Holidays part 3 - Shogran

First things first - yes, we're fine, despite our close proximity to recent news headlines. Things have seemed pretty quiet so far, but we'll most likely be staying in for the next few days at least until we have more of an idea of the public mood.

Continued from part 1 & part 2.

So, on to the more spectacular stuff! After our disappointment at not making to Hunza, our Plan B was to hire a guide with a jeep who would take us up the Kaghan valley for a few days.

Looking down on Mansehra from the bypass.

View from the balcony of our hotel room at Shogran.

After checking into our hotel, our guide took us on an expedition in the afternoon,
starting with a jeep ride as far as the jeep could get - the bit I'm  standing on is a
steep hairpin bend covered in a couple of feet of snow.

Traversing a snow bank.  There's a jeep track somewhere under this lot.

Sam spent a fair amount of the trip not looking down.

Sri, where nomadic shepherds bring their flocks in the summertime.
(click to view large version, then cross your eyes and match up the pictures to see
in 3D - easier than magic eye anyway!)

The less tired explorers charge on to the next summit, leaving the others to amble
down at a gentler pace.

Paya* - at just about bang on 3000m we're merely 2.23x higher than the UK.
(*or Paye, or Pae - in this country spelling of words using the Latin alphabet
is largely up to the speller, as long as it roughly looks how it sounds!)

180° or so from Paya - click for full size.  The pointy one on the sawtooth ridge
about 2/3 of the way across the image is Malika Parbat (Queen of the Mountains),
the highest in the valley at 5290m - though that's small fry for this country...

Starting the descent.  Deep snow if good fun for this part.
Lower down there was a bit of a short cut - see video below:

A quality piece of road-building.

For those not determinedly not looking down, here's the view
out the side of the jeep.  You can see a long way down, at
angles of 60-80° below the horizontal.

Looking down the Kaghan valley from above Kiwai, where the road to
Shogran joins the main road to Naran and beyond.

Malika Parbat in the sunset.  More to come soon...

Photo post: Thandiani

This weekend we had a lovely time with our friends Jimmy & Erin (who we met at the orientation conference) who came up to visit us. They had access to a car belonging to another family who are home for a few months, so we grabbed the opportunity to take a little trip up into the hills in search of some snow. We had an early start, leaving at 7am, then after picking up our wheels stopped at a roadside eatery for naan, omelettes and chai.

On the road out of the valley, each new twist brought a better view. This is looking back towards Abbottabad (the hazy bit in the centre of this pic - click to see full size version):










The steep valleys are amazingly populous, with plenty of houses like these built into the hillside:



















Getting the materials up there in the first place must be a mammoth task!

After a while the road became a bit more like this:



















Most of the traffic consists of little Suzukis like this one:



















We'd already had two attempts at getting up this particularly icy corner when this guy came charging down. Downhill is easier than up, and 4WD doesn't necessarily help much when all 4 W's are on patches of ice!



















Pakistani roadsigns don't always tell you what you need to know. We deciphered the Urdu sign at this junction that said Thandiani 3.5km, but couldn't tell from it which direction it lay in. So we carried on for a bit straight on (behind the photographer) until we found some more troublesome patches of ice and snow. After a few tense slippery minutes we decided to turn around and try the other fork up the hill, which had obviously been cleared. A few minutes along that road the direction didn't feel right, so we decided to come back again, park the beast just before the snow started in earnest, and start our hike from there. (The cleared road turned out to be the main road to Muzaffarabad, a place where we're not supposed to go without a special permit, so just as well...)

It was lovely and quiet up here, thoroughly vindicating the early start to the day. A couple of cars (and even a motorbike!) braved the snow, the locals obviously being more determined drivers than we.

The daily commute:





































Balancing on top of the world:





































The view from the top - around 2700m (click for full size version):






We were told we could see Nanga Parbat from here, but we have no idea which bit of the distant mountain range it might have been.

A beach hut? Here?



















Thandiani town centre:



















Thandiani (literally 'cold place') is one of the old hill stations from colonial times, where people would retreat to escape the high summer heat lower down. In winter it's pretty much closed down, with few people around. All their water is brought up in tanks from a kilometre or so down the road. We stopped for some chai in this little eating place:



















Having brought his gaiters all this way, there was no stopping Jimmy wearing them. When they're all the rage next year, remember you saw them here first!





























































Crazy road-building skills once again in evidence:



















Looking back up one of the valleys on the way down:

Photo post: Mukshpuri

Last weekend we took a trip out into the Murree Hills and did a lovely walk up a 9000ft hill called Mukshpuri, passing through a wildlife park on the way down (separate post on that coming shortly).



















As you can see, the road up is fairly impressive on the way up there; from above it looks something like this.



















On the drive there we met a sizeable troupe of these fellows.

























Looking down from the side of the valley.



















Some of the local ladies collecting fuel. Etiquette reduces my National Geographic-wannabe shots to covert behind-a-tree-once-they-aren't-looking operations.

























There are a startling number of lightning-struck trees, but that's understandable given the standard of lightning storms in this part of the world...














(click on pics for larger versions...)

At the top we emerge from the trees onto this plateau or alpine meadow - it almost doesn't feel like the top of a mountain somehow. This is the quietest place we have been, night or day, since we arrived - no bustling bazaars, no truck horns, no shouty loudspeakers... aah.



















Some big mountains are just about visible to the north-west. We're told that on a clear day you can see all the way to Nanga Parbat - maybe that's it, who knows?



















We stop at an open air barbecue restaurant on the way home, where we have possibly the best curry so far (a ginger chicken dish with soft fresh naan - spicy without being too hot to taste the ingredients!). Here is one of the views from our table. It's amazing where people manage to build their houses. And it gives us some understanding of why so many of pregnant patients at the hospital don't make it to their antenatal appointments!



















Some alternative transport - I'm not sure I like the look of that commute, even though it would probably cut an hour off the journey from one side of the valley to the other.

The Salt Range

The aforementioned Salt Range: this may be of more interest to you engineers and other geeks, but it has some nice scenery too!

Once you get down to Islamabad from where we are, the journey is amazingly flat for several hundred kilometres. So after all that flatness, it's intriguing to encounter a succession of increasingly urgent-sounding signs...





























































...before heading onto a 10km-long, 50kph-limited, 7%-inclined series of double bends, cuttings and bridges that looks something like this...



















...complete with escape roads for those whose brakes aren't up to it (looks like it's been used a few times too!):
















In this one you can see where they've obviously had to swerve the road inwards a bit from the edge after it got too precarious:



















Some striking scenery - all of these were taken on the return journey - on the way there it was so hazy you couldn't see much beyond the road itself:



















While the speed limit for those double bends is mostly 50kph, the trucks have to settle for less than a 10th of that as they settle down into hill-climbing gear for the long haul upwards:



















In our area there are plenty of twisty little mountain roads that snake along the sides of valleys in improbable ways, but to do it with a 6-lane motorway is pretty darn impressive.