Skardu Tour

At a glance

• 12 days, Islamabad to IslamabadFly in to Skardu, drive out over Deosai and Babusar. A contingency day is built in.
• Easy — family friendlyNo trekking. Some long drives on rough road, and two days above 4,000 m.
• Skardu, Shigar, Khaplu & DeosaiThree valleys of Baltistan, plus the plateau and the Babusar road out.
• Three & four star hotelsTwin share with en-suite throughout, including a night at Khaplu.
• April to OctoberDeosai is only open in high summer — roughly late June to September.
• All inclusiveInternal flight, all meals, transport, permits and guide in one printed price.

Day by day

1. 1Day 1Arrival in Islamabad

   

   Your guide meets you at Islamabad International Airport and transfers you to the hotel. The rest of the day is for the flight to wear off. If you land early there is time for the Faisal Mosque below the Margalla Hills, or the Pakistan Monument and the Lok Virsa museum next to it, which is the best hour you can spend on the cultures you are about to travel through. We brief the group in the evening.

2. 2Day 2Fly to Skardu

   

   Forty-five minutes, and on a clear morning one of the great scheduled flights on earth — Nanga Parbat at 8,126 metres off one wing and, if the routing and the air are kind, K2 itself on the horizon. Skardu airport was upgraded to international status in 2021 and cancellations are less common than they were, but the weather still decides. If it does, we drive the Karakoram Highway instead, which is a long day through Naran and Chilas and worth doing once in your life anyway.

3. 3Day 3Shigar Valley and the cold desert

   

   North-east into Shigar, the valley the Baltoro expeditions drive up on their way to K2, Broad Peak and the Gasherbrums. The seventeenth-century Shigar Fort has been restored into a hotel and is open to look round; the Amburiq Mosque nearby was built in the fourteenth century by Sayed Ali Hamdani and is one of the oldest in the region, carved timber and entirely without a dome. On the way we stop at the Sarfaranga cold desert — sand dunes at 2,200 metres with snow peaks behind them, which is a stranger sight than any description of it.

4. 4Day 4Skardu — the lakes and the Buddha rock

   

   A day around Skardu itself. Sadpara Lake is half an hour up the hill, glacier-fed and the town's drinking water. The Manthal Buddha Rock on the edge of town is an eighth-century relief carved into a granite boulder, and it is the plainest evidence you will see that this was a Buddhist kingdom before it was a Muslim one. Then the Kachura lakes — Upper Kachura ringed by rock, Lower Kachura inside the Shangrila resort — and time in the bazaar in the afternoon.

5. 5Day 5Skardu to Khaplu

   

   A hundred kilometres east, two or three hours, following the Indus and then the Shyok through a string of Balti villages. Khaplu was the second kingdom of old Baltistan under the Yabgo dynasty and it controlled the trade road to Ladakh. Today it is the administrative centre of Ghanche district and the base for the Hushe valley, which is how climbers reach Masherbrum, K6, K7 and Chogolisa. We arrive with the afternoon in hand.

6. 6Day 6Khaplu — the palace and the mosque

   

   The Chaqchan Mosque dates from 1370 and marks the conversion of the valley from Buddhism to Islam. It is still in daily use, open except at Friday prayers, and the woodwork inside is the reason to go. Khaplu Palace — Yabgo Khar — was built in 1840 by Raja Daulat Ali Khan, four timber storeys blending Tibetan, Kashmiri, Ladakhi, Balti and Central Asian building in one place. The Aga Khan Trust restored it between 2005 and 2011 and it won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage award for distinction in 2013. The rest of the day is the bazaar and the town.

7. 7Day 7Khaplu back to Skardu

   

   The same road in reverse, and a better drive in this direction — the Shyok opens out as you go, terraced fields and poplars giving way to the wide gravel bed above Skardu. Two or three hours with stops. The afternoon is free, which is the point: the next two days are long ones.

8. 8Day 8Over the Deosai plateau to Astore

   

   The best day of the trip and the roughest. Deosai is the second-highest plateau in the world at 4,111 metres, a hundred and fifty kilometres of open grassland with nothing on it — no trees, no villages, and in July a great deal of wildflower. It is a national park and the last stronghold of the Himalayan brown bear; marmots are a certainty, bears are luck. The track is uneven and slow and takes most of the day, and we stop as often as anyone wants. Down the far side to Astore in the evening.

9. 9Day 9Astore to Naran over the Babusar Pass

   

   Down the Astore river to the Karakoram Highway, with Nanga Parbat over your shoulder — the ninth-highest mountain in the world and the one they call the killer mountain, for reasons the Rupal face makes obvious from the road. A short stretch of the KKH, then the turn up to the Babusar Pass at 4,173 metres, which is the highest tarmac on the trip and the last big view. Down the other side into the Kaghan valley and Naran for the night. Around six hours of driving.

10. 10Day 10Naran to Islamabad, by way of Taxila

    

    South through Mansehra and Abbottabad — a colonial hill station in pine forest — and Hasan Abdal, where the Gurdwara Panja Sahib is one of the most important Sikh pilgrimage sites anywhere. Then Taxila, thirty kilometres short of Islamabad and one of the great archaeological sites of South Asia: a city from around 1000 BCE, ruins from the Achaemenid period, and the Buddhist monasteries and stupas that make it a UNESCO World Heritage site. Into Islamabad in the evening.

11. 11Day 11Contingency day in Islamabad

    

    This day exists so that a closed pass or a cancelled flight costs you a day rather than the trip, and on a trip that runs to plan it is a free day in the capital. Faisal Mosque, the Pakistan Monument with its four petals for the provinces, Daman-e-Koh looking down over the whole grid of the city, Lok Virsa, or a boat on Rawal Lake. Or nothing at all, which after ten days on the road is a perfectly good use of it.

12. 12Day 12Departure

    

    Breakfast, and a transfer to Islamabad International Airport for your flight home. Day rooms, extra nights and extensions are easy to arrange — Hunza is a natural add-on to the north, and Lahore is two hours south.

Good to know

The Skardu flight is weather-dependent. The road alternative is included rather than charged for, and the contingency day on day eleven is there so that a delay does not cost you your flight home.

Deosai is only passable in high summer — roughly late June to September, and the exact dates move with the snow. Outside those months the itinerary crosses to Astore by a lower road instead, which is a good drive but not the same one. If Deosai is the reason you are booking, travel in July or August and tell us so.

The plateau is at 4,111 metres and the Babusar Pass at 4,173, but you cross both in a vehicle in a day, so altitude sickness is unusual. Drink more than you think you need and expect to feel the height if you get out and walk uphill.

Baltistan is more conservative than Hunza. Loose clothing covering shoulders and knees for everyone, and a scarf worth carrying for the mosques at Shigar and Khaplu. The Chaqchan Mosque is a working mosque, not a monument.

Questions about this trip

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