Five hours to Gurez

Gurez is the furthest you can get from the Srinagar houseboat without leaving Kashmir, and the distance is not really measured in the hundred-odd kilometres. It is measured in the fact that when you arrive, people are speaking a different language, in houses built a different way, in a valley that faces a different river system.

The road

You go north through Bandipora and then you climb. The Razdan Pass tops out at roughly 3,550 metres and it is the gate: the valley beyond it is cut off for around six months a year when the pass is under snow, and it opens somewhere between late April and June depending on the winter.

Allow five hours from Srinagar, more if the road is being worked on, which it usually is. This is not a drive to attempt as a day trip. People do, and they spend nine hours in a vehicle to look at a river for forty minutes.

On the far side you drop into the Kishanganga valley. The river runs west and then north-west, and past the Line of Control it becomes the Neelum. That geography is why the valley has the military presence it has, and why permits and rules here can change at short notice.

Dard country

The people of Gurez are Dards — Shins — and they speak Shina, a Dardic language of the Indo-Aryan family and one of the older living branches of it. It is not Kashmiri. A Kashmiri guide from Srinagar will not necessarily understand a conversation in a Dawar kitchen, and the good guides here are local.

The architecture tells you the same story before anyone speaks. Houses are built of horizontally stacked timber, notched at the corners, with a stone base and a low pitched roof — an entirely different tradition from the brick-and-deodar of the Srinagar old city, and a completely rational response to deep snow and abundant conifer.

Habba Khatoon

Standing over Dawar, the main settlement, is a near-perfect pyramidal peak named for Habba Khatoon — the sixteenth-century Kashmiri poet, born Zooni, who married Yusuf Shah Chak, the last of the Chak sultans. He was taken to the Mughal court and never returned. Her verse, which is still sung, is largely about that absence.

Local tradition puts her in this valley searching for him, and gives the mountain her name. Whether or not the geography of the story survives scrutiny, the mountain is the first thing you see in the morning and the association is completely inescapable once you know it.

Tulail, if you have another day

Past Dawar the road continues up the Kishanganga into Tulail, and the valley narrows and empties. Villages get smaller and further apart, the timber architecture gets purer, and the road gets worse. How far you can go depends on conditions and on what is permitted that week. This is the part of the trip people remember.

Practical, and non-negotiable

• Season. Roughly May to October. Outside that, do not plan on the pass.
• Permits. Required, arranged in advance, and subject to change. Carry photo ID at all times; foreign nationals should carry passport and visa copies and expect to be registered at checkpoints.
• Photography. Do not photograph military installations, personnel or checkpoints. This is not bureaucratic pedantry and the consequences are real.
• Cash. Bring it. Assume no working ATM.
• Connectivity. Assume none. Tell people at home before you cross Razdan that they will not hear from you.
• Accommodation. Mostly homestays, plus a few basic guesthouses and huts. Hot water is a bucket. This is the correct way to see Gurez and also genuinely how the money reaches the valley.
• Altitude. Dawar sits at around 2,400 metres and the pass is well above it. Not extreme, but do not go straight from a flight to Razdan on the same day.

What you are actually going for

Not a sight. There is no single thing in Gurez you photograph and leave. What is there is a valley that spent decades effectively closed, that still runs on its own language and its own building tradition, and that gets perhaps a fraction of the visitors Pahalgam gets in a week.

It will not stay that way. The road is improving. Go while the drive is still long enough to keep people out.