A Trip along the Kaghan Valley

The following article decribes a short part of a 3.5 week cycling trip through Pakistan in September 2000. There were 3 of us on the trip Malcolm, John and myself, all students in Oxford. Here is John's recollections of our time in the Kaghan Valley:

We left Mansehra at 4pm-a short ride ahead of us to Gari Habibullah, the true beginning of the Kaghan valley and a week of adventuring. Myself and Stu had spent the rest of the day backtracking to Abbotobad to what was apparently the most northerly town of Pakistan that would change travellers cheques. Malcs had stayed in Mansehra recovering from a stomach bug.

At 4.30 we were stopped by Tariq, the local police chief. Did we know that there was fighting in the next valley? Well yes we did actually, as two days before when we tried to get to Gari Habibullah a different way, we had been overtaken by a couple of UN trucks and then turned back at a police checkpost. Well in that case we would know to take care, and he would check up on us that evening. We left Tariq and rolled the 20 miles into Gari Habibullah, with occasional gunshots echoing across the hills. It turned out to be nothing more than a village which existed solely due to the fact that there was a road junction here, but for some reason the place was coming down with barbers shops - we counted 20 or 30 without trying! Asking for somewhere to stay we were directed down a track that led to the police station and were almost forced by the local gendarmerie to take 3 of their beds for the night.

We met Tariq in the main square later on - he and the other policemen were an oasis in what was the only unfriendly place we were to pass through.

The next morning, after noting that the number of murders in Gari Habibullah was down from last years count and laughable attempts to get the lad in the roadside tea house to understand what `toast' was, we escaped a crowd that mobbed us and a crazy old man who definitely wasn't welcoming us to his village, and follwed the river up through Balakot to Kawai. Here we loaded our gear into the back of a jeep that drove us up an incredible twisting road through pine forests to Shogran, high above Kawai and the river Jhelum. There was no way we could have cycled up this - rising 1300m in 8km it was 4WD or nothing!

Shogran is a shop and a couple of guesthouses with simply awesome views of 5000m Malika Parbat. We enjoyed the views, discovered they sold porridge in the shop and spent 24 hours relaxing and exploring the paths that criss-crossed the terraced fields on the slopes below. Then we faced what should have been an easy descent back to the main road, but on a heavily laden bike, a 1 in 7 downhill gradient with switchbacks every 100m really isn't much fun - by the time we got to the bottom not only the rims of our wheels but even the spokes were hot to touch from braking.

From Kawai we stopped having the luxury of a tarmac road. Our bible, Lonely Planet, variously described the road from here on as `more or less paved', `gravelled', `barely jeepable' and `truly awful'. Our stop that night was Mahendri, a two horse town with no horses. We stayed in a room by the public call office that had a toilet with no light and 3 beds wedged together with about a square foot of floor space that quickly got taken up with bikes. There were high fives among the local men in the kitchen below as we reeled of the only Urdu we knew-`6 boiled eggs, dahl, veg, rice and chapatti please'. A teacher from Peshawar watched us play cards in the evening and the next morning insisted on paying for our breakfast.

The day's ride took us to Naran, passing through increasingly mountainous and beautiful scenery, the road more frequently crossed by streams needing to be forded, less and less vehicular traffic and more and more donkey and mule trains passing us. The main attraction at Naran is a 40 minute jeep ride up an unbelievably bad road (I suspect it should be an hour's ride - our driver was definitely enjoying watching us bounce around and hang on for dear life in the back) to lake Saiful Mulk. At 3500m this is a lake fed by glacier streams and surrounded by snowy peaks, including our friend Malika Parbat. A hermit appeared from nowhere and dragged us off to look at a glacier and then it was a white-knuckle ride back down again.

We were up early the next morning for an assault on the valley head - the 4230m Babusar pass. We aren't the only ones to have made it over although LP advises against it. The guys at Battakundi said there had been 4 serious looking Germans who had gone past a month back - they hadn't seen them since so assumed they had made it over. Dervla Murphy writes in Full Tilt, an account of her epic solo England to India bike ride in the '60s, how she made the first ever two wheeled crossing of the Babusar pass. Having done it on a decent bike with a couple of other fit guys, I have to say that I am full of admiration for her acheivement - this last day really was tough. LP confidently describes Besal, `a village with basic accommodation' one km before Lake Lulusar and about half way to the pass. After 4 hours slog we stopped by a stream to fill our bottles with glacier cooled water by a collection of collapsed stone houses. That'll be Besal then, joked Stu. Back on our bikes and a km later we arrived at Lulusar, all hope of lunch back down the road in a derelict village! Spirits were down as we ate our only food - a packet of biscuits and an apple each before setting off again, climbing alongside the brilliant blue lake. We passed three men walking along the track, coming from where, going to where, I have no idea. They probably got home and told their friends: we passed these three guys cycling..... Another half hour and there it was, admittedly still a fair way ahead of us and definitely a long way above us, the Babusar pass. The path quite simply disappeared for a mile or so at this point before re-emerging on the other side of a bumpy meadow as a `truly awful' path that just climbed and climbed.

At 5.30pm we were at the top, exhausted, feeling the effects of altitude, hungry and freezing cold - the wind, unhindered at the pass, whipping across and chilling us to the bone. A few glucose tablets - real emergency stuff that had kept us going for the last 5 hours - and we started the descent. We bounced, braked, skidded and swore our way down in the fading light, then with steep drops at the roadside opted for discretion and wheeled our steeds on towards Babusar village. A light twinkling below us guided us and an electric storm in the next valley kept us moving, the shadows playing cruel mind games all the time. Shortly after 7, we shouted assalum aleikum at a house above us on a hill until someone came out and in exchange for the local currency (a ball point pen) we were directed to the village. Half an hour later we staggered up to the group or wooden huts on either side of the track that was the village, guided by the glow of a stove inside one of them. Someone took pity on us and led us off to the only other building which was a guesthouse with only one bed. We didn't care though. A cup of chai by the stove, watched by bemused/amused old men - it was difficult to tell which - and as exhausted certainly as I have ever been, we happily fell asleep on the floor, mission accomplished. In the morning, after washing in a spring with the other villagers, we were led across a field to sign the foreigners registration book. This was a much treasured tome guarded by the villagers. We realised we were the first Westerners over the pass for almost a month - and that in the height of the tourist season! Seeing as the pass is only open for 3 months of the year we really were a novelty here.

We then had a long, bumpy downhill through first terraced fields and then a barren rocky gorge, the temperature noticeably rising as we descended, and small children running after us in a fruitless quest for biros - we had already given all ours away in exchange for photos in Babusar village. Tempers frayed as we battled up the final slopes into Chilas under the relentless midday sun and Stu's pannier rack broke. The mighty Indus river was below us and the high Karakoram peaks on the other side as we crawled, shattered, unshaven and unshowered for 3 days into Chilas, before freewheeling down to the posh hotels by the river. Never mind the price, we were going to stay somewhere with sheets on the bed, electricity, hot water and chips on the menu. We'd had a tough but truly amazing week and were going to put our feet up for a it. We were back on the Karakoram Highway and the next week and a half to the Chinese border would be a walk in the park. Or would it...