At dinner the night before, I had discussed my plan to take this trail, and several others expressed some desire to do it as well. So it was decided to meet after breakfast and see where the trail took us.
At eight we gathered outside the inn; Max, Robbie, Hanna, two Dutch women, Katlin and Agness, and me. After provisioning ourselves from the little store by the road with water and biscuits, along with some apples we had picked from the inn’s garden, we set off down the road toward the little village of Ashvendan.
When I call these places along the highway villages, it’s really an exaggeration. They are more like hamlets at best, a mere collection of huts, where maybe six or seven families reside. But they appear on the maps, mostly because there is nothing else here besides mountains, and the map makers evidently wanted to fill the space with something.
So we walked along the highway, crossing the road bridge over the rushing melt waters that tumble down from the Passu glacier, and then turned off onto a trail just past Ashvendan. We initially turned off on the wrong one, but an old woman, who was herding three black goats up from the river, shouted at us and pointed in the direction we should have been going. I guess she knew what we were after, and the new trail took us steeply down onto the wide, gravelly riverbed.
Hunza River
We could not yet see the first suspension bridge, it being obscured by a bend in the river downstream, but the flat riverbed was about 300 feet wide at that point, with sheer walls rising up more than 50 feet on either bank. We made our way across the gravel and sand until, turning a corner; we saw the bridge before us. It hung low over the water, and looked so fragile that it seemed unlikely to have lasted there very long. Indeed, I wondered whether it would support the weight of one of us, much less all six. And as we got closer, and I saw the thin planks and sticks which were used as footing, I began to wonder whether it might be an abandoned bridge, which even the locals no longer used.
Hunza Bridge
After clambering up some boulders, which allowed us access to the near end of the bridge, we all stood there taking pictures, and wondering which one of us would be brave enough to go first. Robbie put away his camera, and grasping two of the cables, stepped out onto the wooden sticks, spaced about 24 inches apart. He slowly stepped from one to the other, and when he was about thirty feet out, Max followed him. Then Agness and Hanna stepped out onto the swaying bridge, followed by Katlin, who had told us that she was extremely afraid of heights. This made her presence here among the highest mountains of the world something of a mystery to me, but I never got the chance to pursue the subject with her.
I followed last, and soon found that though the bridge looked as if it could collapse at any second, it actually felt quite secure. After stepping gingerly at first, I quickly learned to place my feet where the four cables, which made up the base of the bridge intersected with the planks and sticks. By doing so, I figured, I minimized the chance that the wood would break under my weight, as some of the sticks were no more than an inch and a half in diameter.
Katlin had no such confidence in the security of the structure, and was inching across gingerly, so that I had to wait every so often and let her get some distance away. I didn’t want her to feel pressured from behind and misstep.
This allowed me some time to stand above the river and watch the water rushing by only eight feet below us. I could hear the water stream past, and the sound of the silt and small rocks tumbling along gave it a strange hissing and crackling noise. I looked up at the surrounding peaks and along the banks while I waited for Katlin to make her way across, and behind us on the near bank saw a local woman coming toward the bridge along the path we had used.
Because Katlin was moving so slowly, the woman made it to the bridge before we were even halfway across, and I saw her begin to cross the span, using only one arm for balance, walking across the sticks the way we might walk on a city sidewalk. Within seconds she was upon us, and I grabbed the cables on one side of the bridge to move to the side and let her by. Though the bridge sagged heavily in my direction, the woman adroitly stepped around me and was soon behind Katlin.
Now Katlin was faced with letting go of one side to let the woman pass, but while she hesitated, the woman just ducked under Katlin’s right arm and continued easily toward the other side. What for us was high adventure was nothing at all to her.
When we finally all had made it across, we paused to eat some apples and talk animatedly about the crossing. I asked Robbie to shoot some video of me walking on the span, and I crossed back out for a short distance so that he could get the shot.
Then we headed up away from the bridge, climbing up an alluvial fan toward the canyon wall. The trail was difficult to follow, and only by stopping and looking for the few rock cairns marking the way could we keep going in the right direction.
Zarabad
The vague trail led, eventually, to another village called Zarabad, where the local Hunzakuts were harvesting their small plots of wheat and stacking the sheaves on top of the stubble. The village itself was criss-crossed with irrigation ditches, and we followed these past the mud-brick huts. Here and there a villager would step out to see us and greet us with an “asalaam aleikum,” which we returned. They were very friendly, smiling and pointing us in the right direction when we started along the wrong ditch, and waving at us if they saw us from across a field.
Soon we reached the far side of Zarabad, and headed toward the steep cliff side below us, where the trail had been cut into the bank. It wound around a bend in the river, and at times was little more than a foot wide, with a straight drop to the river below.
When we turned another bend, we saw the second bridge down near the water. Though we had been told that the second bridge was in better shape than the first, it appeared to be in shambles, with planks dangling vertically over the water, and huge gaps of eight feet or more in between the ones still remaining.
We stood for a while staring at it from above, wondering whether we’d have to retrace our route. But we decided to keep going and have a closer look, in case there was some way across that we couldn’t yet detect.
The narrow trail clung to the cliff side down along a series of switchbacks, and led us to the beginning of the span. And it was only when we were right on top of it that we saw that is was actually two bridges. One, the “new” one, which had been ruined in some recent flood, and the old one, which hung in the new one’s shadow, and had been obscured by it. But the old one was indeed in better shape than the first bridge we had crossed, and this time, being veterans of this sort of thing, we managed to get across much more adroitly. Of course, again while we were making our way to the other side, a teenage girl from the village beyond came from the opposite direction, and practically skipped across, making us looking like dottering old fools.
The New and the Old Bridge
After pausing for some more pictures, we walked up to the highway through the village of Hussaini, and stopped there for lunch in the shade of some tall poplars. Some of the local kids appeared to look at the strangers, and call “Allo” at us.
Hussaini
Some of them had blond hair and light eyes. And they weren’t the first Hunzakuts I had seen with strikingly European features. At first I had thought they were just fellow travelers dressed up in the local clothes, but after hearing them speak and interact with the more “Pakistani-looking” natives, I knew that they weren’t from Europe. There have been all sorts of explanations offered for the Hunzakuts appearance; from stories about them being remnants of Alexander’s army, to isolated subtribes of the original Aryan invaders. Evidently no one really knows why they look the way they do. But to those of us of European ancestry, they’re sometimes a startling sight.
We finished our lunch, and rather than follow the highway back to Passu, we struck off cross-country toward a brackish, swampy lake above Hussaini called Borit Lake. There, another, unnamed village lay, with apricots drying on the roofs of some of the huts. The temperature was high as we left the village and headed toward the moraine ridge of the Passu glacier, which lay between Passu and us, and I was glad that I had conserved my water during the morning.
We climbed for more than an hour, until at last we crested the ridge, and were met by a great view of the whole length of the glacier, and a cool breeze coming off of it. After pausing for a few sips of water, we followed the ridge back down to the highway and then turned back toward the village and the inn, where cold showers and more crisp apples from the garden awaited us.
The dinner in the common room was much livelier than the night before, as all of us had been there one night, and had had a chance to get acquainted. There were two Frenchmen, two Japanese, five Germans, two Dutch women, a Finn, and I, the only Yank. Fortunately for me, English seems to be the lingua franca among these sorts of travelers, so we all were forced to converse in it. And since I was the most fluent, I told the funniest jokes.
The previous night, after I had gone to bed, Robbie told me that the three other Germans brought out some hashish they had acquired in Karimabad, down valley a bit. But on this night, they were the first to retire, so I didn’t get the chance to taste the local product. Ah well, it wouldn’t have made me any sleepier, since I was dead on my feet by 9 o’clock anyway. So I padded off to my room and slept like a baby until dawn.