The Adventure of a Lifetime: Part Three
A walk on the Karakoram Highway — and a visit to the Wild Boar run at Naltar.
FROM HUNZA WE CONTINUED NORTH toward Gulmit and the border with China. When we were about ten minutes from Gulmit, we were stopped by an avalanche that had covered the highway. A plow had cut a corridor through its 20-foot-deep drifts, but Ali feared the van would lose traction on the icy path and squat there, sandwiched in the snow, a fat target for a second avalanche. So Asad set out on foot for Gulmit to get a tractor that could pull our van through. We sat in the van and waited, and waited, and after a while I decided that rather than wait in the van for a rockslide or avalanche to sweep us into oblivion, I would walk to Gulmit too. There wasn’t much chance of making a wrong turn – the nearest intersection was about four hours away.
So I took off on what became one of the most memorable walks of my life – my feet scrunch-scrunch-scrunching along the snowy path, just me and the implacable mountains and the ghosts of traders, missionaries, and adventurers who had wandered this way for thousands of years. At one point I stopped to rest on a roadside rock and listened to the pounding silence. Perhaps Marco Polo had stopped in this very spot, I thought, sat on this very rock — and pondered just as I am now what an insignificant piece he was in the world’s vast puzzle, how easily he could be bent, or lost, or simply worn away.
In ensuing days we made a four-hour jounce to an idyllic village called Punial, set among lush, flower-speckled fields. There we had tea, potato patties and apricot jam sandwiches in the former residence of the deceased rajah, in a musty sitting room that could have been the setting for a Somerset Maugham story, wallpapered with photos of the rajah himself – a gentleman distinguished by an enormous moustache and an equally prodigious proboscis – playing polo or smiling widely with a worldly assemblage of guests.
The second trip was an even wilder expedition to an area called Naltar, site of a Pakistani air force training camp and what we decided was the most remote ski resort in the world. This journey took us along a crumbling, craggy road just wide enough to accommodate a single jeep, up inclines so steep we seemed to be driving into the sky, around torturous twists that occasionally had one rear wheel spinning over roadlessness, and finally to a never-never land of snowy meadows, deep green stands of pine trees, lung-tingling air and rocky houses with smoke pluming from their chimneys. The parched plains and ragged refugee camps of Peshawar seemed a world away.
There was one ski lift at Naltar, painted fire engine red, and two trails, one of which displayed a sign that read “Wild Boar Run.” When we discovered this, we decided that the next time we needed to one-up someone at a winter cocktail party, we would eye them and casually ask, “Have you done the Wild Boar Run at Naltar yet?”
In Part Four: A death-defying decision in Chilas
#####For information about Geographic Expeditions’ more than 150 journeys around the world, visit the company’s website.
