Few tourists come to Northern Pakistan in March. It's too early for the mountaineers that come to attempt the world's second highest peak, K2, or any of the other 8,000-metre peaks within the district. And it's too early for those travelling onwards to China via the Karakoram Highway: the border crossing between Pakistan and China opens to non-nationals only at the beginning of May.
You cannot travel in a Muslim country as a woman without being reminded of your sex in all manner of ways, every day. And you will have an unbearable time unless you respect a religion which requires women to cover themselves at all times, either with the Pakistani shalwar kameeze or the Iranian chador.
In parts of Pakistan where I travelled, such as Baltistan, which borders onto Kashmir, the people are Shia Muslim. This sect differs from the more widespread Sunni Muslim in a number of ways: there is the requirement that local women live in purdah and are not seen in public. To be a tourist, a lone tourist and, in addition, the only woman in sight in these areas is to feel slightly science-fictional.
To have taken your sex for granted for upwards of three decades and then to travel in countries where men are the visible part of everyday public life requires a lot of energy. Independent travel as a woman in Iran and Pakistan was always arcane, extraordinary, fabulous. However, it requires buckets of patience, and a willingness to commute between the huge differences in Western culture and Islamic culture.
"Where is your husband?" I was asked incredulously a hundred times a day. In the end, I said I had been thrice widowed and that seemed to be an acceptable answer for roaming alone in out-of-season Pakistani mountain villages: clearly, grief had affected my mind and the marbles within.
In Gilgit, which is a two-day bus journey from the Chinese border, I bought a map of the Karakoram one afternoon in the bazaar. Trek- king And Mountaineering Map it declared. Karakoram: Gilgit, Hunza, Rakaposhi, Batura Area. I spread it out on the lawn of the Madina Hotel, examining the symbols. They referred to glaciers and mule tracks, unmetalled roads and unfrequented tracks, monasteries, passes, cave shelters and something baldly described as heights. Heights. I liked that additional statement in a map that had Hindu Kush Range in its top left-hand corner and clusters of peaks that read over 7,000 metres.
There was no colour in the map. It was monotone, with no contours and the sketchiest of topography. Mountain ranges were inked in thick black, the slopes running off at right angles to the backbone of the ridges. They looked like skeletal leaf patterns or strange fish-bones. In between the mountains bulged odd shapes, like pools or lakes. These were glaciers, something which took me five minutes to fully comprehend. This area of Pakistan has the densest concentration of glaciers beyond the Polar region.
The Karakoram Highway itself was difficult to distinguish. It was a mere scratch among the fish-bones and the leaves. The villages it passed through were written in type smaller than the names of the mountain peaks that shoved their way skywards behind them. The map was no more than an impression of a landscape; hints of what lay all round Gilgit.
I wanted to walk along the Karakoram Highway to Karimabad, in the Hunza Valley, a distance of 61, 40 or 52 miles, depending on which map or piece of literature I was currently looking at. I reckoned it would take three days and according to the map, it seemed that there were simple places to stay along the way. But the villages looked as if they been inked in at random. There was no accurate way of telling how far apart they were from each other. If I was to walk from one to the other, I needed to know how far ahead my shelter for the night was. I poured over the map, trying to guess the distances.
Yaqoob, the owner of the Madina, was not happy with my plans. He saw the map on the lawn and came over to see what I was up to. He frowned. "No. Is not good," he said. "You are one person only." Then he said hopefully, "There is a nice bus. Going Karimabad every day."
A sense of independence is a tricky thing for a Western woman to retain in a Muslim country. "I don't want to go on a bus," I said stubbornly. "I want to walk."
"But you are only one!" The map lay between us on the lawn. Glaciers, caves, mule tracks, mountains, passes and heights. A road ran through it. I wanted to walk on that road, just for a few days. Yaqoob tapped the map in agitation. He pointed to an uncertain area between Gilgit and Karimabad. "There are bandits!" he hissed. "And you are woman!"
I looked again at the map. The bandits weren't on it; hidden away in camps among the unnamed valleys. "How do you know?"
"Because they come on the road and stop the lorries and steal the goods. At night, the buses and lorries will not travel alone. They go in convoy. If the bandits see you, they will follow you. Rob you, maybe other things too!"
Yaqoob was a local and I wasn't. But possibilities of danger lie everywhere. In the garden of the Madina Hotel that afternoon, I reasoned that there was more to be risked by yet another journey in an overcrowded bus with appalling brakes than walking tranquil and alone along the Karakoram Highway. At eight o'clock the next morning, I was walking towards the village of Rahimabad, where I intended spending the night.
The Karakoram Highway, which shadows the ancient Silk Road, is not a peaceful place. 35,000 Chinese and Pakistani men came together in the 1960s to build the "Friendship Highway". It took two decades to complete and a life for every one of its 500 miles; a disconcertingly easy statistic to remember. It was dubbed mankind's most ambitious engineering feat since the Pyramids; carving out a road where no road should reasonably exist.
The road has the quality of a ghost. It's there one moment, pushing through impossible-looking walls of rock and gone the next, invisible beneath a collapsing mountainside, a river of rocks or the unexpected wave of an avalanche. It is a shelf-like road that is constantly being remade; salvaged from the debris of the mountains that surround it. The landscape is stunningly brutal.
All that day, the narrow shelf shied along beneath mountain walls that leaned over it, breathing down rock and rubble. Far below in the gorge, the Hunza River flowed deep and cold. I passed countless hand-painted signs with the legend: Be Careful. You Are Entering Slide Area. And then, further down the road, another sign would tell me to Relax. Slide Area Ends. Sometimes, the slide from the slide area had knocked over the warning signs into the river valley and I found myself in the unsettling situation of being urged to relax without ever knowing I had been in the danger area.
In the afternoon, I hitched a lift on one of the famous Bedford trucks that are Pakistan's mobile circus of kitschery. Anything with wheels in Pakistan is decorated. Inside the cab, there are fairy lights, plastic flowers, prayers to Allah, extracts from The Koran, and garlands of tinsel. Outside, the panels of the truck are painted with intricate mosaics of flowers, birds, trees, ships and planes. Every inch is covered with colour, and fringes of chains and coins dangle from the bumpers. It's the interior of Belfast's Crown Bar converted to Islam and gone on the road.
The cab was full, so I climbed up the outside ladder and jumped into the howdah-like wooden structure that projects over the cab. The truck lumbered forwards; an uncertain elephant, stumbling far too close to the sheer and unprotected edge of the road. "Madam is OK?" The driver had his head out the window, shouting up. The truck swerved. The Hunza River glittered far below, cruel as a blade. "Madam is OK!" I yelled back, dry-throated; a modern-day Hannibal.
Rahimabad: one chai stall, a few shacks, men playing Ludo in the dust, one building with a sign outside - "Hotel and Restaurant". Inside, a long room was filled with chairs and tables. About 20 men were watching cricket on the generator-powered television and drinking chai. They looked up in amazement.
"I was wondering if I could have a room?"
"Oh no, no rooms here."
"But it says Hotel," and I pointed to the sign outside, knowing even as I did so that the sign was fiction, like the signs that promised hot water and showers that worked.
"Restaurant, yes. Goat curry, chapati, chai, yes. Rooms, no." The owner hesitated. "Your husband?"
"Dead. All dead," was my automatic answer. So much for the promises of accommodation made by the fictional map. The nice bus to Karimabad had long since passed me on the road. Besides, it would soon be dark. I thought of Yaqoob and the way he had hissed: "There are bandits!"
"Madam!" the owner said. "You can sleep here if you wish. I will permit." He waved a vague hand in the direction of the opposite end of the room. Where the tables and chairs were stacked up.
The cricket finished and the men drifted away into the darkness. Arshad, the owner, set about packing up the generator and the television and counting rupees. For the first time, I noticed the gun that stood behind the desk. "Kalashnikov?"
Arshad looked surprised. "Yes," he said, picking it up. "Bam! Bam! Bam!" he suddenly roared and swung around the room, aiming at imaginary targets.
"Do you use it a lot?"
His eyes were shining. "Once," he sang out. "Once I had to use it. 25 bullets!" Then he looked at me and knew he had said too much.
"Why?" I asked, mad with curiosity. "When?" but by then it was no good.
He laid the gun down on the counter and went back to counting rupees. "My English, it is not so good", he said, even though we both knew that was not true.
The money was counted, the generator was switched off. Arshad locked me in and went away into the night. I was left with a candle, a Snow-White like row of chairs for a bed, the sound of mice and my own wild speculations about the destination of 25 Kalashnikov bullets.