I have been to Gilgit, Hunza, Astor, Karimabad, Deosai National Park and Khunjerab National Park - simply amazing and safe to visit. Yes the land journey is very tiring but the treasure that waits at the other side is amazing!
Footloose, NOS, The News International
One of the best yet neglected tourist destinations in Pakistan is Gilgit-Baltistan. Do visit. You wont’ be sorry
By Chris Cork
Whilst the Cholistan desert on the edge of which I live has undeniable attractions, they are few and far between as the mercury climbs into the mid-40s. Thus it was that finding myself with a few days in which space for me alone could be created, I turned north again.
It was ‘north’ that first drew me to Pakistan in 1993 when I cycled, alone, from Karachi to the China border at Khunjerab pass. It was a journey of discovery in ways I had not anticipated – I met my future wife and began to get to know the country that is now my home. Today, it is not a ride I would ever contemplate. The year 1993 was pre-Taliban and pre-suicide bomber; it was an altogether softer and easier time, the roads less congested, ‘security’ not high on the agenda. Pakistan was ‘open’ as a tourist destination. Lonely Planet, the independent travellers’ essential guide, had a newly-published volume of information that slipped into my pannier bags and not once in that six weeks of pedalling along what were at that time reasonable-quality roads, did I feel at risk.
How times – or is it just perceptions – have changed. Mention to friends that I was off to Gilgit and beyond for a few days of rest and recreation in the fearful reality of 2009 and it produces reactions ranging between horror and exasperation. Horror that I even contemplated such a trip, and exasperation at my apparent desire to pay an early visit to the afterlife.
Northern Areas (more properly Gilgit-Baltistan) was not new to me. I have spent over five years, from 1995 to 1999 and again for the whole of 2005, living and working there, and know parts of it like the back of my hand. This was not to be a journey of discovery, a pushing of the boundaries, more a gentle stroll through familiar territory. How wrong could I get? For one thing, and for the first time since my initial visit, I was going to Northern Areas as a tourist. There is a world of difference between having a job to do and finding yourself at leisure in the place where you formerly worked. For another, I was paying my own way. Whatever I wanted came from my own pocket, not from the pocket of my employer, which if nothing else reminded me that I was definitely at the budget-end of the tourist market.
Travelling poverty-class is something I have always enjoyed. You are less segregated from the realities of life as experienced by those who live in the lands you travel through; it’s less of the typical tourist ‘bubble’ in which many move. So, rather than battle for a ticket on the flight from Islamabad to Gilgit, it was off to the Northern Areas Transport Company (NATCO) booking office at Pir Wadhai in Rawalpindi, hand over 1,030 rupees and there it was…a ticket to Gilgit.
I vaguely remember somebody telling me an apocryphal story that every year one bus passenger dies for every kilometre of the Karakoram Highway. Possibly. Buses regularly take a dive, miss a bridge or get hit by falling rocks. If the Taliban don’t get you then the road might. NATCO has a slightly better rate of survivability than some others I will refrain from naming, but even so it is vaguely unnerving, once you arrive at the Gilgit bus-stand, to realize that the driver of the bus has driven for 20 hours without a break through the night on a narrow unlit road with oblivion beckoning on one side or the other for much of the way.
It was nearly four years since I had been to Gilgit and a lot had changed. The most obvious and immediately noticeable change was that seemingly everybody had a mobile phone. Mobiles were still in the future when I left the place in November 2005, but today there is coverage across the entire region, even in remote valleys.
The other thing to have obviously changed was that Gilgit had finally decided to wash its face. It had lived under patina dirt for as long as I could remember. Not any more. Whilst not exactly clean as a new pin, it was merely grubby rather than downright filthy. Packs of feral dogs used to roam the bazaars, sometimes biting the hand that fed the town – the tourists. A consequence of which was the administration having a mass-poisoning of the dogs. Dying dogs frothing at the mouth is deeply unattractive, not to mention offensive to the delicate sensibilities of western tourists reared in a world where the death of an animal, and the manner in which it dies, can provoke long bouts of intellectual introspection. No more dogs…or at least I didn’t see any. Maybe they all had their feet up somewhere watching cat-chasing videos. Not many tourists either – and there should be, because this is still a destination that us Pakistanis (well, I have the ID card, and sort of speak one of the languages) ought to be visiting in droves.
International tourism has for the most part died a death in Pakistan. There are still people who come here from other countries, but their numbers are small compared to the mid-1990’s. Mountaineers still climb across the whole of Northern Areas and always will, and there will always be an intrepid few who are undeterred by travel advisories issued by the embassy of their nation of origin. Mostly though, tourism is at best on hold or just ticking over or, as in Swat, dead as a doornail for the foreseeable future.
This need not be so. As somebody who travels the length and breadth of Pakistan regularly I can say with some certainty that, mostly, it is safe to do so. There are places I do not go – Peshawar is a no-go for me – but there is not a reason in the world not to visit Gilgit-Baltistan. There is not a reason in the world why we should not extend the envelope of our experience a little and travel northwards. I do not pretend that it is completely without hazard – but then people get eaten by sharks whilst snorkelling off Australia or get food-poisoning in a five-star hotel in Spain (I have).
Pakistan could and should have a thriving domestic tourism industry. The infrastructure is already there but it has been steamrollered by the fears born of hyperactive imaginations and a media that has yet to learn the meaning of the word ‘balance’. The operators of the hotels and guest-houses of Northern Areas understand that foreign tourism is going to take a long time to recover. Some of those I spoke to saw the short-to-medium term future as being in the domestic market. They have affordable packages that cater to local needs and tastes, and you can go ‘abroad’ without leaving your own country, such is the difference of landscape between the plains that most of us live on and the mountains. Admittedly, road access is tiresome and occasionally difficult, but the rewards for the eye (as you roll northwards and the peaks reach higher) everlasting. I still remember stopping the bike in the middle of the road and looking in awe at Rakaposhi for the first time. Give it a try. You won’t be sorry. Promise.