Jeep Tour K2 Trek Snow Capped High Mountains Valley Travel
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Friday September 05: Bumburet – Dir – Islamabad Lowari Pass
Despite it being a major town, to reach Chitral from the East (Gilgit) you have to travel the road/track over the Shandur Pass, and to reach it from the South (Peshawar) you have to take the road/track over the Lowari Pass. Both passes are around 4000 meters high and so are blocked by snow for about six months each year. Thus in winter, there are only two ways into Chitral: by road through Afghanistan and back into Pakistan – difficult to get permits and definitely not recommended even for locals at the present, or by air which is both expensive and often curtailed by the weather. To solve this problem there has been a long-standing project to build a tunnel under the Lowari Pass to give a year-round link to Peshawar. The guide books seemed to be in doubt as to whether the project was still on track or had been abandoned – a not unusual situation in Pakistan. However, we can report that the tunnel is still being worked on – apparently it is being dug and financed by South Korea. There still seems to be some doubt as to when it will actually be opened though.
It was very windy at the top of the pass, and there was the usual shack with a couple of enterprising Pakistanis selling food and drinks. It must have been particularly hard at this time of the year as it was Ramadan and Muslims were not supposed to eat anything during the day. You cannot help feeling that these mountain ‘shops’ are a bit of a miserable existence.
The descent down the south side of the pass was much easier and more wide-open. Also the scenery and vegetation were very different; it’s greener, with more trees and more cultivation.
The area south of the Lowari Pass is Pashtu and so very conservative; the women that you do see are totally veiled, and Ehsan advised us not to take any photographs. Ehsan reckoned that the whole area south to Peshawar and east to Nowshera was Pashtu and therefore conservative and unfriendly.
We got to Dir at about 14.00hrs, and most of the town, including the hotel staff seemed to be at Friday Prayers. The hotel was in the middle of town and didn’t look much cop, and there seemed to be a bit of a crowd staring at us. It was the only time during the whole trip that we felt uncomfortable. Ehsan had never been entirely comfortable with the idea of staying at Dir (perhaps we would have felt easier staying at the PTDC out of town), and a short discussion with him revealed that it was about a six hour drive to Islamabad. We made to decision to drive on to Islamabad even though we would arrive after 21.00hrs; I have never seen the jeep loaded-up so quickly! In ten minutes we were on the road slowly driving south through Dir – it was noticeable that Eidjan refrained from blowing the horn!
There is a good road south to the M1 at Nowshera, though stretches of it are being improved further and the Carol/Gordon/Hilary group had been held up for a couple of hours two weeks previously, and Ehsan was keen to get to the M1 before dark. In villages and small towns, there were lots of lorries stopped by the roadside so that the drivers could go to Friday Prayers; lots of people coming out of Prayers and lots of stalls set up selling fresh fruit, vegetables and cooked food. Mind you, people had to wait till dusk before they could eat it.
I think there were a number of reasons why Ehsan was anxious about this area. Firstly he is an Ismaili and the Pashtu are Sunnis; secondly, there had been reports of trouble in Dir; and thirdly the road goes between the Tribal Areas around Peshawar and the Swat Valley where terrorists/Islamists are definitely active and there is definitely trouble. Ehsan was quite clear that he personally would not chance going to either area. In fact the road passed right by the entrance to the Swat valley at Markand.
It has to be said though that we had a very smooth and swift journey to Nowshera with no hold-ups or problems. It was pretty much dark when we got to Nowshera though.
Along the M1 towards Islamabad we caught a big storm with driving rain and very strong winds. The same storm had caused flooding in Islamabad/Rawalpindi. I had this really brilliant idea of phoning ahead to the hotel and ordering dinner so it would be ready when we got there, so we stopped on the hard-shoulder and did just that.
The M1, like motorways in the UK has a reasonably wide grass central reservation (no central barriers though). At a couple of places there were workers tents pitched on the central reservation. Just past one of the camps we came across a man walking towards on the motorway – in the fast lane!
We reached the Hunza Embassy Guest House at about 21.30hrs and had a very decent mutton biriyani.
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We got off to
a leisurely start because (in theory) we were only going to Dir and that was
about 4-5 hours. For a while we kept to the north of the Chitral/Kabul River
before crossing it on what turned out to be our last spectacular suspension
bridge.
As a tourist
it would be an almighty shame to miss the Lowari Pass. The road climbs up, via
lots of hairpins, through wooded ‘alpine’ scenery and then suddenly rises
through a series of 40 interlinked hairpins to the top of the pass. It is a
rough dirt track of course, and seriously spectacular. The photograph below
gives some idea of the scale!