TRAVERSE 49
TRAVEL- PAKISTAN
LEIGH WILKINS
NOT JUST A PLACE YOU TRAVEL
For days before we arrived, we had been riding north through a landscape that seemed to grow more deliberate with every kilometre, valleys narrowing, rivers sharpening in colour, the air thinning just enough to make you aware of your own breathing. By the time the mountains began to rise in earnest, the journey had already shifted from movement to immersion. The Karakoram Highway, that improbable ribbon of asphalt threading its way through northern Pakistan, had done its work quietly, delivering us into a region where geography feels less like a backdrop and more like a governing force.
The first morning in the Hunza Valley does not arrive all at once. It unfolds slowly, as if the light itself has to negotiate with the mountains before it is allowed in.
I remember waking in Karimabad to a silence so complete it felt
constructed. No engines, no distant hum of a city, just the faint movement of water somewhere far below and the occasional crack of ice shifting high on unseen glaciers. When the sun finally crested the ridge, it did so in fragments, touching the highest peaks first, igniting them in gold while the valley floor remained in shadow. It is only when the light descends, minute by minute, that you realise the scale of the place you are standing in.
Hunza is not a valley in the conventional sense. It is a corridor carved between some of the most dramatic mountains on earth, where elevation is not just a number but a constant presence. Villages cling to slopes between 2,000 and 3,000 metres, while above them rise walls of rock and ice that exceed 7,000 metres. Rakaposhi alone towers at 7,788 metres, its sheer face catching the light in a way that makes it feel almost unreal, as though it has been
TRAVERSE 49