The most beautiful place I’ve seen

I suspect that to many people who read this blog, Pakistan feels like a pretty remote place. Sure, you’ve heard of it, but you never imagined you’d actually go there. Obviously, it wasn’t the same for me. Even on the tails of a 20 year separation, I always figured I’d find my way back to Pakistan. That is, at least to Karachi. But there were other parts of the country that felt as inaccessible to me as they probably feel to you.

Growing up, I knew exactly 2 things about Pakistan’s “Northern Areas” – that they housed spectacular mountains, including the second tallest in the world, K2, and that they were too unsafe to visit. Somewhere in the last decade that changed (the safety thing, K2 is still there and huge) and seeing this place that was basically the Shangri-la of my childhood was suddenly a real option.

Even my parents had never made it up here, so despite all the planning I was skeptical I was truly going to visit until we had actually landed. I say landed because even as we were landing I wasn’t confident our plane was going to make it through some of the narrow mountain passes that have to be manually (!!) piloted for the last stretch. 

Off-roading through Shangri-la

And suddenly I was in the most remote place I’ve ever been in my life. Skardu “International” Airport boasts exactly 1 (squat) toilet per sex and is the size of a medium ranch house. For the next 8 days, we wove through mountains that made distant concepts like geology and millenia feel immediate and material, as if they were operating in front of me. I ate picnics by rivers so close to their ice cap sources that they were as cold as they were clear, and jet-skied on lakes whose serenity was almost fiercely enforced by the encircling mountains. I even saw two glaciers – in short sleeves under a pleasant sun, which still confuses me. It was all stunning. The mountains in particular claim the kind of beauty that makes you feel like you should speak in whispers for fear of disrupting the sanctity of it.

We made most of the trip via Land Cruiser, driven by our guides who had been navigating the dirt roads spiraling around these mountains since they were teens. They rarely lowered their speeds, even when approaching large gaps in the dinky fence separating road from cliff or when maneuvering around boulders from a fresh landslide blocking half the path. But they were always careful to honk when approaching a bend because the turns were often completely blind and there was only room for one. The drivers even gamely encouraged us to ride like real locals, i.e. sitting on the roof of the Jeep, on the way to the Pakistan-China border (which was cool! We saw the world’s highest ATM there… out of service at the moment). 

The people

I was in awe of each one of our guides and meeting them was one of the highlights of my trip. One had summited some of the most dangerous mountain peaks in the world while also carrying the supplies of the group he was guiding, but refused to call himself a true mountaineer because he hadn’t yet summited K2 (both times he tried he could have made it but had to turn back to help down his clients who couldn’t). For reference, the fatality rate of climbing K2 is 29%, compared to Everest’s 1%. He’d lost several brothers to the mountains, all climbers and guides.

Many people here had lost loved ones in this way, it seemed like a grief that they all understood and almost accepted as part of their way of life. Wives implored their husbands not to go on another trek even as their sons grew up running among the mountains, the ever-present peaks beckoning them to the top to see what’s really up there. 

I don’t know if it’s this proximity to death or village life or growing up in such a dominating landscape, but I found that the people living here had a real peaceful gentleness in their approach and manner, serving as lovely complement to their rugged badass-ery. For such a male-dominated and physical society, I saw none of the anger or ego that abounds in city life. Sometimes on the more narrow village roads we would encounter a car coming in the opposite direction without space for us to pass each other and I would fully expect a Footloose-style game of chicken. But without fail, one of the cars would silently volunteer to reverse the lengthy distance required to extricate ourselves. It sounds small but in Karachi it would have come to blows.

The culture is marked by a quiet generosity – like the restaurant owner who tried to refuse payment after a friendly chat with our party or the farm woman who saw my father teaching us how to shuck a fallen walnut from her tree and pulled my mother aside to drop an apron full of her hard-earned crop into her arms – that impresses even my fellow Pakistanis who are renowned for their hospitality. One night, a friend of our guides who works as a cook for trekkers invited us to his home for dinner. It was a fantastic experience, he made us the food of the local laborers, which was a type of cuisine I’d never encountered before (apparently it’s more Tibetan than Pakistani), and even introduced us to his family. But it was only after I probed that I learned that he cooked the 10+ dishes for us using the single fireplace in his one-room home. It took him 7 hours.

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Perhaps this kind of behavior from a village society shouldn’t be surprising, but it was the complete opposite of what I was led to believe. Growing up, I was fed the stereotype that people from Pakistan’s mountains were uneducated and irascible, so I was pleased to learn they were almost as kind and gentle as they were handsome. I say handsome because I rarely saw a woman above school age, but the young men were straight dreamy. We drove through one town where every single person I saw had the makings of a movie star.

The ethnic makeup here is a unique mix of India, Persia, and Tibet, with each adjacent village seeming to have a different ratio, but which generally blends into an appearance that is unusual to see in the West. Most have green or blue eyes, pinkish tan skin, and beautifully thick black hair. I couldn’t snap any good pictures but here are two stock photos I can’t afford to pay the usage rights for.

My roots

As far as I know, my last name isn’t very common, even within my community. I’ve never met a Shermohammed that I wasn’t related to, and if you Google the name (from the U.S. at least), the results are almost exclusively members of my family (there’s a Taliban member in there that mucks it all up. Story of my life, right?). My family learned only a few years ago that the name, as well as our paternal line, comes from Northern Pakistan. It explained a lot. My uncle looks a quarter Tibetan. I’m part of a small sub-sect of Muslims that is a minority everywhere, even persecuted in certain Muslim countries, but composes nearly 100% of the population of several towns in this area. It was stunning to be able to walk into a random shop and use a “hello” greeting that only my sect uses and honestly a bit emotional to see my last name graffitied on a rock and to encounter a random security guard who shared it.

I really had to fight to make my previous visit to Pakistan happen, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’ve been so compelled to visit the country. I’m totally Western in my thoughts, lifestyle, friendships, allegiances, pretty much everything. I’m a lot more American than Pakistani. Yet I’m drawn to it like a bird that just knows in its gut that it has to fly halfway across the world to land in a very specific place. It might not be who I am, but it’s where I’m from. I think that’s why it meant so much to me to be able to make this visit to the North. I’d never been here, my parents had never been here, yet on this weird deeper level, it’s where I’m from.

Some of you know that I’m no longer in Pakistan. I fell a bit behind on writing while there but still wanted to share my experience. More to come soon on where I am now!

P.S. You can find more Northern Pakistan photos here.