Palace on the Rock
31 May 2017
It is a handsome complex of stone-and-timber buildings virtually smothered with various fruit trees and grapevines. Here and there willows, their branches drooping narcissistically over water, are dwarfed by towering poplars where golden orioles sing and magpies engage in noisy arguments. Outside its boundary wall a tumultuous river crashes over rounded boulders on its way to pay tribute to the glacier-born stream that is here known as the Shigar. Not many miles to the southward, right outside Skardu the capital city of Baltistan in the Northern Areas, the Shigar River in turn yields its waters to the great Sindhu.
Outsiders simply know it as Shigar Fort, but for the people of Baltistan it is Fong Khar – Palace on the Rock. An apt enough name for the main wing of the building straddles a huge rock. Admittedly although the rock could not be moved, there being ample space, the palace could have been designed differently to avoid building around its protuberance. One wonders, therefore, why the builders incorporated the rocky mass into the design for it serves no apparent purpose other than giving the place its name.
Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:30,
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The old man of Ghund
26 May 2017
When he was finally himself again, Baba Ghundi told the woman that under no circumstances was she to leave her home because he was bringing down a flood of mud and stones to destroy the evil folk of Chapursan. For her kindness, she alone was to be spared.
Chapursan is a right picturesque valley that stretches from the Karakoram Highway at Sost a full sixty kilometres westward to the watershed of the 5185 metre-high Chilinji Pass. Well-watered by many silvery streams and fertilised by the fine loam left behind by a glacier that melted perhaps about four hundred years ago, Chapursan has rich farmlands and orchards. The people, of old Kirghiz stock who speak Wakhi, a language that descends from archaic Persian, are notable for their extreme hardihood and cheerfulness.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Lovelorn Poet
12 May 2017
As we lounged over tea in the little inn below Ajri Kandao, the poet caught up with us again. The haunting, faraway look was still there as he quietly came in and sat to one side of the single room inn. Wordlessly cradling his cup of tea in both hands he started to sip without looking up at anyone. Wazir Mohammed who sports the nom de plume of Sha’ir Wazir Mohammed Zakhmi, had to be coaxed into speaking.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Kaghan, Northern Pakistan, People, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Hisper: fortress of ice and snow
05 May 2017
The Biafo-Hisper glacial system, extending ninety-eight kilometres in a gleaming white line of ice clenched within the jaws of the most dramatic granite spires, is among the longest ice stream outside of the polar regions. Its southeast end rests a few kilometres from the Balti village of Askole while in the northwest the houses of Nagar feel the icy blasts of wind scudding down its surface.
Right in the middle, equidistant from both ends of the glacier, there sits the gentle saddle of the pass that the people of Nagar know as Hisper. For the people of Baltistan, this is R’Dzong La (Pass), however. Now, R’Dzong in Balti signifies a small defensive turret. The question is: why should anyone need a fortification 5230 metres above the sea on a glacier?
Labels: Book of Days 2011, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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On Mintaka
29 April 2017
Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Mintaka, Mountains, Northern Pakistan, Urdu
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Rupal: the south face of Nanga Parbat
28 April 2017
May 1994. Javid Anwer (JA) who heads Green Earth Organisation (GEO), an NGO that ‘cares for the environment,’ asked if I would like to join a cleaning expedition to the south face of Nanga Parbat in August. I had never seen this mountain close up and I did not have to think twice to say yes. In the end the expedition got delayed and it was in the third week of September that we arrived in Rawalpindi to fly to Gilgit.
As expeditions go Nanga Parbat Saviour 1994 was a pretty fancy one – with a name as pompous as that it was bound to be fancy. To begin with, it was to be multi-national, and it had a TV crew to film the operations. Naturally there was going to be an immense amount of equipment and a whole team of porters – just like any old climbing expedition. This meant not having to carry anything but your camera bag and some personal belongings while the food and tents were to be with the porters or the donkeys that were to be hired. After years of mountain walking on shoe string budgets where I had to carry everything myself this was a grand treat for me and I looked forward to it.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Mountaineering, Northern Pakistan, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Pakistan - a multi regional state
26 April 2017
The Great Asiatic Divide or the Great Asiatic Watershed formed by the line of the Himalayas and Karakorams divides the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia - the former being south of the line and the latter north of it. This line runs through K-2 to the west, sweeping northward to pass just south and west of Shuwert, the summer pasture in Shimshal. That is, Shuwert sits north of the Divide and therefore, geographically speaking, is located in Central Asia.
The windswept summer pasture of Shuwert has the unique distinction of being the only habitation in Pakistan that is actually in Central Asia
Shuwert can be reached the easy way (and you only know how easy (!) it is when you go) from Shimshal. Trek up the Shimshal River and if you are very fit you can get there in a single day's hike. If not, you overnight at Shuijerab and then climb up Shimshal Pass and reach Shuwert in about three hours.
Labels: Geography, Northern Pakistan, Shimshal
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Between Two Burrs on the Map
27 March 2017
I lay dozing on a commandeered charpai in the mellow early September sun of Sost, Pakistan's border post with China on the Karakoram Highway, when I was roused by a crisp 'Major Rashid'? The year was 1990, I was two-thirds through my long trek across the Western Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindu Kush.
Poised at the mouth of Chapursan to walk over the 5,200 metre-high Chillinji Pass into Ishkoman Valley, I had been told to inform before hand the commander at the remote military outpost of Baba Ghundi Ziarat. As I made inquiries about the man and if it was possible to get transport to the outpost, I was told that he, Niyat Khan, had only shortly before been spotted in Sost.
Read more »Labels: Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Men of Hunza
20 March 2017
In August 1861, the explorer Godwin-Austen was camped on the Panmah Glacier when he met four travellers coming down the icy slopes of the glacier above. They were Balti men returning home from Yarkand to meet friends and relatives. Godwin-Austen noted that they were very well-clothed and equipped and guessed that living in Yarkand had done them well in economic terms.
Though the explorer already knew of the depredations of the men of Hunza, he got first-hand information on the subject from his Balti visitors: the robbers from whom no one was safe were all over the place. The road across the glaciated Great Asiatic Divide to Raskam and beyond was within their reach. As well as that, they also prowled along the great trunk road from Leh that we today sometimes know as the Karakoram Route over the pass of the same name.
Read more »Labels: Explorers, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Shimshal, Travelers
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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کیا آپ نے کبھی دیوسائی کے بارے میں سنا ہے؟
18 February 2017
آپ پا کستان کے شمال میں واقع فلک بوس پہاڑی چوٹیوں کے بارے میں تو ضرور جانتے ہوں گے۔
کیا آپ نے کبھی دیوسائی کے بارے میں سنا ہے؟
یہ پاکستان کے شمالی علاقے سکردو کے قریب ایک بلند چوٹی پر واقع ایک مقام ہے۔ سفر نامے ویو سائی: ’لینڈ آف جائینمس‘ دیوسائی اور اس میں بسنے والے جائینس کے بارے میں ہے۔
یہ کون سی مخلوق ہے، اور دیوسائی کیسی جگہ ہے، اس بارے میں سنیے سفرنامے کے مصنف سلمان رشید سے بی بی سی اردو کی ماہ پارہ صفدر کی خصوصی گفتگو۔
Labels: Baltistan, BBC, Books, Deosai, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Gilgit–Baltistan, Nadeem Khawar, Northern Pakistan, Podcast, Travel Literature, Urdu, Wildlife
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Khunjerab: the upstart pass
11 January 2017
As renowned passes go, the 4730 metre-high Khunjerab is an upstart. Until the building of the Karakoram Highway it was a nonentity. For as long as humans have travelled, and they have travelled since the beginning of time, they sought the shortest route between two points. Consequently, to enter the habitable parts of Gojal and Hunza from the north or to travel the other way, they used the direct line over the Mintaka Pass.
Indeed, the Khunjerab Pass was no crossing point at all. Here in the wide open upper reach of the Hunza River valley the shepherds of Gojal herded their cattle in summer. Here the yak, so used to the arctic winds, fattened well on alpine grasses and flowers. But when the first snows fell in September, the herders withdrew, livestock and all, to the more amenable climes of their permanent villages lower down the valley. For the next seven months, the snow-swept uplands of Gojal remained inviolable.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2011, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The ‘exclusive’ traverse
09 May 2016
First things first. I wrote my requiem last year in August when I wept on the Mintaka Pass in Gojal. I had walked up unfit after a full year of living without a jot of exercise. To add to that, I had developed, right on the first day of the trek, the most horridly lurid blisters on both feet. I wept when I read on the crest of the pass how fit Peter Fleming had felt coming up from the Tashkurghan side. Sono (Rahman) Aunty called to say I had brought tears to her eyes and that I couldn’t give up so quickly. So, even without trying, I did not give up.
This year I returned to Shimshal after twenty years to walk to the summer pasture of Shuwert doing some work for Pakistan Petroleum Ltd. I was not prospecting for oil, though. Back in July 1990, with much less flab on the body and much more hair on the pate, I had done a traverse from Askole to Shimshal by the Biafo-Sim Gang-Braldu glacier system. Having crossed the 5700 metre-high Lukpe La, I became the first Pakistani to have done this traverse.
Labels: Mintaka, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Bearer of the Balti footprint
20 January 2016
Even today Raskam is just a collection of stone and mud huts, about 20 in all, sitting a couple of hundred metres above the rocky bed of a young Yarkand River. In those early days when the first Balti hunters approached it, Raskam would only have been a few felt yurts where the Kirghiz shepherds sheltered from the dry, freezing cold.
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The name, we are told, is a corruption of Rast Kan — the Good Mine. Early Victorian explorers wrote of good copper to be mined in the region. There were, they recorded, dozens of smelting furnaces around Raskam. The copper would have been exported to Yarkand, the nearest trading centre. Surely the Baltis would have asked about reaching this unknown place that sounded almost like an El Dorado.
Labels: Explorers, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Red Pass
23 November 2015
When I met Bashir two years ago I had liked him instantly. A native of Naran in the Kaghan Valley he is a rather unusual man for his background. He has ready wit and a delightful sense of humour. Best of all he is genuinely interested in his work as a mountain guide and does not treat his wards as useless pieces of baggage to be escorted from one point to the other and got over with as fast as possible. His most endearing feature, however, is the warmth in his boyish face and brown eyes.
By the time our trek finished we were friends and we parted with promises to walk together again. And so it was that the two of us set off into the gorge leading to Rutti Gali – the Red Pass, east of Battakundi in upper Kaghan. This is an uninhabited valley that comes alive every summer when the nomadic Gujjars and Afghans invade it with their herds of sheep and goats, and recedes into an icy somnolence when the storms of winter dump metres of snow in it.
Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Kaghan, Northern Pakistan, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Travelling through Kaghan
04 November 2015
If I thought I had perfected the art of travelling like a tramp, my friend Bashir from Naran has given it finesse. Trekking in the outback whenever we came across a shepherd he would quiz the man in great detail about the nearest Gujjar camp and the leader, or Chaudhri, there. Then as we would go our way he would chuckle, ‘Should misfortune befall us now and we have no food or shelter I will tell the Chaudhri all the good things that people say about him as far away as Abbottabad.’
Bashir maintained that it was every human being’s egotistical desire to hear complimentary things and this was exactly what he gave them. Having not only survived an encounter with Chilasi brigands in the Rutti Gali connecting Kaghan Valley with Azad Kashmir, but through subterfuge having deprived them of a quarter of good lamb was elated. As we crested the broad saddle of Jalkhad Gali back into Kaghan we ran into Yusuf, the strapping Gujjar youth from the encampment at the foot of the pass.
Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Kaghan, Nomads, Northern Pakistan, Porters, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Loneliest Places in Pakistan
26 October 2015
I suppose it is natural to feel an overwhelming sense of isolation in a particular remote and unpopulated place. I have also heard that a sense of dread overcomes folks in lonely places. I have a different feeling, however. Lonely, isolated place do things to me. My imagination goes into overdrive and I begin to perceive things that I wouldn’t anywhere else.
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| Shuwert on the Central Asiatic side of the Great Asiatic Divide |
In those early years of travelling after I left the army and lived in Karachi, I went alone. In 1979, along the Malir River, about sixteen kilometres upstream of Super Highway, I got my first taste of real solitude. Having left the highway, I had not seen a single soul en route. When I slept that night on a flat rock, the only sound was the soughing of the thorn bushes all around me. Occasionally there was a yelp of some unidentified animal. Once or twice I heard the mewing and coughing of what I later learned could have been sand cats.
Read more »Labels: About, Balochistan, Northern Pakistan, Sights Less Seen
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Climbers’ hangouts
22 October 2015
There would be white people from places you did not even know existed, some Japanese and Korean, and a couple of Pakistanis. The talk, mostly in English, was generally about mountaineering and trekking. Great tales were swapped, new trekking routes were bandied around and sometimes immortal friendships were cemented. I think that is where I met Matthew (French) and Mareille (German) who later married and even came to stay with us in Lahore. We kept in touch long after the couple had left Pakistan and settled in Thailand and were having babies. But I lost contact after I changed my email address because the old server went defunct.
Read more »Labels: Mountains, Northern Pakistan, Travel
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:59,
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The Last Leg
27 July 2015
Highway S-1, from Alam Bridge where it splits of off N-35, is still as it was the last time I travelled on it in 2010. I left Snowland Hotel at Skardu at 5:00 AM. Owned by Jafar who I know since 1990, this is a lovely property a little ways outside town as one approaches from the west. Though it has limited accommodation, its lovely garden and cherry trees make up for everything.
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| ‘Here Continents Collided’ |
On my two days in Skardu I spent my free time walking about in the garden eating cherries straight off the trees. The hotel staff, kind as ever and surely following Jafar’s instructions, would see me and come up with a plateful of freshly picked and washed fruit. And this was no extra charge. That has been the way at Snowland for the past many years and that is the reason I prefer this branch of the hotel to the one in town just below the hill on which the PTDC motel sits.
Done with the work in Chorbut, I left Skardu early. Early enough to get to Gilgit in good time before the Sindhu Gorge heated up to its temperature that can shame the fires of hell. It took me fully seven hours to cover the two hundred and thirty odd kilometres. By midmorning the gorge was already flaming. Only the passage through the wooded villages was nice and cool.
Read more »Labels: Motorcycle Diaries, Northern Pakistan, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Over the Babusar Pass
20 July 2015
At 2:30 AM the moronic waiter of the Abbottabad guest house came banging at my door. In direct contravention to what he and many others believe to be divine injunction, he was forcing upon me sehri, the predawn meal to begin a fast that I should not be observing for being a traveller. But phooey to divine order as long as some idiots more concerned with my hereafter than their own can impose their will upon me.
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| The road near Jalkhad: 10 years ago, no one could have imagined such a road through Kaghan! |
I left Abbottabad about six. The road to Mansehra was almost empty and I made the twenty-four kilometres in about thirty minutes. Back in the military academy days in late 1971, we used to do exercises along this road, then almost deserted. All that went past was a car every hour or so and the beat-up smoke-emitting buses of the then famous and now defunct Pindi-Hazara Transport Coy.
Read more »Labels: Motorcycle Diaries, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Motorcycle Diaries, July 2015
13 July 2015
PIA did it again. There is an insidious design within the national airline to force a collapse. Alternatively, the plan is to make it continue to live on governmental largesse in the shape of huge injections of funds with the aim of ultimately making the airline die an unnatural death.
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| Hazara landscape |
Back in September 2010, I needed to fly to Chitral. Now, September is off-season for tourists and planes fly in and out virtually empty. But the Edgerton Road PIA office informed me that no seats were to be had until the end of October. That meant my deadline would be missed. In desperation I turned to the only very powerful friend I had and someone I could always rely upon. General Khalid Shameem Wynne was then Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and to him did I turn.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, Motorcycle Diaries, Northern Pakistan, Taxila
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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