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| A view down the lower part of the valley. |
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| And up the way. I'm still amazed how populous these steep hills are. |
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| Driving close to the edge. |
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| Since we were last here, a little progress has been made with this landslide. The two temporary bridges have seemingly been pressed into service elsewhere, leaving the traffic to fight its way along the side where the road used to be. |
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| A new addition since last time is the beekeepers. Every half a mile or so we passed a few hundred of these little beehives, usually with a tent or two nearby for the keepers. We must have passed tens of thousands of hives on our trip - do they get packed away to hibernate in the winter? Or are they packed into trucks and forcibly migrated to somewhere warmer? |
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| Most of these places also have a little stall where you can buy the produce. It comes in unmarked recycled containers, from old jars to 2-litre coke bottles. |
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| No problems getting past the glacier this time, as thousands of people have apparently already discovered. Naran has been transformed by the tourist season: a huge tent village has sprung up on all the available flat land, catering for tourists using tents bearing the logos of countless different aid agencies; all those broken down building have been fixed up, painted, and filled with things that tourists might like to part with their cash for. |
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| We even had the thought that Naran might be the Pakistani equivalent of somewhere like Ibiza (minus the drinking/clubbing) - bustling until the small hours with young trendy tourists from the big cities, throbbing music, rowdy social gatherings, even a big searchlight-type thing sweeping the night sky. |
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| And of course no Pakistani street scene is complete without one of these - and this is a particularly fine example. Next part tomorrow... |
