It was agreed we would go up to see a local lake/beauty spot in the morning before leaving Chilas as it was only about an hour in each direction and the lake is famous for its beauty. This was up a very bumpy track past where a couple of new hotels are being built – they will need to improve the track! Mind you, the track got even worse beyond that point, and suddenly around a bend we had to stop as the rain of the previous evening had washed out the track.  There was a whole gaggle of jeeps there, and a group of men had organised themselves to try and repair the road, but this was clearly going to take some time. Ever enterprising, at the far side of the washed-out road another group of men had organised horses to carry those brave enough to wade through the stream up to the lake. It was all very jolly and clearly accepted as an every-day part of life in this part of the world. However, we did not have the time to wait, so a multi-point turn was done and we headed back down the hill.

 

 Back in Naran, the jeeps dropped us at the top of the bazaar (high street) and we walked through looking at all the colourful little shops. We were then accosted (for the first time, but certainly not the last time) by a local who was most concerned that we should like Pakistan and find its people friendly. This was a reaction we had throughout the trip, whether the people were locals or whether they were Pakistani tourists such as the group of lawyers from Lahore that we met on the Deosi plateau. They really do not get many Western tourists, and certainly not in 2008, for tourism was around 75% down even on 2007.

 

It is 105km from Naran to Chilas; the first and last 20km are on metalled road but the middle 65km is unmade and takes 5 hours as it passes over the Babusar Pass which rises to 4,175m – that’s 13,650ft in old money, so it’s pretty high then. Even on the metalled first 20km we lost count of the number of landslides onto the road, some of which had effectively destroyed the road surface completely so that we had to drive over rubble.

 

  

 

 

The first time you come across a decent sized landslide you are pretty awestruck, but after a while, you just get used to them, and then once you are on the KKH, you realized that they were rather minor affairs in the great landslide scheme of things.

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The previous day’s rain had made the unmade track very difficult indeed, with going down slopes (the word ’track’ implies a degree of formality that was simply missing for large sections) being more difficult than going up.

 

In the photograph on the left it may look as if we are driving along a river, but we are most certainly driving along the track! At one point we had to wait for half an hour whilst the track was reconnected to a bridge – it having been washed away in the rain. Theoretically the whole route is being up-graded and so a various places there were work crews, some with JCB type kit and others without – i.e. with picks and shovels. The trouble was that you could not see the reasoning for why the work crews were where they were, their positioning seemed utterly random, certainly there was no concept of starting at one end and ending at the other. It is also a fact that the sections that were being worked on were inevitably more impassable and churned-up than the other sections. After about three hours of track we got to the top of the pass where it was cold, cloudy and raining – there was even a work crew there! The way down the pass was taken very carefully, Eidjan who was driving our jeep stayed behind Ishaq who clearly ranked as the more senior in the scheme of things. It was not always easy to see where the track went, or which track to take, and at one point this necessitated an eight-point turn round to re-trace a couple of kilometres.

 

We had taken almost the whole track in four wheel drive, but so muddy and slippery were parts of the route that, almost at the very bottom, we say a 4x4 Toyota Landcruiser being aided by being pushed up one section; bizarrely there was actually a car behind it that was intending to try the route – no chance.

  

It must have been a very tiring day for Eidjan and Ishaq, and it is impossible adequately describe how difficult the track was, but it was certainly an adventure.

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