If you were in Karachi, being stranded for three days in unfamiliar territory would have you terrified out of your wits. You would never stray too far from your car for fear that something would be stolen, and the idea of passing the night at a stranger’s house would be unthinkable.

However, in the Neelum Valley region of Azad Kashmir, such an experience is an opportunity, not only to explore some of the most scenic locations in the country, but also to witness first-hand the famous Pakistani hospitality that you hear about so often.

Keran is a picturesque village located some 93km from Muzaffarabad, a journey that can be covered in only a few hours if the road is clear. Flanked by lush green mountains on three sides and the Neelum River on the fourth, it is one of the first villages along the paved Neelum Road that starts from Muzaffarabad and goes all the way up to Kel.

On the other side of the river, another village, also called Keran, stares back at you, so similar that it is hard to believe that more than just a river separates the two. For the Neelum River is, in reality, a de facto border between two countries; an Indian army checkpoint and an Indian flag faintly visible in the distance mean that the other side of the river is off limits. Visiting a relative on the other side means waiting anything from two to four months to obtain a pass that is valid for 15 days only, and which I was informed could only be extended once.

This was the village where my tour group was to spend a night before we set out towards Sharda, Kel, Jagran and Tao Butt, all of which, locals told me, far surpass Keran in natural beauty. I was exhilarated at the prospect — a lifetime spent in the concrete jungle that is Karachi had turned me into one of those people who “get excited at the sight of a tree”, as one of my fellow tourists put it.

An unexpected change in the itinerary opens up opportunity to discover and experience Kashmiri generosity

Unfortunately, I never got to see these places. The worst rains that Kashmir has seen in decades brought on landslides and road closures that forced us to abandon our schedule, and turn back for Muzaffarabad.

The real beauty of Kashmir

Along the way we stopped at several guest houses for the night, and every morning I would wake up to vistas that would not be out of place in the pages of National Geographic. A walk after a restful afternoon nap at a guest house in Jura Bandi led me to luxuriant green plains, dotted with cows and goats shepherded by agile little children.

All the children I managed to strike up a conversation with — if he or she did not end up blushing or running away first — told me that they went to school, making me marvel at the literacy rate of the region. The pleasure I felt was short-lived: it did not take long for me to also discover that most of the children dropped out of school before they even reached seventh grade.

Each conversation culminated in an introduction to the children’s parents, and invitation to step into their homes to share a cup of tea with them. Despite my initial hesitation, this turned out to be an opportunity for me to observe the miserable conditions in which these mountain-folk lived. The derelict houses equipped with battered furniture and the patchworked clothes worn by the inhabitants were clear indications that economic prosperity was yet to reach this part of the country.

However, their abject poverty did not prevent them from opening their homes to complete strangers and sharing what little they had. They blindly believed that the stranger they were inviting into their homes would do them no harm — the trust that a lifetime in a city like Karachi had stripped away from me. When a roadblock in Bata prompted a generous shopkeeper to invite my entire group — all seven of us including the driver — to spend the night in his home, I was too terrified to accept the invitation at first. Only the prospect of sleeping out in the cold rain and possibly drowning in the Neelum led me to venture into the home of an unknown man.

My doubts and fears proved to be unfounded, however. The shopkeeper introduced the women to his mother, wife and sister, and we were welcomed into their home as family. It was long past their usual bedtime, but that did not prevent them from hurriedly putting together a meal of boiled eggs when they learnt that we were hungry, or from drying our soaked clothes before the fire and arranging a warm bed for all of us.

A breakfast of anda paratha and tea was laid out in the morning and the ladies of the house gave us company as we tucked in. The shopkeeper — I regret that I never got a chance to find out his name — made us wait until he found out the condition of the road, and on his return guided the driver on the route to take. As we prepared to leave, his sister, Ulfat, presented each of us an item of jewellery as a small memento. I received a simple but charming bracelet studded with white and red stones; the kindness with which it was presented made it impossible to refuse.

In no man’s land

In recent years, tour operators have been aggressively promoting tour packages to various parts of Azad Kashmir, but the poor infrastructure and absence of utilities mean that most tourists tend to have a hard time of it. None of the guest houses I stayed at had a regular supply of electricity, running water, or even gas to cook meals and to keep warm. Except for the Neelum Road, all roads leading to Kel are little more than precarious dirt tracks which can prove impossible to navigate for those who are not accustomed to them. Once you cross Keran, heavy snowfall in the winter months makes the Neelum Road impassable, while torrential rains can have the same effect in summer.

Unfortunately, the forces of nature are not entirely to blame for the isolation of the villages in Neelum Valley. Decades of unabated deforestation, while providing local residents with wood to build their homes and light their fires, has reduced the forest cover from 47pc 60 years ago to slightly over 10pc today.

This drastic reduction of vegetation — not all of which is legal — has been the major contributor towards landslides, which in turn result in roadblocks, cutting off access to and from villages. Until a bulldozer is dispatched to push the boulders off the road, a traveller cannot proceed further. With luck, the bulldozer arrives within half an hour of being summoned, otherwise it can take hours.

On the occasions when I found myself stuck due to a landslide, I couldn’t help comparing the patience of the locals to the intolerance and aggression that is characteristic of Karachiites, where something as common as an extended power shutdown can result in riots and even arson.

Were the locals indifferent because the road blockages did not affect their work and lives? Or had they accepted the landslides as part and parcel of their lives, and decided there was little they could do about them? When I quizzed the driver, who was himself from Tao Butt, about this, he shrugged his shoulders and said resignedly: “Allah ki marzi [It’s God’s wish]. What can we do about it? We are helpless. The government only sends help when it is convenient. Till then, we wait. We don’t have a choice.”

But there comes a time when you realise that sometimes the only recourse is to take matters into your own hands. The afternoon of the third day of our enforced sojourn rolled around, and we were no nearer to reaching Muzaffarabad. A particularly heavy rainstorm the previous night had washed away a part of the road into the Neelum River below, while heavy boulders blocked what was left of it. The deputy commissioner (DC) was personally supervising the clearing operations and assured us that we would reach Muzaffarabad by nightfall.

There and back again

Sceptical of the condition of alternate routes, we decided to stay where we were, biding our time by walking around and getting to know the people around us, some of whom had been stranded for even longer than we had been. Strangers speaking in a multitude of accents, indicating that they had come from all across the country, passed around juice and crisps. It was unlikely that our paths would ever cross again — yet in that situation it was as if we were all one, united in our helplessness.

But afternoon turned to evening and evening turned to night, and eventually it became clear that the road could not be repaired until the next day. The DC offered us free food and accommodation for the night in an attempt to placate us. But when you have a job to get back to the following day, or when you need to communicate with anxious friends and family, such appeasements are useless. Hitherto good-natured travellers magically transformed into an angry mob, refusing to allow the DC to leave until he had solved the problem.

He tried to tell us that a landslide was a natural disaster, probably hoping that his appeal to the “Allah ki marzi. What can I do?” rhetoric would mollify the mob enough to let him go home. But the mob was having none of it: they had made up their minds that they were going to get out of there before dawn, and they were not to be deterred. Their persistence paid off: the DC finally made arrangements for an alternate route to be cleared, and instructed the drivers on how to get there.

The ‘route’ turned out to be a dirt track carved out of the side of the mountain that eventually gave way to a series of decrepit bridges which could not bear the weight of more than one car at a time. But the people did not desert one another even now. Some used torches to guide the cars behind them over each bridge, while others produced tow ropes. Several days later I discovered how extremely fortunate we had been to come out of the ordeal unscathed: the morning after our crossing, four people had fallen to their deaths from the same dirt track we had used.

On board the train back to Karachi, I had a chance to reflect over the past few days. Except for Keran, I had not managed to see any of the places on my original itinerary. The idyllic landscapes which I was exposed to were sometimes unexpectedly marred by incongruities: power cables strewn across the landscape, rubbish dumped by locals and goat skulls in the grass — images I had never seen in National Geographic. All of this was disappointing at the time, but in hindsight, I am thankful for it.

Had the trip proceeded as originally planned, I would not have gotten a chance to observe the inhabitants of the valley at such close quarters. More importantly, I was grateful to be reminded that people are still capable of genuine altruism and hospitality, something that I had almost completely forgotten.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, June 19th, 2016