Noreen Abbasi

I grew up in Neelum Valley and now live in Muzaffarabad, so most summers I take a group of friends who've never been up the valley properly and show them the drive I took for granted as a teenager. This year it was three friends from university. We didn't rush the road, which is the whole point of this kind of trip — the valley narrows and opens repeatedly as you go, with the river alongside for almost the entire drive, and stopping wherever looked good mattered more than reaching any particular endpoint. We passed through Kutton and Keran and stopped for tea at a small place in Sharda that I've been going to since I was a child, mostly because the owner still remembers my father. My friends kept asking why I hadn't brought them here sooner. I didn't have a good answer beyond that when a place is home, you sometimes forget it's worth showing people. We turned back before Dowarian rather than continuing further up the valley — this trip was about the drive and the villages along it, not about pushing to any particular destination, and I think that restraint made it a better trip than trying to do everything in four days would have.