Starting from Grenoble, we reach Skardu in less than 24 hours --- with a morning flight from Islamabad with wonderful weather, magnificent sights on Nanga Parbat and all the Karakoram still under a lot of snow. The change of scenery is complete: we are now in a typical noisy and dusty Asian town with its crowded bazar … just the trucks are missing, the road up here has been closed till now because of bad weather conditions. In the morning, I visit the quiet areas of the city far away from the road, and in the afternoon we visit the bazar and a beautiful viewpoint on the Indus River.
Next morning we leave Skardu (around 2000m, where apricot blossom is almost over) for a 100km jeep ride on a progressively worsening, finally almost scary road to the ends-of-the-earth village Askole (at 3000m) where spring has barely started and people live all winter in a windowless rooms, isolated enough from the cold outside to allow survival … as in Ladakh many years ago. In summer, it is a busy place, plenty of mountaineers and trekkers come to admire and climb the local peaks even if in recent years the crowd decreased; now there are only the locals, and before two months no other trekking group will come up here.
We spend a full day around the village, we have time to visit the school in Korphe (built by the Italians), on the other side of the river, to observe the spring farm work, and some of us even experience the direction of a plow yak …
Men and kids look and behave just as everywhere else, but women wear colorful local dresses … and are completely scared by all these cameras that we tourists carry around. Poor girls, they (have to?) hide as soon as one of us is approaching.