Baltistan Association Of Adventure Tour Operators

BALTISTAN (SKARDU)


Baltistan lies north of Indian-held Kashmir along the Indus River between the Karakoram Mountains and the uninhabited Deosai Plateau. Skardu, its capital, is the starting-point for some of the best trekking and mountaineering in the world.

When the Indus River enters Baltistan from Ladakh, it has already travelled 700 kilometers (435 miles) from its source in Tibet. It comes in through a gorge so deep and narrow that no path can follow it. On the northern bank a solid block of mountains, 60 of them over 7,000 meters (21,000 feet) high, from a wall 100 kilometers (60 miles) thick between Baltistan and China. In no other part of the world is there such a large number of high mountains in such a confined space. ON the southern bank, the Himalayas and the Deosai Plateau from the barrier with India.

It is only from the west that you can enter the isolated valleys of Baltistan. A new road hugging the bank of the Indus leads from the KKH for 170 kilometers (110 miles) to Skardu.

Like the rest of Pakistan's Northern Areas, Baltistan is a high-altitude desert. It rises from 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) above sea level to 8.616 meters (28.268 feet) at the summit of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. The average rainfall here is less than 100 millimeters (four inches) a year, but wherever possible the steep mountainside is cut into tiny terraces and irrigated by a network of small water channels from the glacier streams. In summer the melting snows swell the Indus to a raging torrent sweeps away everything in its path, so only the gentler side streams can be used for irrigation. Every inch of irrigable land is manured and cultivated: startling green oases stand out against the grey sand and rock of the barren mountains, like emeralds in massive settings of tarnished silver.

Stacked up the hillsides near the fields are mazes of multistory wood-and-stone cottages honeycombed with narrow unlit alleyways and rough, dark stairwells. Clustered round the houses are apricot, peach, mulberry and apples trees, all festooned with grape vines. Rows of poplar and willow trees line the irrigation channels and terrace walls, holding the soil in place and providing wind breaks. The trees are also vital for firewood and house building.

The quarter million people living in these villages are almost all Shia Muslims, the strictest sect of Islam. They speak Balti, an archaic Tibetan dialect. With its rolling sand dunes and barren mountains, the area round Skardu looks very like Tibet and is, in fact, often called Little Tibet.




The valleys are perhaps steeper and deeper than further east; and they are separated not by rolling plateaux but by lofty spurs. Yet there is the same overall impression of rock and sand, harsh white light and biting dry Natural vegetation is a rare and transitory phenomenon; cultivation is just an artificial patchwork of fields suspended from a contour-clinging irrigation duct, or huddled on the triangular surface of a fan of alluvial soil washed down from the mountains.

John Keay, When Men and Mountains Meet (1977)


In comparison to the gentler, greener valleys of Chitral and Hunza, Baltistan appears bleak and forbidding, and is not to everyone's taste. Yet the people, for centuries almost entirely cut off from their neighbors, are charming and hospitable. Until the airstrip was built at Skardu, they were virtually self-sufficient, growing grain and storing rancid butter (a great delicacy) in the ground for the long snow-bound winter. In the summer they ate fruit, reputedly the best in the Northern Areas.

As in so many of Pakistan's northern valleys, there is a vague tradition here that the town of Skardu was founded by Alexander the Great. Although the fort at Skardu is sometimes called Askandria (not unlike Iskander, Alexander's Indian name), neither Alexander nor his followers travelled this far east.

The area's early history is linked to Gilgit's. Baltistan was known as Great Bolor, Gilgit and upper Chitral as Little Bolor, Baltistan comprised four main kingdoms, of which Skardu was the most important. Of the other three, Khaplu controlled the route along the Shyok Valley; Shigar held the Shigar River and its tributaries; and Rondu guarded the Indus Gorge to the west of Skardu. There were also four lesser principalities: Kiris on the Shyok, and Parkutta, Tolti and Kharmang, which were on the Indus and controlled the path to Leh.

From 1846 Baltistan was ruled by the maharajah of Kashmir, whose cruel Hindu soldiers were hated by the Baltis. The British were only minimally interested in the area, as they considered it of little strategic value. At Independence in 1947, the Balti people, aided by a small number of freedom fighters, including the Gilgit Scouts, rebelled against their Kashmiri rulers became part of Pakistan. The Kashmiris were for a time isolated within the Askandria Fort.