The world’s most remote village?
In the Shimshal Valley, electricity arrived in the 1990s, but there is no phone service, Internet or police force.
For centuries, this tiny village in the northern tip of Pakistan has been home to some of central Asia’s toughest inhabitants.
From this rugged, 3,000-metre plateau in the Karakorum Mountains, residents used to have to walk for up to a week to reach another settlement. The journey was so gruelling that monarchs banished prisoners to live here — assuming they survived the walk.
About a decade ago, the opening of a one-lane road — after 18 years of construction — brought comforts such as factory-made blankets and water-filtration systems, as well as concern that the route that freed the village from isolation would doom it as younger residents left for jobs and Internet access.
For now, the 2,800 villagers who live here in the Shimshal Valley remain, arguably, the toughest residents of Pakistan, as well as some of the world’s best mountain climbers.
They have to be. Electricity arrived in the late 1990s but works only sporadically, and still there are no phones. There is no police force. Winter is so severe that most residents keep two years’ worth of food, knowing that help is not nearby.
The dirt and gravel road connecting the valley to the Karakorum Highway has been called one of the world’s most dangerous — and beautiful — drives. Carved into the sides of mountains, the route is so narrow a jeep’s tires roll centimetres from the edge while passing through breathtaking gorges and axle-busting rock fields next to a multi-storey glacier.
In the valley, tiny stone houses are clustered at the base of barren mountains. But irrigation ditches have made the valley floor lush in the summer, and wheat grows up to the doorstep of most homes.
For generations, residents relied on that wheat and a herd of 5,000 goats and yaks to survive. Villagers take the animals into upper reaches of the valley to graze each summer.
“Climbing is in our nature, so you have to do it,” said Jaffar Ullah,18. “It’s not till later in life, when you grow up, that you learn about other things such as the Internet and television.”
That is how local Samina Baig, 24, became a celebrity in Pakistan — and the first Pakistani woman to summit Mount Everest.
Baig is also the first Pakistani woman to climb the tallest mountain in each of the seven continents.
Villagers who never left the valley finally saw their first mechanical vehicle in the late 1990s, when a Pakistan army helicopter dropped off a tractor. Even today, however, residents rely on cows to crush wheat with their hooves.
But life here is changing. And as more young adults leave, residents question whether the next generation will stay. Each year since the road opened, villagers say, fewer people have been sleeping up in the pasture with the herd.
“Now, everyone is going to other places for education and, if they don’t have jobs, they do come back but they don’t stay for long,” said Yahya Baig, 42.
Still, other residents remain optimistic that their bucolic way of life will live on.
“At least now with the road, we feel part of global village,” said Daulet Amin, 75.