Skardu to Hunza: The Road, the Real Drive Time and Where to Break It

This is the leg that defines the day. From our gate you drop through Skardu, pick up the Skardu road west, and then follow the Indus downstream in a gorge that goes on for four hours. The S-1 was originally built by the Pakistan Army Corps of Engineers between 1970 and 1982, and for most of its life it was a narrow, broken, genuinely frightening road. Its reputation locally was not good.

That changed. The widened and rebuilt 167-kilometre road was inaugurated in December 2021, and the upgrade is credited with cutting the Jaglot-Skardu journey from around ten hours to about four. Our guests who drove it before and after do not need convincing — it is now two metalled lanes with barriers on the exposed sections, and an ordinary car handles it comfortably.

What has not changed is the terrain. It is a gorge road cut into loose rock above a large river, so rockfall is a permanent feature rather than an occasional event, and it is at its worst in spring melt and after rain. Repairs close a lane at short notice. There is very little on this stretch: no proper restaurants, few shops, sporadic mobile coverage, and long sections with no settlement at all. Leave Skardu with a full tank, water, and something to eat, and use the bathroom before you go rather than hoping.

The four-hour figure is the road's capability, not a promise. With a family, a bathroom stop, a checkpost and two photographs, our guests routinely take four and a half to five hours to Jaglot. That is normal and nothing has gone wrong.

The last leg is the one people remember. It runs roughly 100 kilometres north from Gilgit and takes two to three hours, climbing steadily from Gilgit's 1,500 metres to Karimabad's 2,500. The valley opens out, the river turns, and the peaks stop being a wall and start being individuals.

The obvious stop is the Rakaposhi View Point at Ghulmet in Nagar valley, on the highway between Gilgit and Hunza, sometimes signposted as Rakaposhi Zero Point. Rakaposhi is 7,788 metres and the viewpoint is genuinely close to it; there are tea stalls and, in season, a certain amount of crowd. Allow half an hour. If the top is in cloud when you arrive, it is often clearer on the return journey, so do not force it.

From there it is a short run to the turning up to Karimabad, which climbs off the highway on a steep, narrow road. Cars manage it; large vans sometimes struggle to turn at the top. Arrive with daylight if you can — finding a guesthouse on that hill in the dark, in a town where the lanes are not built for cars, is the least pleasant twenty minutes of the day.

There is no direct scheduled bus from Skardu to Hunza. Every public option involves changing at Gilgit, and that change is the part that catches people out.

May and June: the road is open and green, and this is also the peak of snowmelt, which is when rockfall on the gorge is most active. Fine, but check before you leave.

July and August: the warmest and busiest months, with the most traffic on the KKH and the highest chance of a monsoon-edge downpour bringing something down. Also the most likely months to be delayed for a few hours by a slide. Start early and carry more water than you think.

September and October: the best window for this drive, as it is for most things in Baltistan. Clear air, low haze, thin traffic, and the poplars turning along the river. If you can choose, choose this.

November to March: the road is not formally closed and does get driven, but snow, ice on the shaded gorge sections and short daylight change the calculation completely. In deep winter we would not put a guest in a car for this journey without a local driver and a flexible plan at the far end.

The common mistake is treating the two valleys as interchangeable halves of one holiday and giving each three days with a travel day glued on. What happens is that the travel day eats a day at each end, and guests leave feeling they saw neither properly.

What works better is to treat the drive as its own day and be honest about it. Fly into Skardu, give Baltistan four or five nights, drive to Hunza on a day you have already written off for driving, and give Hunza three or four. Coming back the other way, fly out of Gilgit or drive down the KKH to Islamabad rather than doubling back over the same gorge.

The other practical point is where you sleep the night before. The drive is decided at six in the morning, not at noon, and starting it from Katpana — ten minutes from the airport, with the kitchen willing to do breakfast at half past five — is materially easier than starting it from somewhere in the bazaar with a car you have to find. Guests going on to Hunza usually spend their last Skardu night with us for exactly that reason, and we send them off with a flask.