Jeep Tour K2 Trek Snow Capped High Mountains Valley Travel
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Wednesday 20 August: Karimabad – Passu
All the way up the KKH we were surrounded by spectacular scenery; there is the gorge, the rushing Hunza/Khunjerab river (quite where it’s name changes is not entirely clear – this seems to be quite a common practice in Northern Pakistan), and brown rocky snow-capped mountains.
We stopped at the Chulpin glacier where the wind blowing off the glacier is distinctly cold, as was the melt water stream flowing from the snout of the glacier. The glacier itself is almost black because of the amount of fine rock, or glacial flour, it contains. The snout of the glacier looked about 10 minutes scramble away so we agreed to hike up to it. Well, after 40 minutes very hard (we’re over 10,000ft here) scrambling over some serious boulders we were still not there; you always get fooled by the scale of things. We didn’t actually walk down onto the glacier itself, but looked down onto it from the lateral moraine.
Further up the KKH we stopped at one of the ‘gap-plank’ bridges that span the river. These things look seriously/are scary, but they are in fact in every day use by the locals. Actually there are gaps between the planks because this allows the wind to blow through them rather than the wind blowing them away – doesn’t stop them looking/being pretty scary though. Most of us couldn’t resist the urge to walk out onto the bridge, none of us actually walked over it though; in fact, it’s quite a long way, but as we left a local lad walked across it.
The path up from the bridge passed by a local farm where there were two lovely little girls with ginger hair. The hair colour is actually caused by a vitamin deficiency and a diet high in carbohydrates and lacking in protein.
By the time you get to Passu, which is well up the valley, there are far fewer green, ie. cultivated, areas. The hotel was OK, but the electricity wasn’t working (not uncommon!), and the water, though hot, dribbled over you rather than spraying from the shower head (another not uncommon feature!).
The Passu glacier is much faster flowing than many of the others we have seen, so it is white and not so moraine filled. At the glacier overlook we met yet more people who were concerned that we should get a favourable impression of the area and its people.
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By 17.00hrs it was rather cooler so we drove down the KKH a few miles
and then turned right up a track to the village of Borith and Borith lake. The
ground here is all boulder –strewn glacial moraine, but the area is farmed,
principally for pasture and for wheat. There were people cutting the corn and
stacking it into sheaves. Then we drove on past the lake, which not
surprisingly is very cold, though Ehsan claims to have swum in it, and then
walked/scrambled up a path over the moraine to where you get a great view over
the Passu glacier. 