Head to the North where ancient empires meet colourful cultures, nature is at its most spectacular and there are very few tourists to spoil the view.
Northern Pakistan is not top of many people's travel bucket lists. Yet it was once part of the Northwest Frontier region that formed the apex of the Victorian explorers' dreams. The region to the North of British India once conjured up exotic images of colourful pagan tribes, dangerous brigands and crenelated mountain ranges, their frozen tips stroking the heavens. There are cascading glacier rivers, ice cold and azure blue, becoming tumbling dark grey torrents further down the valley.
The region has of course been through great turbulence in recent decades with terrorism, destructive weather events and crumbling infrastructure keeping tourists away. Improvements are underway, yet the spectacular vistas and unique environment remain. As huge road and power projects edge towards completion this part of the world is about to open up, so now is the time to see Northern Pakistan before it changes forever. So why visit? Here are three reasons:
Under the gaze of giants
Few places on earth can compare to Northern Pakistan for jaw-dropping vistas and retina-tingling contrasts. The region is cradled by the Hindu Kush mountain range in the North and West, the Karakoram to the North and East and Himalayas to the Southeast, creating an enormous basin of unspoilt nature in their midst. The adventurous traveller navigates the creases in the earth that these stone giants have torn out almost exclusively in jeeps that churn up dust, which covers everything and hardens uncomfortably in the nose. Thankfully, the roads aren't the vertiginous nausea-inducing, precipice-hugging tracks of old.
The views are unrelenting and come in sensory waves of colour, sounds and textures around every craggy corner. A particular highlight is the Hunza Valley, 350 miles north of Islamabad, where a series of villages imprinted along a yawning expanse is sliced by the clear blue Hunza River depositing nourishing silt that feeds the valley's beautifully cultivated bright green fields. All around are grazing sheep, cows and horses pottering beneath shrubs of walnuts, apricots, figs and mulberries that fill the footpaths, orchards and gardens. The air is pure and sweet and tempered with a hint of woodsmoke from unseen campfires. The twitter and clicks of birds and insects and clink of cattle bells add sound effects to the experience.
To the West, the Shandur Pass links the key northern towns of Chitral and Gilgit. Here, at an altitude of over 12,000 feet above sea level, is a vivid wilderness, blue skies and streams, green grass, red-brown mud and rock smeared over the slopes of towering cliffs, on a scale that makes you feel as if you've been magically shrunken by a world that hasn't changed for a millennium. Altitude exhaustion is a real challenge here, which makes it an unlikely setting for the world's highest polo pitch where the local Chitral-Gilgit rivalry is played out. Horses and yaks move slowly from one verdant pasture to another, sipping the glacial waters with barely a glance at the occasional jeep whose passengers pause to watch them.
Leaving the pass and heading east, Hunderap and Phander are villages worth stopping at even if it's only for a photo opportunity. Here the Gilgit River sweeps down from the mountain pass and shreds into innumerable shimmering baby blue veins, pooling between tiny islands carved out over centuries, clumped with trees weighed down with fruits. Occasionally it's possible to spot small children playing an impromptu game of cricket, merely dots on nature's intricately detailed, saturated canvas.
The imprint of empires
William Blake wrote: "Great things are done when men and mountains meet; this is not done by jostling in the street." Northern Pakistan has seen some of the most celebrated empires vie for legacy beneath its mountains over millennia. Alexander the Great cut a swathe across the north on his way east. The remnants of the Gandharan civilisation are scattered throughout, while the influence of the Kushan and Sikh empires are also apparent.
The most recent and best documented visitor is the British Empire. Gilgit was the outpost of empire and the base for all British Great Game spying activity into the Northwest frontier. From here Colonel Kelly's relief force marched in 1895 across the entire north of Pakistan to the relief of the siege at Chitral fort. There are few signs today. Gilgit is now a bustling culturally conservative trading town. The Gilgit Agency bungalow, where spying activity was coordinated, still stands and is now a library but lies inside a security cordon and so it is not easy to visit.
An easier site to see is the Christian cemetery where one of the most famous Great Game explorers of the late 19th century, George Hayward, has lain since his murder on a lonely mountain pass in 1870. The Great Game was the pre-World War One imperial contest between Britain and Russia for control of the region. The small Christian cemetery on the corner of a busy road is barely visible from the street and inside the sun is mostly blotted out by a canopy of tree leaves. It is small (I counted 16 graves) and overgrown yet remains one of the few visible testaments to a bygone era.
More apparent are the Gandharan ruins, perhaps best preserved in the towns of Swat and Taxila. The Swat valley has several notable stupas that have been maintained to varying degrees of success, while Taxila on the outskirts of Islamabad provides possibly the best-preserved Buddhist artwork in the region. Here there are remnants of the Persian and Mauryan empire. It is a UNESCO world heritage site and part of the old silk road, containing the ruins of cities, monasteries, stupas and religious monuments. In fact, through the whole of Northern Pakistan it is not uncommon to find randomly a rockface by the side of the road adorned with ancient carvings.
Rainbow nation
Although the empires have gone, their legacies remain. The rival warring kingdoms have been disunited historically and often invaded and settled by other civilisations. It is perhaps due to this outside influence that Northern Pakistan has some of the most diverse people on Earth. It's possible to drive through a village in the mountains and encounter a school with red haired and green-eyed children, playing with olive skinned Mediterranean class mates whose mothers have the high cheekbones of central Asia and fathers the complexion of Spain and Greece. The further south you go towards Islamabad the more people become recognisably Punjabi, but in the north their ethnic heritage can appear to be anything from Nepalese to Scandinavian to Irish or Afghan.
The Kalash tribe on the Afghan border are colourful in a literal sense. These are one of the few existing pagan tribes who once populated an area known as Kafiristan on the northern border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is the land visited by Sean Connery and Michael Caine in the film of Rudyard Kipling's tale, The Man Who Would be King. Here the women and young girls are adorned with vibrant threads and colourful buttons that are woven into their clothes. Blues, green, oranges and yellows are common colours, selected to match the wearer's personality.
Their distinctive decorated headdress sits like a crown on the top of the head with a tail that extends down the back adorned with colourful beads that match their dress. The language here is different to either the Urdu spoken in much of Pakistan or the other regional dialects of the north. The women and girls can be greeted with "Ish pata baba" and they reply "Ish pata".
The Kalash number around 5000 and claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great and blonde hair and blue eyes are not unusual here. They live a life of poverty even by the standards of Pakistan, sometimes half a dozen people to a single abode, and face prejudice as non-Muslims but they guard and maintain their culture, which is dwindling in the face of modernity and pressure to convert. Even by the variety of the north of Pakistan the Kalash stand out as uncommon people in an uncommon land.
It is also worth noting that, while tourists will be greeted in general with friendly curiosity, the north can also be a deeply religious and traditional land. Between villages there are occasionally small watchtowers built by feuding families to prevent their sworn enemies ambushing and killing them. Honour is everything here and the locals tell stories of the latest assassinations of young people who, for example, clapped at a wedding and have been sentenced to death.
Nothing really prepares you for the sense of scale and isolation of Northern Pakistan. There are bustling noisy market towns like Chitral but there are also so many remote settlements hundreds of miles from modernity sprinkled in the shadow of towering glaciers where forgotten armies once marched in search of glory.
Such a place is Mastuj. On our trip it was little more than a convenient stopping point at night. Here, at dusk, the thick voluminous grass of the valley, tailing away towards the horizon alongside the bubbling river into the distant cradling arms of the Hindu Kush, imparts a sweet aroma and the air is filled with the noise of excitable insects. The only tourist site of note is an old fort used in the nineteenth century as a staging post for the British army.
And so it was in the shadow of the Mastuj fort on a sparsely settled hillside where British troops prepared for battle in 1895 in the twilight of the Victorian era that, one morning, our group heard the news that Queen Elizabeth II had died. Such momentous news in such a distant location is a reminder of how tenuous and impermanent a way of life can be.