The Roof of the World (part 1)
Day zero — Friday, 17th June, 2023
Drinking thick, sweet tea in Skardu, the capital of Baltistan, Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Population: 200,000. Number of traffic lights: zero.
The air is hot and dusty. Crumbling sandstone cliffs, thousands of metres high, frame an impeccably flat valley inhabited by the Balti people, ethnolinguistic Tibetans who converted to Islam over five centuries ago. We sit on the carpet, cross-legged, over an afternoon meal of bread and stew.
I watch Musa’s fingers close around the last of his chapati. “Your plan, boss”, he says, “is not possible.” We want to trek to K2’s base camp and back in eight days, half the normally prescribed seventeen-day itinerary. “The porters,” he continued, “they will not follow you. It is too much distance for them.”
“We don’t need porters. We’ll carry everything ourselves.”
He looks doubtful. “Food? Tent?”
“Yes. We’ll carry it. You can sleep in our tent too.”
He says nothing, although his expression betrays a foregone conclusion that I had spent too much time in a Rawalpindi hashish den. In reality, I am simply too cheap to pay for porters. It doesn’t help that Bartek needs to ride his motorcycle from Pakistan back to Poland, via Afghanistan, in the next two weeks before his papers expire.
In fact, Bartek is conspicuously absent from this particular conversation, having recently left to drop his bike off at an unspecified customs depot 300 kilometres away (how will you get back, I asked. Hitchhike, he replied).
Musa continues to demur, but by Pakistan Army diktat we cannot embark on this trek without a guide, so I spend another two hours grinding him down. We are supposed to leave tomorrow morning.
Day one — Saturday, 18th June, 2023
At 6am we are drinking instant coffee on the terrace, listening to the wind blow and watching the sun rise. From nowhere, a bright purple Toyota Landcruiser rounds a corner and pulls up with a screech at the doorstep of our hotel, honking loudly. “They stopped making these in the 80s,” Bartek muses. One side mirror is missing and its tyres are balder than a hen’s egg.
We load our kit onto the open truck bed — food, tent, stove, sleeping bags, crampons, harnesses, everything we need to sustain us for eight days in the wilderness without re-supply. Anything borderline unnecessary is jettisoned (my medkit is down to a strip of paracetamol, a bottle of hand sanitiser and a single plaster).
Musa stands in the back with our gear, still giving us the side-eye, whilst Bartek and I are ushered into the front cabin where we spend the next nine hours sharing a passenger seat for one. With the agonised shudder of a gearbox that hadn’t been oiled since 1976, we bid goodbye to civilisation, and with it our last shower for eight days.
The jeep track traces the gradual contours of the Indus river, which once marked the furthest boundary of Alexander the Great’s conquest. Today it is Pakistan’s primary aqueduct, although only weeks ago its swollen banks wrought catastrophic floods on millions of lowland inhabitants. We will venture upstream all the way to its source, the Baltoro glacier, which in turn is formed from snowpack which cascades off K2 and the surrounding mountains.
“Rockslide,” says our driver suddenly, gazing up into the cliffs, just as we drive straight across our eleventh river of the day (bridge not included). He pulls over for no reason other than to watch.
For a full minute nothing happens. And then the ground begins to shake, and a tsunami of granite, water and sand crashes over the section of road where we had passed a moment ago, cascading all the way down to the Indus hundreds of metres below. Sabir shrugs. “Now the road is closed,” he says. Had we mis-timed the crossing by sixty seconds, by now they would be fishing my body out of a pelican sanctuary downriver in Punjab.
More than a back-country trail for wayward trekkers, this road in fact represents the single transport artery for the Shigar Valley’s fifty thousand inhabitants. Its closure, even temporary, marked the end of any possible urgent resupply or medical evacuation. The valley is thus stuck in an economic doom loop, where nobody wants to invest because of unreliable access, and the lack of commercial interest in turn means no infrastructure gets delivered.
By 5pm we arrive at Askole, the final village at the end of the jeep track — from here on, you go on foot or you go nowhere at all. It is a pleasant enough agglomeration of terraced wheat farms and mud-brick huts with zinc roofs. Men wearing the ubiquitous kurta circle us as we arrive, looking for porter jobs, and are disappointed when we turn them down.
After a long day on an arduous road, most expeditions spend the night in town and leave for Jhoula camp in the morning; but being not very good at sitting still, we shoulder our packs and set out.
My pack weighs in at about fourteen kilos including water, though it will only get lighter through the journey as we consume our food. At just over 3,000m above sea level we can’t yet feel the effects of altitude, and the path is a gentle uphill on sand and gravel with the occasional herd of goats.
In the dying embers of the setting sun we reach Jhoula, the first campground of our journey. In the distance, away from the fluorescent tents of the main tourist site, sat a collection of neat, angular canvas structures in the unmistakeable dark-green camouflage of the Pakistan Army.
Baltistan lies within Kashmir, a territory of 12 million people that remains carved-up between the nuclear-armed trifecta of China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the eastern Karakoram mountains are the world’s highest battleground, with permanent military stations dotting the high glaciers at almost 6,000m above sea level. These are not Potemkin facades — only two years ago, gunfire and artillery exchanges on the India-Pakistan border left over two dozen dead and countless more wounded.
“Let’s go say hello,” says Bartek. “Boss… I think this is not a good idea,” Musa intones nervously. But life is too short to stick to the path and we soon find ourselves face-to-face with a group of bearded, un-uniformed men stacking jerry cans under the bright fluorescent perimeter lights. Somewhere in the darkness beyond, a diesel generator hums quietly.
A man in a dark fleece steps forward. “Are you lost?” he says.
“No. We just came to say hello.”
“Where is the rest of your expedition? Your porters?”
“We don’t have any. It’s just us.”
He eyes us curiously. “Please. Come inside.” Musa steps from side to side, clearly wishing he was anywhere else but with these two crazy gringos.
We sit inside on small metal chairs and Amar*, the man who greeted us, pours tea — thick, milky and sweet, gratefully accepted (I put aside my lactose intolerance for the sake of international relations). Of the two dozen men in this camp, two thirds are from the Punjabi lowlands, the rest an assortment of Pashtuns, Baltis and Balochs. The officers get their orders in English, day-to-day interactions amongst the men are conducted in Urdu, and most of their singing is done in Punjabi.
“We are here to build bridges and roads,” says Amar. He and his men are members of the Army Corps of Engineers. “As you can see, we don’t carry weapons. Our work is peace. Welcome. You are my guest.”
After some merriment, which includes Bartek reciprocating with a song in Polish, we are allowed to set up our tent on their grounds. Musa, who has also been given a raucous welcome, is offered a bunk, so tonight we only have to fit two people into our two-man tent.
*All Pakistani Army names changed to protect privacy
Day two — Sunday, 19th June 2023
Musa walks over to our tent with a big grin on his face, bearing good news on two fronts. The first is that he has snuck us a couple of warm chapatis from the mess hall (win!). The second is that the Army jeep is heading the same way as us, and they’ve offered us a ride.
This triggers an internal conundrum. On one hand, I harbour a deep-seated desire to complete this journey unsupported, reaching our destination through nothing other than personal effort and determination. Climbing is not about where you get to but how you get there, and the summit is simply the point at which you begin the descent.
On the other hand: Pakistan Army jeep.
The choice is obvious.
After about four kilometres we arrive at a ravine, upon which the crew dismount to continue building their bridge, and we continue our journey on foot. A vast, untamed wilderness stretches beyond us. This is a parched land, harsh and beautiful, its impossibly high sandstone cliffs constantly raining debris on the river valley below. The upper reaches are glued together by permafrost, but increasingly warm summers are gradually dislodging surfaces that have held together for millions of years.
Under the mid-day sun we reach Paiyu Camp, and here we chance upon our first actual K2 summit expedition. Nims Purja of 14 Peaks fame has founded his own guiding company, and the bright yellow dome tents of Exped Elite sit in neat rows on a level platform hacked into the cliff edge. On a lower terrace, the porters sleep under tarps stretched between piles of rocks, accompanied by a live goat on a leash, munching happily on shrubs unaware of its eventual macabre fate.
“Here they are resting for one day,” says Musa. “From Askole, they will take seven days to reach base camp.” This surprises me — whilst I expected trekkers to march at a slower pace, I’d imagined the ‘real’ climbers would at the very minimum match our four-day pace, if not exceed it, considering they had a four-to-one ratio of porters carrying their stuff.
Shortly after Paiyu, the river turns to ice and our path veers onto the Baltoro Glacier itself (it will be another six days until we step back onto solid ground). It is well after sundown when we reach Khobutse camp, where we collapse in exhaustion from our fourteen-hour walk.
The end of day two. I drift to sleep, thinking of the long road ahead.
Click here for part 2 of the journey: we sneak into another expedition’s base camp, meet some Nepali Sherpas, and our high-altitude guide threatens to abandon us on the mountain.
Map of the entire trek:
