Travelling by Road to Moutains, Pakistan

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Patience, is required on some of the Northern routes. Its slow going, and the leg room is minimal, but the scenery makes up for it. Mini van or landcruiser are the most frequent modes of public transport.

While beautiful sometimes it is dusty and hot, and it makes sense to have a bandana or scarf to cover your nose and just for handy use.

Arrange fares before you get on the vehicle. Speak to locals first too, before boarding, it always helps to have local knowledge before you subject yourself to foreigner status.

Timings: Vans and Buses are frequent from ISB.

Recognizing the need for high quality road net work in the country, the Prime Minister of Pakistan inaugurated Pakistan Motorway Project covering the whole of country: from Peshawar to Karachi and Karachi to Gawadar and Karachi to Quetta and Quetta to Iran including covering area from Lahore to Islamabad as well. M2 Lahore-Islamabad motorway was the first project to be accomplished & now fully operative. It is very scenic experience travelling on this Motorway. You can stop at "kalarkahar" the place got more famous since the project has completed. There is a beautiful lake there. The place is very famous for media functions as well...

The Jeeps were the real workhorses when the roads got tough. In my travels in the Northern Areas, Jeeps and trucks were the only vehicles that seemed to cope with the rough roads. Most Jeeps will officially seat about 5 people, but there is quite a bit of latitude with numbers! In all the towns in Baltistan (Skardu, Khapalu, Kande etc...) there was no problem finding a jeep and driver and there are some fantastic trips to do such as visits to the Deosai Plains or the stunning mountains.

The jeeps I travelled with were hired by our trekking company so I can't actually tell you the process but from looking at the number of jeeps hanging around the motels it didn't look to hard to organise!

Some of them were pretty cute - I travelled on a beaut red one that must have been an old Russian relic that was driven South but it still roared along so it did the job quite nicely. The pic is of the stunning Northern Pakistan views that you get framed by the jeep windows...

Crossing water was always an adventure. Here, we are crossing the Mastuj river, which is not far from the Afghan border. I left the jeep before it crossed the river, so I could take this picture - not that I was afraid of crossing the river in the car ;-)

People were always very nice when we passed them in our jeep. They were waving at us and were shouting "Hello!" However, many kids had a different way of greeting us. They welcomed us with a request for "One pen!" Apparently, some tourists thought it more appropriate to give them a pen rather than sweets or money.

The Shandur Pass between Chitral and Gilgit is at 3735 m. Each year, the polo teams of Chitral and Gilgit compete during a three day festival here. The Pakistani don't play polo like Prince Charles does. The way they play it in Asia is fast, exciting and dangerous. Unfortunately, in 2001 the Pakistan Tourist Office (PTDC) had a wrong schedule for the annual polo tournament on their Web site. So, when we arrived at the Shandur Pass during the second half of July, we found out that the festival had been advanced by a month.

Near Gilgit there is the Chinese cemetery with Chinese road workers that died during the construction of the Karakorum Highway in the 60s and 70s. Some statistics say that over 1000 Chinese and Pakistani workers died. People believe that the number is much higher, because the number of casualties of road workers during the 1974 earthquake near Pattan was never published by the Pakistani government.