Luxury Hunza & Skardu Tour

This is a 10-day touring circuit through Hunza and Skardu, the two valleys that hold most of what people travel to Gilgit-Baltistan to see. You move between them in a private 4x4 with your own driver and an English-speaking guide, and you sleep in the best rooms the region actually has: the Serena properties in Hunza and Gilgit, and two restored heritage palaces near Skardu. The route runs Islamabad to Hunza, up toward the Khunjerab Pass, then across to Skardu and the Khaplu Valley before flying home.

In Hunza you see Baltit and Altit Forts, the older Altit being the original seat of the Mirs, both restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. You boat on Attabad Lake, which a 2010 landslide created overnight, and drive up the Karakoram Highway through Gulmit and Passu toward Khunjerab at 4,693 metres, the highest paved border crossing on Earth. Sunrise from Duikar, above Karimabad, puts Rakaposhi, Ultar and Lady Finger in one view.

The Skardu half is where the heritage stays come in. Shigar Fort Residence is a 17th-century Raja's palace of the Amacha dynasty, restored by the Aga Khan Cultural Service and now run by Serena as a 20-room hotel and museum, about an hour from Skardu. Khaplu Palace, two hours further, dates to 1840 and was restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture between 2005 and 2011. Staying in both is the point of the trip, not a detail of it.

We have run this circuit many times, and we sequence it so the comfort carries the distances. Days are long because Gilgit-Baltistan is large and the drives are real, but the nights are easy and the logistics are handled. If you want the Karakoram without roughing it, and you would rather sleep in a 400-year-old fort than a glass tower, this is the trip.

Be honest with yourself about what luxury means in Gilgit-Baltistan, because it is not the same thing it means in Dubai or the Maldives. There are no glass towers, no rooftop infinity pools, no Michelin kitchens up here. What there is, and what nowhere else in Pakistan can match, is a pair of genuinely restored heritage palaces you can sleep in: a 17th-century fort and a 19th-century palace, both saved by the Aga Khan restoration programmes and now run as hotels.

The luxury is in the buildings, the service, and the way the trip is run. You travel in a private 4x4 rather than a shared van, with a driver who knows the road and a guide who can get you into places a self-driver never finds. Meals are local cooking done well: trout, apricots, walnut bread from a clay oven, vegetables grown nearby. Where modern comfort exists, at the Serena hotels in Hunza and Gilgit, you get it. Where it does not, we do not pretend otherwise.

So the trade is straightforward. You accept long drives and mountain altitudes in exchange for heritage-palace nights, privacy, and a team that smooths the friction out of a hard region. That is the luxury on offer here, and it is the real kind.

May to October is the window. The valleys are warm and open, the Karakoram Highway is clear, and the Khunjerab Pass is usually reachable for a day-trip, snow depending, across these months. April can still hold snow on the pass and we do not promise it that early; by late October the high ground starts closing again.

Spring brings apricot and cherry blossom to Hunza in late March and April, and the apricot harvest follows in June and July. Autumn, through October, turns the orchards gold and is many guests' favourite. Both shoulders are quieter than midsummer, which is the busiest stretch.

The circuit begins and ends in Islamabad. From there the cleanest option is to fly, PIA runs scenic flights to Gilgit and Skardu, but these are weather-dependent and cancel or delay often, especially in peak season. We never sell a flight without a road plan behind it.

If a flight drops, we drive: the Karakoram Highway from Islamabad is a long but spectacular run, and the Gilgit to Skardu road was widened and paved around 2021, so that leg now takes about 2.5 to 3 hours through the Indus gorge rather than the old six or seven. Building this contingency into a private trip is exactly what the private 4x4 is for.

This suits travellers who want the headline sights of Hunza and Skardu but will not compromise on where they sleep, and who care more about heritage and character than about five-star uniformity. Couples, photographers, and culturally curious travellers tend to love it.

It is a touring circuit, so you change hotels and cover ground; the drives are long and the altitudes are real, topping out at Khunjerab. If you would rather unpack once and let the days come to you from a single lakeside base, look instead at our Shangri-La Premium week in Skardu, which is built around staying put rather than moving.

We are a Gilgit-Baltistan operator and have been running trips here since 2015, which means we book the heritage palaces and Serena rooms directly, hold a road fallback for every flight, and pair you with guides who live in these valleys. On a private circuit like this, that local depth is what turns long mountain drives into an easy, well-paced ten days.