Karakoram Highway

During our stay in Kashgar, my friend, Matt, from London, who we had met up with in Kyrgyzstan had miraculously managed to foil Chinese officials (albeit with some complications) and joined us at the hotel. We agreed to join forces for a while.
Leaving Kashgar, we headed along the perfectly surfaced roads for Tashkorgan, a fairly non-descript border control town in China. Like our entrance to China, this was a good 90km before the actual border and it was here that our passports were stamped out of the country. This was a fairly slow and inefficient procedure, but disappointingly involved us being supplied by a uniformed escort to the outer border.
A very dull 2 hours later, we finally got to the outpost and Matt, who had had to put his motorcycle onto a truck due to not having all paperwork in order managed to at last unleash his bike and ride it into Pakistan.
The Karakoram Highway (KKH) runs all of the way from Tashkorgan in China to quite some way into Pakistan, a total of around 800 miles.
The Chinese side of the road is perfectly surfaced but quite flat, whereas the Pakistan portion is much more winding with frequent landslides as it progresses through continuous mountain roads, following the Hunza River. The Pakistan portion of the Karakoram Highway presented many challenges and surfaces including mud, sand, floods, gravel, pot-holes and then immaculate surfaces! Karakoram means black mountain and is the only link for many communities to the rest of the country. It is quite a poor area, but in Pakistan, the locals are hugely welcoming. This to me somewhat by surprise as I had anticipated them to be slightly hostile towards westerners. Children line the streets greeting us (the education rate is quite low, so they were not at school). We have become familiar with a hand gesture that lets us know that we are riding during the daytime with our headlights on. The locals think that they are being helpful, but motorcycles in the west always use headlights both for visibility and because they are hard-wired to always be on. This sign is seen hundreds of time a day!
As soon as we crossed the border to Pakistan, via the Kunjerab Pass, the roads deteriorated to gravel and pot-holes. We were greeted by a sign saying 'Welcome to Pakistan, please drive on the left' (our last 11,000 miles had been driven on the right!) and a friendly border guard who waved us straight through. The real border was to be some 90km later in Sost. We progressed along the stunning mountain roads, eventually being stopped by a flooded piece of road, which at over 200m long was too risky to try to navigate with the bikes. Eventually, we loaded the bikes (something of a hairy manoeuvre in itself) into a truck to get across. The truck had absolutely no suspension at all and it was pretty uncomfortable riding in the container with the bikes, but it served the purpose. Unfortunately, we then couldn't find a suitable place to unload the bikes (it was almost 2m high without any type of a ramp), so had to stay in the truck for the 60km to Sost. After the 30km/h ride, and 1.5 hour stop as the truck ran out of fuel wait, we arrived in Sost in the pitch black. The border was closed but smiling faces welcomed us. Immigration held our passports for the night but waved us through to a hotel in the town. The next morning, we returned to immigration, sat down with the border guards whilst we filled in the paperwork and chatted before preceding to the customs office where we got our carnets stamped. It was so great to finally see some smiling faces after being in the Stans and China.
A carnet (or Carnet de Passage) is a guarantee that some countries require that declares that a vehicle being brought into a country will be taken out again. It basically states that if we don't take it out, we will pay up to five times the value of the bike. Hence, it's important to get it right! ...but things went smoothly enough and by 10am, we were on our way to Charimabad in the Hunza valley, where one of the guides from the tour groups in Kashgar had recommended that we visit.
The winding mountain roads continued and we passed truck after truck. In Pakistan, all of the trucks are painted and decorated in bright colours with pictures, ornaments, lights and dangling chains. They are quite a sight and it is amazing to see that it is ALL of the trucks.
In Charimabad, we stayed at a secluded hotel up in the hills, where we bumped into another of the Kashgar tours! We joined them for dinner and some illegal alcoholic drinks that had been smuggled in (Pakistan is a Moslem country). One of the girls in the group was so taken by our travels that she (Evelyn) asked if she could join us for a couple of days.
...so then we were four! After taking a look around the cobbled, steep alleys of the village and visiting the fort, we headed on down the KKH to the Sandor Valley. This was another winding road in stunning scenery, following the Ghizer River.
Seeing the reaction of a non-biker to the freedom of being on a motorcycle was fascinating and showed me how lucky I was to just jump on my bike everyday and go whichever way I pleased, when I wanted and to have an unobstructed view of the scenery.
Evelyn travelled with us for 2 days before we dropped her off in a City to meet up with the rest of her tour group. Afterwards, we pressed on Southwards to the bottom of the KKH, on our way to Peshawar, in the North-West region of Pakistan.