Once Upon A Time In Pakistan

The rugged mountains and welcoming culture of Pakistan’s north have long been off limits, but with direct flights from London being relaunched, the country’s story is ripe for retelling

- Emma Thomson

From the dark recesses of the room came a sharp snore and a loud fart. We gated our giggles behind cupped hands and waited for Gul Naz’s grandfather to slip back into a deep sleep. He rested on one of six woven-rope beds arranged around a central wood-burning stove, and from the rafters hung heavily beaded headdresses, rumpled shirts and cobwebs. Gul Naz’s mother, Jamsher, shooed away the kittens winding between her legs on the compact mud floor and passed me a cup of weak green tea. I’d met her daughter, just an hour ago while wandering around the village of Balanguru in the folds of the Hindu Kush and she’d invited me into the family home.

They are Kalash, a pagan people living in the Chitral District of northern Pakistan, but I would come to learn that the warm welcome they offered me is the same as any you receive countrywide.

I left Gul Naz and returned to my Kalash host Saifullah. “In the Seventies, Pakistan was firmly on the hippie trail,” he remembered, as we walked through the village. “They used to hang out here smoking marijuana,” he smiled, pointing to the dilapidated balcony of a former guesthouse – a reminder that, not so long ago, travellers had very different opinions about Pakistan.

Indeed, we’ve all heard stories – many of them negative – about Pakistan. Some are real, some are exaggerated, some are untrue. I’d come to uncover the truth by staying with a Kalash family, visiting the previously off-limits Swat Valley and taking in the mountain scenery of the Hunza Valley as I journeyed around the country’s north-west region.

New beginnings