From the Cairngorms to the Karakoram

Passu Cones

​Spent the last two weeks mooching around the northern areas of Pakistan as a big birthday treat to myself. It's my third visit to Pakistan, returning for the first time in 15 years, and the first to the 'proper' mountains. 

View down to the Hunza River from Altit Fort

Accidentally spent the time chasing high summer pastures, learning more about transhumance, and finding so many similarities with Highland shielings, flora, folklore, and ways of life that have been dismantled in Scotland. More on that later!

Cow grazing at Rakaposhi base camp

Overlooking Karimabad, on the way to Ultar Meadow

Like ours, their folk stories are full of faeries, spirits and giants. More on that later too! 

Baltit fort beneath Ultar Peak, Karimabad

My poor bits of Urdu were almost useless in the far north - instead I learned and spoke bits of Burushaski (a language isolate with no relations), Wakhi, and Balti. Somehow managed to walk in and travel through the Hindu Kush, Himalaya, and the High Pamir as well as the Karakoram. Their names alone are so evocative, and their colours and characters even more so. ​

Overlooking Zar Abad, Gojal

Discovered the joys of salty tea when invited into a lady's home with her daughter and swaddled granddaughter in a handmade cot; watched the stars come out, dense as anything, during a power cut in a village at the end of the road near the border with Afghanistan; chatted with a cow at 4,000m; chatted with a birch at 3,600m; was fascinated by irrigation systems; hitched a ride on a tractor (they're all Massey Ferguson); ate the best samosas and jalebi I've ever had in my life from a street stall; was awestruck and terrified by glaciers; picked cherries off trees for breakfast; paddled at the confluence of two roaring rivers, one blue and one grey/brown; quietly sang òrain obrach beneath a willow tree at the meadow of Ultar Peak, the 'inner pasture'; climbed to a 'base camp', something I thought I would never do, and napped on a glacial ridge beneath the snowy peaks of Rakaposhi and Diran; swapped Gaelic for Burushaski with a storyteller and poet; delighted in finding two hag stones on one hike, through a hot dry version of the Lairig Ghru; foraged mountain herbs for tea.

Shepherd's house above Batura Glacier which is 35 miles long

Outwith the human-made oases totally reliant on glacial meltwater, the mountains are dust, and cough and spit and burp their innards all over tenuous roads, communities, into rivers. Everything feels precarious - the languages, the politics, the customs, the land itself.

Potato field, Passu village

And everything is back to front: the Plough is upside down, snow melts on the northern slopes but not the southern, shrines are circled anti-deiseil (anti-clockwise). 

In the last village at the end of the road in the High Pamirs

Returned to a lush green burgeoning spring, the elder coming out, the sudden loss of a much-loved person within our small community, and terrible news from a friend in Gaza.

​More of the mountains crumble.