Hunza

Hunza is the valley above Gilgit, and the shape of it is what you remember. The river runs at the bottom, the road runs beside the river, and the villages sit up on the terraces above both, on land that has been irrigated by channels cut along the mountainside for a very long time. Karimabad is the one most people mean when they say Hunza, with Baltit fort at the top of it and Altit fort older and lower down, both restored and both worth the climb. Rakaposhi stands across the valley from it, and the view of Rakaposhi from the Karakoram Highway is the one that stops the car.

North of that the valley becomes Gojal. Attabad lake is there, a long stretch of very blue water that exists because a landslide dammed the river in 2010 and drowned the road and several villages under it. That is worth knowing while you are looking at it. Beyond the lake are Gulmit and Passu, where the mountains come down as a row of stone spires that everybody photographs, and then Sost, and then the road climbs to the Khunjerab pass on the Chinese border, which is the highest paved border crossing in the world and is shut for a good part of the year.

The people here are Burusho and, further up in Gojal, Wakhi. Burushaski is spoken in the middle of the valley and is related to no other language on earth, which is a genuinely strange fact rather than a brochure line. Wakhi is spoken above it. The valley is largely Ismaili, schooling has been taken seriously here for generations and the literacy rate is something Hunza is rightly proud of. One thing to leave at home: you will have read that people in Hunza live to a hundred and twenty. It is folklore, it has been repeated by outsiders for eighty years, and it is not the compliment it sounds like when it is said to somebody's face.

A few honest practicalities. Almost all of this is one road, the Karakoram Highway, and a landslide or a repair can close it for a day at short notice, so a Hunza trip needs room in it rather than a schedule that assumes nothing goes wrong. The valley is high and the pass is much higher, so the last stretch is felt by most people and should be taken slowly. Nights are cold well outside winter. And the two things the valley is famous for, the blossom and the autumn colour, are short and they move by a week or two with the year, so if you are going for either, ask us close to the time rather than booking on last year's dates.