Mountains > Articles > Karakoram Highway: The High Road to China

"Ava Gardner, the renowned showbiz of Holly Wood stayed in this suite in the year 1955 during the shooting of Bhawany Junction", declares a tarnished brass plaque at the old Faletta's Hotel, Lahore. I can only hope that Ava's digs were a cut above the exhausted quarters I occupy.

But who cares? A brief night in this crumbling, colonnaded ghost is a fitting start for a Karakoram Highway journey, from Pakistan to China, that's much about seeing time - both cultural and geological - in rewind.

The Karakoram Range is a five, six, seven-thousand metre speed hump - Nature's way of slowing everything that would move north from the Indian sub-continent towards Central Asia, including the sub-continent itself. Fifty million years in the making (ever since India slammed into Asia) and still climbing, by about seven millimetres per year, these massive earthworks aren't so much the hand as the fist of the gods. The Karakoram and its neighbouring ranges, the Himalaya, Pamir, Hindu Kush and Kun Lun might be the clenched fingers of some restless alpine titan. For millions of years the only force to penetrate this white-knuckled, seismic knot was water - rivers like the Indus, Hunza and Gilgit. In far more recent times, pilgrims, Silk Route traders and imperial invaders followed these watercourses through the mountains, balancing on paths that clung like spiderwebs to the valley walls.

Our mini-bus weaves below the remnants of these filament trails and above snow-fed torrents. The modern road that will carry us 1300 km from Rawalpindi, Pakistan to Kashgar, China is the Karakoram Highway - the "KKH" - lauded by one promotional poster as "the most brilliant achievement of mankind of the 20th century."

Nine of us, travelling on an 18-day tour organised by Australia-based adventure travel operator, World Expeditions, are out to test the proposition. More than guiding us is Asghar Khan, an avuncular Hunzakut, whose capacity to arrange for small mountains to be moved (if necessary by bulldozer), palms to be greased and dinner to always arrive on time makes the Karakoram, for us at least, a pushover. We leave behind the bazaar shenanigans of Peshawar - wandering ear-cleaners and Internet shops, naked weapons and veiled females, and head into the North West Frontier Province. The mountains rise before us like dragon's teeth. Trundling down them are trucks, gaudy land galleons bedecked with fringes, wild paintwork and rampant over-cab prows - big show-off rigs that announce themselves with a belching of diesel and hashish fumes and the blast of tremolo air-horns.

Through the Swat Valley, a former feudal kingdom that acknowledged it was part of Pakistan only 30 years ago, we roll past apricot orchards, Pathan compounds and Pepsi signs. Revenge and hospitality are among the sustaining tribal traditions here; another is the sequestration of women. It's odd to see a street where the ratio of men to women is around 300 to1. Still, serial religions and their persuading armies have flowed through here for five thousand years: Aryans, Darius of Persia, Alexander, the Emperor Ashoka, Buddhists, Bactrian Greeks, St Thomas the Apostle, Mongols and Islam have been among the passing parade.

And now us - a group of mostly "over-50's" travellers. There's Gloria, an incessant tripper who broke an arm in Nepal and set fire to hotel room in Cuzco, and now cheerily awaits new disasters. Monty, a retired IT man from Melbourne has been to "Koola Lumpa" and "Kuz-koo" too, although the only culturally significant events to have occurred anywhere he's visited seem to have been his own shopping forays. Where I observe a merely dramatic Karakoram landscape, Alfred, our amateur geologist, enlightens me on its subtleties - a complex of conglomerate rock, magma folds and alluvial intrusions. Astrid, a farmer and self-confessed "carpetoholic" asks us to restrain her should she be seen lingering near any carpet stall.

The landscape goes vertical. Sawtooth wedges of air and mountain interlock. Below us, romping rivers squeeze between the folds of the earth. There are deodar forests and donkey carts, smoke-cured villages, ancient petroglyphs and souvenir vendors. A ripple of excitement runs through the bus at Besham with our first sight of the washtub torrent of the mighty Indus River. The colour of wet cement, it churns its way south, slowly returning those gate-crashing mountains to the Indian Ocean. We'd celebrate with a beer, but this is teetotalling Pakistan, so we settle for tea, rice and chicken, and more tea.

"By your age, your brains have already shrunk so much that fluid pressure - cerebral oedema - isn't a significant risk," chuckles our group leader, Ian Williams, as he briefs us on possible altitude sickness. With what remains of my shrunken brain, I deduce that the risks are minimal, as the highest altitude we will sleep at is 3200 metres, in the Chinese town of Tashkurgan.

The mountains now rear before us like terrestrial tsunamis - snow-peaked surf in five-thousand metre sets. The treeless, eroded faces slide from sky to river, their scree fans cut at the base by roaring rivers. We pile out of the bus to view an earth-sky-water vortex of literally Himalayan proportions - the point where the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Himalayan ranges converge; where two continents - Asia and the Indian plate - collide; and where the wild confluence of the Gilgit and Indus rivers is thrown in for good measure. Not the place to linger should the mountain ogre decide to crack his tectonic knuckles.

The giant peaks of Nanga Parbat (8125 metres) and Rakaposhi (7790 metres) glow in crystal serration against the sky as the KKH climbs towards China. Other than local traffic, there are few tourist or international trade vehicles on this tortuous road that was jointly built by China and Pakistan between 1958 and 1978. (The unofficial death toll is reckoned at around one worker per kilometre.) The Pakistan section runs through the most difficult terrain, constantly affected by glaciers, washouts and landslides - after all, Karakoram is a Turkic term for "crumbling rock." Crews of Pakistan Army engineers and fearless bulldozer drivers are permanently deployed to keep the route open.

The 10,000 people of Karimabad, the main town of Hunza, inhabit one of the most picturesque vales of the Himalaya-Karakoram chain. Lush fields of maize are shaded by orchards weighted with stone fruits; tourism provides a modest cash flow; and, as followers of the liberal Ismaili sect of Islam, Hunza girls (unlike many others in Pakistan) receive equal education with boys, and women are not obliged to veil their faces. Life looks so benign here that, as well as the "immortality through Hunza Pie" sect, the "Shangrila-ists" have also fixated upon Hunza, proclaiming it to be the prototype happy valley of James Hilton's 1933 novel, "Far Horizons". That sunny vales from Bhutan to Mustang to Zhongdian, China all claim the same mythic mantle makes little difference to any of their boosters.

Ian, our guide is far more pragmatic, marvelling, "Where else could you simply drive in - rather than walk for a fortnight - and find yourself surrounded by six-thousand metre snow peaks?"

"Noisy with kingdoms" was Marco Polo's take on this region in 1273. Even then, Baltit Fort towered over Karimabad (formerly Baltistan). Seven centuries later, this fortress and palace of the Mir (king) of Hunza still stands, framed by formidable pinnacles of stone and snow. It's here that Colonel Francis Younghusband confronted the Mir in 1889 and demanded that he cease raiding the Silk Route caravans that passed, en route to British India. The Mir protested that this was his people's traditional form of income - but if Queen Victoria was unhappy, he could cut her in on the action. Preposterous. As "Great Game" warriors were wont to, Younghusband politely withdrew, then sent in the army to better explain the imperial point of view.

The KKH's highest point, the 4733 metre Khunjerab Pass in China is closed by winter snows from November to May. We approach the Pakistan border town of Sust one week after the scheduled re-opening of the pass, only to find that due to late snows, there's still a queue of trucks, Haj pilgrims' buses and a score of French tourists. Asghar warns us that the latter may have priority; and, as all foreigners must transfer to government vehicles for the journey between Sust and Tashkorgan, China, we may be in for a wait.

We wake next day to learn that the pass is open and, thanks to methods best not queried too closely, Asghar and Ian have secured several Land Cruisers for our immediate departure. Having leap-frogged, as it were, the French, we set sail for the Khunjerab Pass. The journey is a mixture of transcendent beauty - the sky above the high plains of snow burns like sapphire - and low farce. A local driver eager to be first over the icy pass slides his bus into our parked Land Cruiser, almost toppling it off the mountain. Later, on an empty road in China, he rams us again, from behind. It's not personal - but he still writes off his own front end.

Bactrian camels, yaks, marmots and women are among the unfamiliar creatures we spot upon entering China. After a nippy, overnight stop in Tashkorgan, Xinjiang, we commence the 300 km, seven-hour run to Kashgar. The KKH now widens into what one suspects is a military-capable highway, an endless ribbon unrolling across a high desert plateau of pastel dunes and witch's-cap peaks. In other places, the road seems merely borrowed back from the banks of the roiling Ghez River and the cliffs that teeter above us, constrained only by the habit of gravity. One tremor and this valley might close like a book slammed shut.

The main event for visitors to China's so-called Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region is the fabled Sunday market in Kashgar. As promised, Asghar gets us to Kashgar right on time. "Like Genghis Khan come to Chinatown," is how a friend once described this former Silk Route caravanserai on market day. We step straight back into old East Turkestan, into Marco Polo and Tamerlane time. The faces and dress are Uigur, Kazahk, Tajik and Tartar. Han China plays a very second fiddle here. Around us, the market erupts with fifteen thousand people buying and selling everything from kitchen sinks and samovars to airconditioners, camels and carpets.

Carpets! Mindful of our vow to rescue Astrid from her "carpetoholic" compulsions, I plunge into the bazaar just in time to interrupt her all-but-completed purchase of a huge Bukhara rug. A string of robustly autonomous Uigur epithets follows our empty-handed retreat from the carpet-wallah's stall. We rejoin the group, finding that Monty, instead, has become the proud owner of a carpet, a silk prayer mat the size of a large tea-towel. "I bargained the fellow way, way down - to only one thousand bucks!" he hoots. Not too much more, I'd guess, than one might pay in Melbourne.

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