We don’t know what to do.
Our visa expires in 2 weeks, but we don’t want to leave.
We are not able to decide what to do.
Obviously we don’t try to solve the situation in a rational way, we simply start to do what my mother would call cincischiare (Cincischiare means something like fiddle about, waisting time doing small useless things instead of the ones you are supposed to do..).
We spend other 3 or 4 days in Passu, then we go back to Karimabad where we rent a room for one night and we end up staying one week.
Our daily routine includes having a huge breakfast with a view over the Rakaposhi and the terraced mountains of Nagar Valley that opens right in front of us.
Thomas declares he is “the guardian of the valley” and that he cannot move from his position. After a while he takes back his words, saying that he actually is only “the observer of the valley” which is a less demanding role.
Before the British, Hunza and Nagar were two separate and enemy reigns, with different traditions and languages. Being divided by a furious river with glacier origins the cultures never uniformed, yet remaining similar.
In both valleys it is practiced an eco sustainable agriculture completely based on natural methods. The steep sides of the mountains have been terraced and water channels have been created to bring water and green in places otherwise deserted.
This is apricot season and we start a taste tour of the various local species: bright orange apricots, almost red, amazingly sweet in taste, white apricots, a bit more sour but more valuable and Nagar’s berry-apricot as big as black cherry, that are an explosion of taste.
While we decide what to do we move from one valley to the other, riding them until the end and then turning around driving back. We spend 4 days in Hopar, at the end of Nagar valley, where the road finishes inside a guest house. From there you can proceed only by walk crossing a huge black glacier that rolls down directly from the mountains.
We go on it and it scares me. We are surrounded by spikes of ice and huge rocks that are pulled down from the mountains by the power of the ice. I feel tiny and vulnerable. The biting cold makes my nose itchy and all around me I hear the sound of dripping water and cracking ice. I don’t think I’m able to face such a big monster.
We are told that it’s from this glacier that the first Muslims came to Pakistan from Persia, converting a population that otherwise was animist and Buddhist.
In Hoper we once again feel the desire to stay there. To live I mean.
The valley is less steep than Hunza‘s and it’s all cultivated. In every village we are welcomed by curious stares and similes and all the kids that we meet join us in our walks until the point where we find ourselves leading a gang of shouting kids.
In the all valley there are no vegetables shop, every family has is own plot of land and a orchard in the garden of the house. When we ask how can we do to find vegetables to cook, a man brings me to his field and while he digs for potatoes, I collect green beans and leafs similar to spinach.
Every evening, at sunset, we gather with the men of the village in a small chay shop with view over the glacier where they teach us how to play to the local games: a kind of “snakes and ladders” called Larù, of which Thomas turns out to be a champion, and a game similar to pool, but where instead of the balls, big disks are used.
The bad weather comes: it starts to rain and there, on the side of the glacier, it’s really cold. Our dreams of living in these valleys hits agaist reality: winter is coming and there in the Himalaya it’s coming the real cold, the one we are not ready to deal with.
We go down to Gilgit where we spend days petting Gulebi, the orange cat of Abdul, the owner of the Guest House where we stay. We make plans of arriving to Islamabad before the end of the visa, but not before finishing our tour of the Northern Areas going trough Skardu and Deosai Plains. I have a feeling that, to make a difference, our visa will turn out to be too tight.
