The end of Pakistan's lost paradise of Hunza: 'In just 20 years, our entire environment has changed'
In the village of Passu, we left behind the comfortable Karakoram Highway, the road opened in the early 1980s to link China and Pakistan. The 4x4 crossed a first suspension bridge, marking the start of the ascent to Shimshal. Below, a handful of men, gold prospectors, worked in the tumultuous, grayish river, fed by melting glaciers. A heatwave had struck Pakistan at the end of May and the upper Himalayas had not been spared.
The path is narrow, made of earth and gravel. It winds through a pass of rocky gorges, then crosses bare valleys whose walls, sculpted by the wind, rise like natural fortresses. It skirts glaciers the color of ash, covered in layers of sediment. This mineral, fragile desert is crumbling away on all sides. The final stretch of the journey, edging along a precipice, was torturous: The vehicle's wheels grazed the void and the mountainside.
Shimshal finally appears after three and a half hours and 55 kilometers of dust, like a green oasis. Its poplar-lined paths, orchards (cherry, peach, apricot trees), wheat fields and vegetable plots bordered by stone walls form a lush natural patchwork, accompanied only by the sound of glacier water rushing through a maze of irrigation channels. In the distance, the peaks shimmer with their eternal snows. Shimshal seems like a garden of Eden.
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