Hunza to Khunjerab

This 8-day tour gives you the Hunza Valley properly first, then makes Khunjerab Pass the climax. The route runs the upper Karakoram Highway north from Karimabad through Gulmit, Passu and Sost, climbing out of the orchards into bare high country until it reaches the pass at 4,693 m on the Pakistan-China border, the highest paved international border crossing in the world. The shift in scenery on the way up, from terraced fruit terraces to glaciated rock and tundra, is the whole point of doing it as a journey.

Karimabad is the cultural base and we spend real time there before turning for the border. You walk Baltit Fort, restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and on the UNESCO Tentative List since 2004, and the older Altit Fort above the river, both seats of the Mirs of Hunza. The valley is home to the Burusho people, whose Burushaski language has no known relatives. In April the terraces blossom; June and July bring the apricot harvest; October turns the poplars gold.

North of Karimabad the highway threads the set-pieces of upper Hunza. Attabad Lake, dammed by a 2010 landslide and now bypassed by the Friendship Tunnels, gives a boat ride on deep turquoise water. The Passu Cones rise to 6,106 m above the road, with the Hussaini suspension bridge and Borith Lake nearby. Sost, about 75 km below the pass, is the last Pakistani town and its customs post before the climb into Khunjerab National Park.

Because the Hunza days do the acclimatising for you, the climb to the marker becomes a single hard outing rather than a worry. Those slower days lower down, walking the forts, sitting in an orchard, riding the boat, are what the trip is really built around; the border is the reward you earn by the end of the week. Grading is easy bar one demanding high day, group size runs 2 to 12, and the price is $1,200. We run the pass day only inside the snow-free window.

From Karimabad the Karakoram Highway runs north past Attabad Lake, through the Friendship Tunnels that replaced the road the 2010 landslide drowned, and up to Gulmit, an old Hunza capital. Beyond it the Passu Cones line the road and Borith Lake sits off to the side near the Ghulkin glacier. This upper stretch is short on the map but dense with landmarks, which is why we give it a full day rather than racing through to the border.

Settled life thins out at Sost, the last town before the frontier, roughly 75 km and two hours short of the top. Past it the orchards are behind you and the road climbs into the protected high country of Khunjerab National Park, where marmots and ibex are the animals you are likely to actually see and a few yaks graze the upper margins. We deliberately keep the prose on the park light here, because the wildlife and the geography of the marker are the job of our dedicated Khunjerab Pass Explorer; on this trip the pass is one big day inside a Hunza week, sat at 4,693 m with the border gate and a famously high ATM for company.

For tourist day-trips, plan on May to October, and treat it as snow-dependent. Snowfall governs the top of the road, so the start and end of that window can shift year to year, and we will not promise the pass in early spring or late autumn. The early-season and late-season departures carry the most weather risk, and we keep a flexible plan for the pass day so we can move it to the clearer morning.

Where you read that the road runs April to November, that calendar belongs to the freight traffic moving in and out of China, and it says nothing about whether a visitor can reach the marker on a given morning. This is the reason we load the week with Hunza rather than the pass: should fresh snow seal the top on your high day, you have already had the forts, the lake and the orchards, and the holiday loses nothing of substance.

What tires you here is the thin air, not the walking. The vehicle does the distance, yet in one go the high day lifts you from Hunza near 2,400 m to 4,693 m and brings you straight back down, and that jump is steep. The week of nights spent up in the valley first is our main defence; on the day we cut the time at the marker, keep water going round, and watch faces for the headache, short breath or queasiness that flags mild altitude sickness.

This still is not a trip for guests with serious heart or lung conditions, and we would rather know in advance and adjust than have someone struggle at the marker. For most reasonably fit travellers it is a manageable big day with a memorable payoff at the border gate.

Book this if you want to live in Hunza for the better part of a week and treat the frontier as the last act, rather than driving up and straight back. The forts, the orchards and the upper-valley overlooks come first, and the high day sits on top of all of it. Travellers chasing a leaner, border-first run with fewer valley nights should take our 7-day Khunjerab Pass Explorer instead. And if the China gate holds no pull and you would sooner stay down among the culture, our Hunza Valley Explorer or Hunza cultural tour will suit you better.

Based in Gilgit-Baltistan and running this stretch of road every season since 2015, we build the week so the body is ready before it has to climb: days in Hunza first, the border saved for last. Our drivers have the upper highway memorised and the guides know the orchards, the forts and the families behind them. We tell you plainly that the marker depends on the snow and that the high day is a genuine altitude push, and we have made the Hunza half of the trip rich enough that it carries the holiday on its own should the top be closed.