Everyone plans Hunza for blossom or autumn gold. I came in January by accident of timing, and I would now defend that accident with my life. The Karakoram Highway, which I'd been promised was one of the world's great drives, was also — in winter — one of the world's emptiest: long stretches where ours was the only vehicle between river and rock, the famous viewpoints deserted, Rakaposhi wearing more snow than seemed structurally reasonable.
Karimabad in winter runs at perhaps one-tenth speed. Half the hotels close; the ones that stay open get better. I had booked a homestay below the fort, and my room came with a bukhari — a wood stove with a personality — that the family's youngest son relit each evening with the seriousness of a ship's engineer.
Breakfast became the architecture of every day. Apricot-kernel oil on fresh bread, eggs from somewhere within earshot, salted milk tea, and the stove ticking while the windows did their slow reveal: first the orchard under snow, then the village roofs, then Ultar's ridgeline, then — touched by sun long before the valley floor — Rakaposhi, pink as the inside of a shell.
The days were short and I stopped minding. I walked to Baltit Fort through lanes where the only footprints were mine and a dog's. I drank coffee in the one open café with the owner, who showed me summer photographs of the same street with the affectionate contempt of a man showing you traffic. At Attabad the tour boats sat pulled up on the shore and the lake's edges had frozen into panes of grey glass; the turquoise underneath looked like a secret being kept until spring.
One evening my host's father talked about Salgirah — the December celebration when, he said, the whole valley strings its houses, orchards and even the fort with lights for the Aga Khan's birthday, and the hillsides at night look sewn with constellations. I had missed it by a few weeks. He showed me a video on his phone, mountains outlined in fire, and I understood I was being given both a gift and an assignment for next year.
I had been warned about the cold, and the warnings were correct and beside the point. Yes, the pipes froze one night; yes, I wore my hat to dinner. But cold is what the stove, the tea, the blankets and the conversation are for. Hunza in winter doesn't lack comforts — it concentrates them around heat sources, which is where the people are too, which is the entire point.
On my last morning the snow came down soft and businesslike, and the family stood in the doorway in the manner of people who have done a thousand goodbyes and still mean each one. The driver took the empty highway south slowly, for the views, without my asking. Come in January. Tell almost no one.
“Rakaposhi, touched by sun long before the valley floor, pink as the inside of a shell.”
