Bullseye’s Blog

We were all at least a little concerned about going into Pakistan – after all, the whole Taliban in the Swat Valley thing is very recent (if not ongoing, depending on if you believe the Pakistani government).  We aren’t going to the Swat area, but the Karakoram Highway goes within 100 km of it on the drive between Islamabad and Gilgit.

All that said, we’re now in Gilgit and the drive was completely without incident.  In fact, the people here are almost nice to a fault.  As we drive through towns everybody waves, and when we stop to eat or stay in a hotel, people are really excited to see us.  Not only that, but this area is really beautiful!

The truck parked along the Karakorum Highway, on the way to Gilgit

Even the police are quite excited to see us, as I imagine tourism has pretty much ground to a halt over the last six months (we haven’t seen a single westerner since we’ve been in Pakistan).  We got several police escorts, but one guy was particularly colorful.  I was sitting up front, and all of a sudden he pops up out of the hatch on top of the cab with his AK-47 and started posing for us to take pictures!

He even indulged our curiosity and fired off a couple of rounds into the wilderness, and then passed his gun off to our trip leader, Danny, who also took a shot.  I would have liked to have had a go at it, but unfortunately I wasn’t riding in the cab with them…

I’ll update again once we’ve done some climbing here – we’re driving tomorrow to Skardu to check out new routing possibilities around there.