Kohistan and the Karakoram Highway
The next morning we were expecting escorts, and there weren’t any, which cheered us. We set off, and promptly lost the German. He was doing 80kph again. Apparently he had somewhere to be. The land was still beautifully green, with bee-keeper boxes dotting the sides of the roads. We were rounding the bottom of the mountains, following the river. We stopped at a check post, where a guard tried to surreptitiously hold my hand while showing me a poster of Switzerland. It was odd. We were escorted for 15 minutes through the most dangerous part of Kohistan. It didn’t look any different to the rest, and nothing untoward happened. The mountains were snowcapped, the light amazing, and the waterfalls suitably sploshing. Shame about the road- it disintegrated further, with streams flowing over it, and bits of road tumbled into the ravines below. The pot-holes were truck sized. ...