Babusar Pass

What a full and exciting day. We were off down the hill at 7 am, after porridge and omelette. It was a beautiful morning though of course cold. The sun shone on Nanga Parbat but didn’t reach us till we got to the jeeps 1.75 hours later. We were able to enjoy the views ahead of Rakaposhi and Haramosh, and turned round for our last views of Nanga Parbat, as we knew the slower walkers were behind us so we had plenty of time. We hadn’t really appreciated how steep the ascent towards the end had been till we started off down. No wonder we were a bit puffed. It was a great walk up to Fairy Meadows though and we were so lucky to get such clear morning views of the mountain.

We had to negotiate the steep sandy eroded path down to the stream, get across that and up the steeper side to reach the fleet of jeeps. We had bit of a wait for some of the others. Asif found us and we set off driving down the hairy track. It was more scary going down as the stones were unstable and caused slippage of the tyres. We got down in 1.5 hours to find Jude our UK leader waiting with the bus.

We left at 11.30 on the KKH following the Indus. It was spectacular. We stopped at a village for a tasty lunch of pilau rice, okra and dahl, then continued to the checkpoint near Chilas where an armed guard joined us. We were in the NW Frontier area, a tribal area, which has been renamed Kyber something. No doubt a bit like Windscale to Sellafield. 5 years ago all the girls’ schools in the area had been burned down as the militants did not agree with education for girls. (Malala lived in Swat not far away.)

For the next few hours the bus ground its way up the Babusar Pass. It took a couple of hours to negotiate all the bends and take turns with the vehicles coming down to use the least eroded bit of road. The area was much more heavily populated than I expected. We went up to 4600m, where it was snowing. (Dervla Murphy described cycling this in one of her books). The bus went over the top then stopped at a place with shack shops and lots of cars, with no view of the way we’d gone up. We dropped off our guard at a police post. Down the other side the road was even worse, with big holes and sometimes diggers moving the worst of the rockfalls over the edge. We stopped at a little lake to take photos. A man from Karachi asked if he could take my photo with his wife. Further on a new village of hotels was being constructed, for domestic tourism.

Eventually we reached our motel at Naran, at 8000ft. It is pretty basic. I don’t think the rich domestic tourists would stay here. We were so excited by the thought of a hot shower but were told there would be no electricity or hot water for at least an hour. There doesn’t appear to be WiFi either. Maybe tomorrow in Taxila. This should be out last cold night till Kashmir.