Basho Valley, Skardu: What the Jeep Track Actually Costs You

From the bridge, the track climbs into the valley. Published accounts put it at around ten kilometres gaining something in the region of 3,500 feet, cut into the mountainside, narrow, steep and heavily potholed in stretches, with drops on the outside edge and few places for two vehicles to pass. Budget an hour and a half to two hours for that ten kilometres. If that ratio sounds wrong, it is the single most useful thing on this page.

This is 4x4 country and it is not a matter of preference. An ordinary saloon car will reach the Basho bridge and will not go beyond it. People do ride the track on motorcycles, and larger machines manage it, but that is a different kind of day and a different appetite for risk. For everyone else the answer is a jeep with a driver who has done it before, and the driver matters more than the vehicle: this is a track where knowing which side of a rut to take is worth more than horsepower.

Hire is arranged in Skardu, not at the bridge, and it is arranged the day before rather than the morning of. We are not going to print a rate. The figures circulating for a round-trip jeep are estimates from the last year or two and they have moved; anyone quoting you a precise number online is repeating something they read. Ask two or three operators in town, carry cash in rupees, and settle the fare before you leave rather than at the top.

Sultanabad meadow is the place people mean when they say they are going to Basho. It is the main camping ground, set among pine forest with the Basho river running through it, and in a good summer week it is as green as anywhere in Baltistan. There are camp operators through the season with tents, basic toilets, a kitchen and somewhere to sit around a fire, and you can equally carry your own gear and pitch it.

What almost no guide states plainly is that there is no hotel in Basho. None. The choice is a tent or a return to Skardu the same day. That single fact drives every sensible Basho plan, and it is why the valley is best treated as a long day trip from a base in town, or as one deliberate night under canvas bracketed by proper rooms on either side.

If you do camp, take the cold seriously. Nights at the meadow are commonly reported at five to eight degrees even in July — not dangerous, but a great deal colder than the day, and people routinely arrive with a summer sleeping bag and regret it by two in the morning. There is also no ATM and no fuel station in the valley, and coverage is patchy at best: SCOM reaches parts of it intermittently, most other networks not usefully at all. Carry cash, fill the tank in Skardu, take everything out again, and tell someone where you are going and when you expect to be back.

Leave early, and mean it. Breakfast at Arcadian runs from six, and for Basho that is not hospitality, it is arithmetic: thirty to forty minutes to the bridge, up to two hours on the track, a few hours in the valley, and all of it again in reverse. A seven o'clock departure gets you to the meadow in good morning light and back down the track before dusk. A ten o'clock departure has you descending a narrow jeep track in the dark, which is the one part of this trip we would genuinely ask you not to do.

Katpana is on the western edge of Skardu, ten minutes from Skardu International Airport, which for once is the right side of town — the Basho road leaves in our direction, so you are not crossing the bazaar at the start of the day the way you would be for Kharmang. It is a small advantage and on this particular trip it is worth about twenty minutes.

Arrange the jeep the evening before through the front desk, take cash, take layers, and take more water than the temperature suggests. If you are camping, tell us — we will hold your room, keep the luggage you are not taking, and have hot water and a late dinner waiting when you come back down. Coming off that track into a heated room is, by a distance, the best part of the second day.