Sunday Market. This market is the economic, social and cultural hub of the week and people driving their animals to market pour into Kashgar from up to a hundred miles or more around.

During Sunday Market, the population of the town doubles from some 200,000 to 400,000. Onlookers like ourselves have to pick their way between drovers with their sheep, goats, cows, yaks, dzos, horses, donkeys, mules and camels being bought and sold in a jam as tight as any on Cup Final day. The streets are full of wonderful characters, young and old, shouting "Busht, Busht, Busht" which means "get out of my way" or something along those lines. Outside of the animal market, there is an endless maze of aisles which one can wander for hours, getting hopelessly and happily lost but fascinated by the extent of the wares on sale. People are often curious but overwhelmingly friendly and smiles are readily returned on every side. Marian bought some very attractive Chinese silks and I found some nice trousers, all at prices that would be unthinkable at home. My slacks, including the cost of shortening the leg ("will take only 20 minutes, honourable master – took over an hour) cost me in RBM Yuan the equivalent of £3.50. Nice cloth, well tailored; thirty five quid at home if they cost a penny. Never mind the quality, feel the width. Had we not been constrained by considerations of space and weight, we would have bought lots more. When we eventually got tired of wandering through the endless aisles, we took a ride on one of the donkey carts for a cost of 1 Yuan (British 8p for both of us and the guide). We got our guide to tell the owner that we’d treble the fare to 24p if he didn’t whip his poor donkey - at least whilst we were aboard. This produced a toothless grin and the contract was obviously clinched. After a fascinating day, we made our way back to the wretched Qinibagh via The People’s Square where we admired what has to be the largest statue of Chairman Mao in the Known Universe.

The Great Helmsman

Kashgar Sunday Market – Animal Section

Sunday Market – Main Board of Directors

Marian Interviewing Kashgar Superintendent of Secret Police

Then came the Monday morning and for myself it was as if all the foregoing had been but preamble. Here we were at the start of what I was expecting to be a fascinating journey along the KKH, a drive about which I had dreamt for so long. We had once again had an English speaking guide meet us at the Kashgar airport on the Friday evening – one Abdul-henni whose English was deliciously quaint but fairly comprehensible – and he had been with us trailing us around Kashgar on and off over the Saturday and the Sunday. Now he was waiting for us at 8am outside the hotel together with a fairly respectable looking red Toyota Landcruiser and a moon-faced Uighur driver named Pirhat to take us on the first part of the KKH and over the top to Sust in Pakistan.

Before loading our luggage into the vehicle, Marian peered in and promptly advised me that she was going to sit in front with the driver. I was to sit at the rear with our guide. I told her that this wasn’t going to work. It would be impossible to take any worthwhile photographs from such a position with the four different cameras which we had expressly brought with us for the purpose. "That’s tough ... I can’t sit there" (gesturing towards the second row of seats). So we set off on the start of our drive, stopping first to purchase some 30 or so small bottles of drinking water to last us into Pakistan. Before we had reached the edge of town I had cricked my neck taking several completely worthless photographs. Marian was reluctantly forced to concede that, from a camera point of view, video and still, the seating arrangement was less than ideal. Having won the initial trial of strength outside the hotel, she retired with fairly good grace to the second tier behind the driver and permitted me and the four cameras to take residence in the front passenger seat.

Kashgar lies at around 4,000 feet, at the western end of the Takla Makan, on an upland plain. In ancient times it served as an oasis in an otherwise fairly waterless environment. Nowadays with a well developed system of irrigation catching melt waters from the mountains in the south, there is evidently a well-developed agriculture on the edge of the desert. At first the KKH goes south through gentle agricultural country, the road lined with poplar trees and a little bumpy in places but by and large no worse than many country roads in the United Kingdom. After about an hour across this flat countryside and through two or three local market villages, a rampart wall of hills begins to loom on the horizon and after some 50 miles, the road enters a wide but gradually narrowing defile known as the Ghez Gorge and begins to climb a little. The surface becomes very bad as the gorge narrows to the point where winter rains take over the flood plain and cause considerable damage. Road gangs are in evidence here even in summer and are witness to the frequent rock-falls and landslides along this stretch.

Ghez Gorge View

After climbing gently but perceptibly for some time, the road eventually emerges from the gorge onto the beginnings of a broad alpine plateau. The Ghez River which carved the gorge has become a wide and meandering marshland and further gentle climbs over considerable distances gradually take one from around the five to six thousand feet of the Ghez Gorge up to between nine and ten thousand feet. Gradually the Chinese Pamirs with their distinctive rounded tops take up flank on both sides of the plateau and after about four hours from Kashgar, one can discern, for the first time, two of the many major mountains dominating the KKH - Mount Kongur and Muztagh Ata. These giants rise above the highland plains to around 25,000 feet. That they look perhaps a little less than awesome is due to one’s own vantage point elevation of around ten thousand feet.

As one moves higher, the road surface, by and large, improves. This seemed rather odd. But then, we found lots of things odd in China, not least the subject of time. Although China has three time zones, the whole country runs on Beijing time. This means that in Urumqi and Kashgar there is Beijing time and there is local time and woe betide one if one gets them confused. Buses, air and train timetables run on Beijing time which is three hours earlier than local time. Get it wrong and you miss your flight or whatever. Then there is the extra one hour of summer time whereas at the border the time change to Pakistani time can be three hours or four hours as the case may be – but not, of course, from local time .... When we took the drive to Heaven Lake on our only full day in Urumqi, Alim had proposed picking us up at 9.30 in the morning. Canny travellers that we were and not to be caught, we had said "Aha, that’s 9.30 local time, 6.30am Beijing time – OK?". "Sure", says he, "No problem. 6.30am Beijing time. Good Night". For all that, he called up to our room at 6.30am local time when we were fast asleep. When we bade him a face to face Good Morning twenty minutes later with less than good grace, he apologised with a breezy nonchalance and told us he had forgotten because everyone is so used to this crazy time system that it becomes effectively subliminal. The next day we went and had what we thought was a remarkably good breakfast buffet at 10.30am. When they gave us our bill, we found that we had had lunch (at twice the price of breakfast) because it was now 1.30pm Beijing time and breakfast had finished at 7.30am local time.

Anyway, to return to the travelogue, we moved ever higher with the road to ourselves for long stretches. Traffic, fairly sparse over the whole KKH, is even lighter in China than across the border in Pakistan. It tends to consist, in the main, of the occasional ramshackle bus moving between the Chinese border town of Tashkurgan and Kashgar or of lumbering container lorries on their way back from the Pakistan border to Kashgar or Urumqi. Between the top of the Ghez gorge and our overnight stop of Karakul Lake we passed, from time to time, small Khirgiz settlements on both sides of the road. Sometimes these would consist of as little as half a dozen sun-baked mud houses side by side with the occasional yhurt. Colourfully clad herdsmen (and herdswomen) on horseback ride through roadside pastures being grazed by Yaks, Dzos (crosses between a Yak and a cow), goats and camels. On one occasion our driver did a fine job of braking sharply and swerving to avoid the destruction of a camel seemingly bent upon suicide. We thought this area was "made for" John Wayne, sternly surveying the far distant horizon and muttering "let’s move it on out ..." The largest settlement at Balunkul is about five hours south of Kashgar at which point the road is gated. The gates are usually open but a barrier stays down until one has gone through a passport check.

Police Checkpoint at Barakul

South of this checkpoint the KKH gradually ascends further through a series of switchbacks with wide vistas to the distant mountains on both sides of the plateau before reaching, at some six to seven hours south of Kashgar, the lonely Karakul Lake at around 12,000 feet which was to be our first night stop.

Karakul Lake with Chinese Pamirs

Local Tajik Entrepreneurs Waiting to Sell Marian Something

The area is beautiful in a rugged sort of way. The lake is about a mile wide in both directions nestling under the shadow of 25,000 feet Muztagh Ata and its foothills to the south and Mount Kongur (25,500 feet) and other rounded Pamir peaks to the north-east. A restricted area of small Khirgiz settlements dot the far side of the lake. Nobody seems to know why they are restricted but nobody checks for the requisite pass. The main stopping area (one building and a few yhurts) abuts the KKH. Here one can, at certain times, get a spartan meal of sorts (at monopolistically astronomical prices) and there are some dormitory bunks at the back of the building which the only available guidebook (Lonely Planet) sternly warns against. Marian and I, being two of only five Westerners in evidence, were able to rent a yhurt for the night. We wandered along the shore of the lake for a while but one was well aware of any exertion at 12,000 feet. Marian was persuaded to go ride a camel and I watched her gently swaying on the camel’s back like a slow-moving metronome. It all helped to pass the time. At around 9pm all activity seemed to cease other than the gentle chugging of a lone electrical generator in a nearby hut. By this time night had already descended. The relative warmth of the sunny day had become a bitterly cold night which sent us to our yhurt. We seemed to be all alone in a great mountain fastness, all silent but for the generator. This served to provide area electricity including the power to drive the solitary light bulb in our yhurt. The light, albeit dim, sufficed to serve our needs until 11pm when the generator suddenly stopped and we were plunged into the instantaneous stygian blackness of our windowless surroundings with a moon-less night outside. It was to prove one of the longest nights of our lives. Despite wrapping ourselves in the generous supply of blankets and duvets provided for overnight residents, it was teeth-chatteringly cold with a prevailing silence that was verging on eerie. Neither of us slept a wink all night and we didn’t have a flashlight (nobody had warned us to buy one in the market in Kashgar). The only way we could check on the time was by my groping for my mobile phone (which of course didn’t work here) lying somewhere on the floor next to me and pressing the "on" button which gave a bit of momentary dim light for just long enough to read the watch.

During the night we both needed to answer calls of nature so we braced ourselves to face the temperatures outside of the duvets and got up. In total blackness, we groped our way to the door of the yhurt. When we got out into the very uncertain light of a dim moon casting flat shadows around us, we saw, to our alarm, that the area immediately alongside on both sides of our yhurt was crammed with the sleeping forms of men on the ground wrapped tightly in blankets to keep out the cold. Marian was terrified! I was pretty uneasy. Where had they come from? How was it that we had not heard them wrap themselves up? How had we not heard the drone of their conversation prior to their or our falling asleep? Fearful of waking any of these robust and potentially hostile mountain men, we tip-toed nervously to a spot sufficiently remote to dare to answer the call of nature without inviting any ecological complaint from any of these fellows whom we might have awoken. Then we carefully crept back to and into our yhurt.

Minutes seemed like hours through an endless night until the first shafts of dawn came and we were able to get dressed and venture outside. The sleeping figures of the night turned out to be, in the early morning light, so many piles of stones which we had not even noticed in the daylight of the previous evening before turning in. Alas, we were both too tired and too cold to see the funny side. The restaurant area was still shut and there was nobody around for quite some time so we disconsolately wandered the shoreline once more and shivered. Anything was better than going back into the gloomy yhurt where minutes were as hours. It seemed an age before the first signs of movement manifested themselves above us at the cafe and we were able to thaw out with a hot drink.

Muztagh Ata south of Karakul Lake

(Yhur-t)urn to make the bed, Darling | Yhur’too Kind! (1)

(Yhur-t)urn to make the bed, Darling | Yhur’too Kind! (2)

Around 8.30am the guide and the driver appeared. The driver – the guide told us – had been up most of the night playing cards with other overnighters in the dreadful dormitory and had apparently lost quite a lot of money. His mood, consequently, was pretty curmudgeonly. When we asked the guide to warn him that we might report in high places in Beijing his behaviour towards foreign guests, his attitude improved. I said to the guide that if he hadn’t slept much, the KKH wasn’t the place to nod off whilst driving. "Don’t worry", said the guide, looking worried. "Why don’t you drive?", said Marian. I pointed out that suggesting this could have the makings of an international incident. Then I asked the guide, who had been here before, for directions to the men’s toilet and he looked distinctly uneasy. So I thought to ask him if the toilets were terrible and he responded to the effect that they were "a little bit terrible". Despite having been forewarned, when I found them, away in a distant concrete bunker, they were a very enormous bit terrible. After recovering from both this culture shock and the sorry looking spread that went for breakfast, we were ready for the second leg to the Khunjerab Pass and Pakistan. The sun was already promising a second day’s pleasant weather as we turned from the Karakul settlement back onto the KKH and lumbered off southwards.

Moving off from Karakul Lake the road is fairly flat at first, snaking across the wide pastures of the Subash Plateau before gradually ascending another 1,000 feet to around 13,000 feet before descending once more to the little town of Tashkurgan where China has its immigration and exit formalities.

Subash Plateau in the Chinese High Pamirs

Between Karakul Lake and Tashkurgan the KKH makes its closest approach to Tajikistan (about 7 miles) and to the Wakhan corridor of Afghanistan (20 miles). Whilst the actual China/Pak geographical border is at the Khunjerab pass, there is a sort of no-man’s land of over 100 miles between leaving/entering China and entering/leaving Pakistan at Sust. After a long drive through the Chinese Pamirs with wonderful long range vistas left and right we rolled into Tashkurgan and the Chinese frontier station around lunch-time. It was here that our guide was to leave us. Unlike our driver and his vehicle, Abdul-Henni was not licensed to proceed any further. We bade him goodbye in the customary manner with American dollars. He would make his way back to Kashgar by whatever means presented themselves, bus or otherwise. There is not much to Tashkurgan other than that it is the administrative centre of Xinjiang’s Tajik Autonomous County, has a couple of awful hotels and restaurants and a bus station. Passing through Chinese formalities was painless and swift and after twenty minutes or so we drove, now only three of us, out of the customs yard and back onto the road. The barrier was raised with a salute and we were off once more southwards towards Pakistan with communication between our driver and ourselves now reduced to sign language and smiles.

Crossed the Chinese Frontier at Tashkurgan and Heading for Pakistan

The road had descended from 13,000 feet to the north to a "mere" 10,000 feet at Tashkurgan. Now we would be climbing once more to 16,000 feet to cross the watershed down into Pakistan. I had bought a little hand-held altimeter before we left the UK and had had great fun with it all the way from Kashgar. I was intrigued with its apparent accuracy as we climbed higher and was looking forward to checking the read-out at the pass. Like a little boy with a toy, said Marian. Be that as it may, on the broad grassy plain around Pirali at some 14,000 feet it suddenly chose to pack up for no apparent reason. It was calibrated to 24,000 feet and this wasn’t supposed to happen. It was doubly annoying because from where it gave up its ghost the road started to climb steeply through a number of hairpin bends up towards the watershed. After all, it was for the Khunjerab that I had bought the wretched thing. A final Chinese checkpoint just below the pass waved us through and we were at the top.

I had expected to find one’s breathing impaired to some extent at 16,000 feet. My cardiologist had said that he would prefer me not to go on this trip if it meant such a high altitude. I had then canvassed the opinion of an aviation medicine specialist at the CAA whom I vaguely knew from my having held a professional flying licence. I had been so pleased to have his opinion that we would have no difficulty breathing at 16,000 feet so I made myself believe that my cardiologist was being over-cautious. In the event the doctor at the CAA was right because both Marian and I found ourselves less short of breath at 16,000 feet than we had been whilst walking on the shore at Karakul’s 12,000 feet. The air outside was cold but bracing. Despite the temperature, I was so fascinated to be at this spot that I wandered about in a short-sleeved shirt whilst Marian was wearing three layers of sweater!

No two sources agree on the exact altitude at Khunjerab Top but 16,000 feet or just over appears to be broadly accepted. It is certainly thought to be the highest paved international road border crossing in the world. Surprisingly, also perhaps one of the most relaxed. With frontier formalities taking place miles away in both directions, the military personnel of both nations, in their own uniforms, seem to have little to do at the top other than smile for the occasional camera and pass the rest of the day chatting with each other in the local Barashushki language spoken on both sides of the political divide. The pass is a broad grassy saddle with snowy peaks sweeping upwards to the left and the right. Crossing in September, the road was wide open and clear of snow. From October onwards Khunjerab starts to snow up and the KKH is officially closed from mid-November.

There is a dramatic and immediate change in landscape at the pass from one geology to another. Khunjerab is significant, moreover, in terms of physical geography in that it marks the continental watershed, with rivers to the south flowing down towards the distant Indian Ocean and rivers to the north flowing into China’s Tarim basin and evaporating). It also acts as a distinct junction between two major mountain chains (the much older Pamirs to the north and the relatively young Karakoram). On account of this, the physical terrain varies considerably on either side of the pass, with the wide, grassy high altitude plateaux of the Pamirs on the Chinese side giving way to tight and chaotically shattered narrow canyon defiles and gorges in the Karakoram. These canyons remain with the KKH for much of the next several hundred miles southwards towards the plains of the Punjab.

You Are Now Entering The People’s Republic

Khunjerab Top – Pakistani & Chinese Military

Khunjerab Top

After taking lots of photographs, mindful of the years I had dreamt of standing here, we were off downhill moving from the right hand lane of China to the left hand lane of Pakistan. South of the pass, the KKH descends steeply into Pakistan first via a series of about twenty hairpin bends before entering a narrow canyon made by the Khunjerab River through a shattered area notorious for slip and general instability. In 1998, a huge landslide dammed the Khunjerab river at this point preventing all traffic from passing and forcing travellers to make a difficult 30 minute detour around the blockage. Local people made a killing, charging $10 a bag to carry bags over the difficult terrain. There are a number of checkpoints on the descent to Sust and on the way down a jeep road leads off into a side valley to Misgar. An ancient strand of the Silk Road trading route used to run north from Misgar crossing into Chinese territory by way of the Mintaka Pass and the Killik Pass, both at around 15,000 feet. These passes were of great strategic concern to the British who feared a Russian invasion of India in the 19^th century, particularly when they received a report in 1874 claiming the Killik Pass to be "of remarkably easy access". A British mission was despatched there in 1885 found the passes to be a nightmare, losing two porters through exposure and with all the party suffering from snow blindness. In 1893 the British had concluded "we have no reason to fear a Russian advance through the passes". When the KKH was being constructed, the route through the Mintaka Pass was considered but was rejected as lying too close to the Afghan and the Soviet borders.

Eventually we emerged from a steep narrow canyon to arrive at the Pakistani border formalities at 10,500 feet in Afiyatabad ("New" Sust). Sust and its "new" satellite are a pretty unsalubrious collection of bric-a-brac shops in jerry-built buildings all vying to sell to exit or entrance travellers all sorts of things they couldn’t possibly want to purchase. We did not think the two villages made for the sort of introduction to Pakistan that the Pak Ministry of Tourism would have sought. Nevertheless, the border personnel, being somewhat short of punters, were courteous and helpful and formalities were accomplished swiftly enough if somewhat chaotically and on what appeared to us to be a charmingly ad hoc basis.

Sust International Terminal – Immigration & Customs Facilities on A Busy Day

It was in the Sust customs post marshalling yard that we said goodbye to Pirhat, our Uighur driver. It seemed that he was apparently intending to return that day as far as Karakul. We were sorry that language constraints prevented us from being able to warn him against trying to get his money back, Las Vegas style, in the dreadful dormitory that night. Our Pakistani transport was already waiting for us – driver and, as guide, the same young man who had met us at Islamabad Airport on the outbound leg – no nice Landcruiser but a pleasant enough utility van. Having transferred our belongings from one vehicle to the other, we handed another "Thank You" in US dollars to our Chinese driver who turned back towards the pass whilst we went down the road towards the famous Hunza and Nagar Valley some three hours further south. On the way, the KKH passes through very impressive scenery as it winds its way ever lower through the pretty villages around Morkhun and Passu alive with people walking on both sides of the road. Gone was the "Central Asia" feel evident from Khunjerab northwards. Here all the men were already dressed in shalwar kameez and the women, (readily in evidence up here as opposed to lower down the KKH where they effectively disappear from sight altogether), sported pretty multicoloured Gujal and Hunza hats and shawls. Below Passu the KKH goes through Gulmit village where it skirts the edge of the huge Baltoro glacier which ever threatens the road with damage before the narrow valley gradually opens out into the beautiful area of Central Hunza and Nagar, which was to be our second night-stop at Karimabad.

For breath-taking beauty, the Hunza Valley is the centre-piece of the KKH. The area first achieved international acclaim in the 1930’s when James Hilton’s book "Lost Horizon" became an instant best-seller. Most commentators accept that the author took the central Hunza valley as the setting for his "Shangri-la" Himalayan kingdom of endless happiness and peace. Hunza is a natural amphitheatre formed by a surround of high snowy peaks with seemingly dry and barren canyons opening out onto grassy pastures with apple and apricot orchards and hundreds of ingeniously engineered terraced fields in layer upon vertical layer irrigated from the perennial snows above. The people living here are mainly Ismaeli Muslims and look to the Aga Khans, who have done much for the area, as their spiritual leaders. There is no purdah system here and the women work alongside the men in the fields unlike further south on the KKH where women are not to be seen in the streets at all. The people of this area, the Hunzakuts, are said to be the most friendly and welcoming people in all of Pakistan. It is not unusual to meet blue-eyed and fair-skinned locals up here.

Alexander the Great brought his armies through here and some ethnologists maintain that those in the area with such complexions are still descended from those in Alexander’s armies who chose to remain here. Notwithstanding the fame of this area, until the building of the KKH, those seeking to reach Hunza would either reach it by helicopter or face a hazardous journey by jeep or mule train over precipitous tracks often high up on vertical canyon walls. Fatal accidents to travellers were commonplace .

Rakaposhi From PTDC Motel Garden - Hunza

Hunza - Baltit Fort with Ultar Peak

We checked in at the Pakistan Tourist Development Corporation’s pleasant motel right alongside the KKH. We enjoyed the late afternoon sunshine in the hotel garden with kaleidoscopic views of mighty mountains all around us then had a pleasant dinner and being tired from our lack of sleep the previous night, we turned in for an early night. This was the night of September 11^th. The time in New York was some ten hours earlier and the terrorists had not yet done their dreadful work. We were woken up at around 6am the next morning, Wednesday, with the news of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and with a subsequently unfounded rumour that the US had already launched missile attacks on Afghanistan in retaliation. Disbelief and dismay was in the air and everyone was clustered around the satellite television set broadcasting reports in Urdu. Having crossed the border from China only the previous day, we were suddenly very aware of being in Pakistan, in a remote area at that, and potentially in an environment not entirely unsympathetic to the perpetrators of these horrifying acts of wanton destruction. A group of eight Americans in a mini-bus were the only other Westerners at the motel and they, like us, had also crossed from China the previous day. Now, having held a discussion amongst themselves, they announced that rather than face the next three days of driving south through the narrow tribal areas along the KKH, they were going to retrace their steps to Khunjerab and back into China. This seemed to us to be an unnecessarily draconian solution but Marian and I were nonetheless not unhappy at being British rather than American.

Mountains in Hunza

Mountains In Hunza

Numbed at the news from New York and not yet knowing about the second WTC tower, we nevertheless continued, after an early lunch, with our intended itinerary southwards and to lower altitudes. It seemed to us that our Pakistani companion had become somewhat withdrawn. It was difficult to know whether this was somehow wanting to distance himself from his Westerner clients or on account of worrying for his country, his job and the Muslim world in general.

The Hunza area is properly known as "Hunza and Nagar". The primary waterway, which had been with us since it was a tiny trickle at Khunjerab, had now broadened into the rapidly flowing Hunza River. Here the river divides two sides of the valley with Hunza on the west and Nagar on the east. In former days the two societies maintained at best an uneasy hostility interspersed by periodic skirmishes. Nowadays there is a bridge across the river but something of an "us" and "them" atmosphere still remains with Hunza enjoying the lion’s share of the economic advantages which the KKH has brought to these remote areas, although Nagar has the larger population. As we drove southwards, we enjoyed the lush greenery on both sides of the road, so lacking in the Chinese Pamirs, and the soaring mountains all around us with the 26,000 feet Rakaposhi giant rearing high above the left side of the road. Gradually the valley narrows below Ghulmet and the line of the road becomes somewhat precipitous up above the river. It is from here southwards that the road-builders’ art really comes into its own.

Hunza to Gilgit – Typical Stretch

By late afternoon we had reached Gilgit town, the administrative centre of Pakistan’s Northern Areas and our next scheduled night-stop. Gilgit is a principal hub on the KKH, has an airfield intermittently served, subject to weather conditions, from Islamabad and various hotels and restaurants. The town is actually about 4 miles off the KKH to the north-west in an area which, below the verdant upper valleys, is drab and austere. We found ourselves to be the only westerners in the hotel and again spent most of the evening clustered around the half-hourly broadcasts giving the latest reports of the horrors in New York and Washington in Urdu and translated for us by fellow-listeners.

They Actually Meet A Few Centimetres Right of Where’s She’s Pointing

The next day’s journey was a nine hour drive down through Baltistan, Chilas, Dasu, Pattan and Kohistan to our third Pakistani nightstop at Besham. Before leaving Gilgit, we made quick stops at the airfield, deciding it was probably no competition for Heathrow and at the famous polo ground where they tried to convince us that nowadays the severed head of an opposing tribesman is but rarely substituted for the puck.

Hunza River from the Left Joins Indus Coming From Baltistan & Tibet

High Noon in Downtown Chilas

Nanga Parbat Hidden by Clouds

An unmistakable feature of the region between Gilgit and Chilas is the massive Nanga Parbat "The Killer Mountain". This giant of the Western Himalayas rises to just under 27,000 feet and the mountain’s sheer south face, the Rupal Wall, rises vertically an unbroken 13,000 feet from the bed of the River Indus gorge. This constitutes one of the highest vertical faces in the world. It is an area of geological instability where the plates of the Indian sub-continent and the Asian landmass meet. South of Gilgit, the Skardu road branches off to the left to follow the Indus valley towards the K2 area in Baltistan proper and towards the troubled Siachen Glacier face-off and the Indian-Pak disputed Line of Control. There is a good view, weather willing, of Nanga Parbat from here. Just south of the Skardu turn-off is the confluence of the Hunza river and the Indus coming out of Tibet. From this point southwards we followed the Indus for over 200 miles through the precipitous confines of Kohistan - "The Land of Mountains" .

Kohistan has the reputation of being a fairly unfriendly sort of area, conservative and unwelcoming towards outsiders and even to those foreigners where Muslim rules of etiquette dictate hospitality. It runs in the main through the Indus gorge separating the Hindu Kush from the Western Himalayas and is largely dark, grey and gloomy. Kohistan begins, going southwards, at Chilas – itself an unpleasant looking place – and continues south to the Thakot Bridge where the KKH finally leaves the Indus. The precipitous terrain of Kohistan make it one of the most harrowing passages in Asia. It is also not for nothing that the area was once nicknamed "Yaghistan – Land of the Ungoverned". A traveller, passing this way many hundreds of years ago, wrote "The road is difficult and broken with steep crags and precipices in the way. The mountainside is like a stone wall 10,000 feet high. Looking down, the sight is confused and there is no sure foothold. In the old days, men bored through the walls to make a way and spread out ladders of which there are some 70 in all to pass. Having passed these, we proceed by a hanging rope bridge to cross the river". Nothing much had changed in hundreds of years before the coming of the KKH. When its forerunner road, now abandoned, was being driven into these remote canyons, the locals even offered the road-builders hay for their jeeps!

Indus River Gorge – Kohistan

The stretch of the KKH between Dasu and Pattan is the most exposed of the whole way from China to Islamabad. Here the road is at once photogenic and hair-raising as illustrated to some extent by these photographs. It runs, in places, is as much as 1,500 feet above the river flowing along the valley floor. This, in itself, would not be too great a cause for concern were it not for the fact that long stretches have no side guards of stones or metal railing. It was in these parts of the road that our driver was consistently determined to show us his rallying talents. He would accelerate into bends, delighting in making the stones at the edge of the paved area go flying into the abyss. Every request from us to take the corners and the unguarded sections with more consideration for our nerves would produce a courteous smile and a nod of the head and he would slow back. Within five or ten minutes the devil would take over once more and off he’d go accelerating into the next hair-raising bend. As much as this scared us both, we were reluctant to read the riot act to a Pathan in a Pathan area. We were not experts on Pakistani masculine macho so we just put our trust in God and the four tyres and were not a little relieved to eventually descend from these horrors to the open valley town of Pattan. This relief was short-lived as the KKH once again re-ascends onto the side of the cliff above the gorge for a further blood-curdling run down to Besham. It was in these areas that the builders of the KKH met some of their most intractable problems and the most copious fatalities, often hanging from suspended slings hundreds of feet long as they set explosive charges into the cliff faces.

Indus River Gorge - Kohistan

It was a pale Marian who finally turned into the parking lot of our little guest house at Besham at the end of this drive of over nine hours from Gilgit. "You can give me ten thousand pounds cash", she said, "and I wouldn’t do that drive again". Perhaps something of an exaggeration but Kohistan is, to say the least, interesting driving. It was now Thursday evening and the US had already been putting pressure on Pakistan to join the "anti-terror" alliance so when we went down to the little dining room for some dinner we were greeted with some distinctly hostile glances from two fierce looking gentlemen clad all in white on a neighbouring table. Over a curried dinner at adjacent tables, they appeared, it seemed to us, to be plotting our imminent destruction with frequent scowling glances in our direction interspersed with whispered conversation. We asked our guide who these gentlemen were and were told that they were fundamentalist clerics involved in local politics. It occurred to us that local politics as far as Islamic fundamentalists were concerned could involve the kidnap and disappearance of passing Westerners. The guide darkly advised us not to look too hard in their direction, and to go to bed, lock the door and place a chair against the handle. We ate little – needless to say - and made ourselves scarce as soon as possible feeling not a little glad that, were we to survive this night, the next one would be back in Rawalpindi.

Having passed, notwithstanding worst fears to the contrary, an uninterrupted night, we embarked once more for the final run down to Islamabad. About an hour south of Besham with the mountains gradually falling away, we entered the province of Hazara where, a short distance beyond the strategic Raikot Bridge – one of the largest of all bridges between Kashgar and Islamabad - the KKH finally leaves the Indus which turns away to the south-west and Peshawar.

Goodbye Indus – Having Followed A River Since Khunjerab

The KKH continues to move into ever gentler countryside through pine woods and vistas reminiscent of the lower alpine areas of Switzerland and Austria. These wooded areas in turn give way to intensely cultivated agricultural areas until, having passed through the town of Mansehra, it finally finishes (or starts depending on which way you’re travelling) at the railhead in Havelian. Shortly thereafter the southern extension of the KKH meets the Great Trunk Road linking Peshawar (and – via the Khyber – Europe) with Rawalpindi/Islamabad (and – in the days of the British Raj - Delhi and Calcutta).

It was early evening by the time we reached the city. We could sense that nerves in Pakistan were generally starting to get frayed. One even felt that the cordiality and courtesy of the first days in the Hunza and Gilgit areas were being replaced by a certain sense of reserve on the part of some Pakistanis. It was now Friday and the USA was already putting heavy and undisguised pressure on President General Musharref to fall this way or that in the coming war on terrorism. Sitting on the fence was no longer an option said George W. Bush but the more radical folks were already starting to show their disapproval in quite a vocal manner.

Having joined, at Taxila, the thundering wall of moving metal on the GTR from Peshawar to the Twin Cities, the KKH already seemed a million miles away. We thought back upon those hundreds of miles where we had scarcely passed anything faster than a camel and it had been worth every moment of the experience. We checked in at Rawalpindi’s Pearl Continental Hotel and put ourselves under the powerful shower for the best soak since Urumqi. We learnt that British Airways had stopped running its Islamabad flights from the day before and that that morning (Friday), the Islamabad International Airport had been temporarily closed on account of a security scare. "Some US transport planes were supposed to be landing without authorisation" – this turned out to be media hysteria without a grain of truth but nervousness was abroad everywhere.

Grand Trunk Road

The next day, having fought our way through the chaos at Islamabad International departures – even more chaotic, with all the nervousness around, than when we had made our way to the China flight (was it really only nine days ago) - we duly got our seats on the PIA flight to London. This sat on the tarmac for over two hours waiting for London to give inbound clearance for an aircraft of an Islamic Republic to over-fly central London (the tension in things aeronautical was still intense) but eventually we took off on an uneventful flight home.

Below is a picture of the intrepid Mrs Gregory at the top of descent into London’s Heathrow some 8 hours later.

Recommended Reading (and with acknowledgements to) –

Karakoram Highway (by Lonely Planet Books)

Footprint Pakistan (by Footprint Handbooks)

Bob Gregory

November 2001

Revised October 2005