How Not To Traverse a Glacier

The next day we were due to leave for Passu, a 3 hour drive away.
 
It took us 8 hours.  The place was full of JCB s, excavating vast chunks out of the mountains to widen the road.   The ‘culvert construction’ diversions continued, mostly into mud.  

 

We only fell in once, when we were going through a river and hit an underwater boulder.  There was no disaster though, I jumped off and pushed the bike back up, and we carried on.

 

 

  

We stopped for watermelon and mango juice at a roadside shack, by a bubbling brook that the drinks were kept cold in.  

 

 

The route was stunning.  Every time you turned a corner it got more incredible, with massive mountain vistas.  There were huge chunks of snow and ice.  There was an enormous glacier in the distance.  

 

The water rushing everywhere meant there were fruit orchards and grassy meadows.  

The restaurant was perched high on a rock in front of the glacier.  It was a colder, rockier location, but the restaurant was cosy, with a friendly, knowledgeable manager.  

We camped out the back.

We boulder-hopped to the glacier, and I was amazed.  It was huge, enormous, incredibly large, really quite big, etc.  There was a massive river rushing out from underneath it, where the ice had melted.  The noise was tremendous.

We clambered up to it, and Adam turned to inspect a large hole he had found.  
I watched a large rock tumble from on top of the glacier and land beside us.  

I turned back, and Adam had fallen into the glacier, up to his hip in a giant hole.  

He managed to get out, but lost his shoe in the process.  He tried to look for it, but it had been rushed away by the icy underground water.  He was lucky, it could have been him rushing down the river.  We didn’t even realize we had been stood on the glacier- it looked like rocks, but they fallen to form a layer above the ice.   It was a bit scary.

 

 

  

 

Adam walked home without a shoe, over sharp rocks for 2 hours.  

 

 

We got back and read about the dangers of glaciers in a guide book.  

 

 

Another walk saw us end up lost, in apricot orchards, near a tiny village.  All the people we saw asked us where we were going, and directed us.  There were little shepherd huts (the huts, not the shepherds), and lots of goats.

Before we left the manager told us we had to visit his friend in Karimabad for the best walnut cake.