Apples or a mythology

Our breakfasts were followed by the plucking of fresh apples. The Apple laden trees stood dropped, invitingly, with their ripened fruits a perfect fit for our palms and a perfect complement for our appetite. In Skardu they were golden, just like the first ray of Sun as it branches out from behind the mountains heralding the breezy mornings.

Apples at Skardu

In hunza, we feasted on blood red apples, tearing into its glossy skin with our teeth, letting the juice ooze down our hands and run down our lips. It is a luxury withheld from the residents of bustling cities where a green tree alone becomes a sight for sore eyes and where the fruits reach dry and dented.

Apples at Hunza

Beginning Of A Journey

Beginnings tend to be beautiful, nostalgic, for they mark a turn in your lifetime and unfurl the future into something new and unexpected. Wondrously, even an idyllic journey with an insignificant ouset, morphs into a transformative one, if we revisit it with a self-reflective eye.
This is clearly too dense an introduction for a blissful journey to North Pakistan with my maternal cousins. In fact, it reminds me of the poem "Woodspurge" by Daniel Rosetti as he insists that not everything in life needs to be dissected to reap wisdom:

"From perfect grief there need not be 

Wisdom or even memory"

so conclusively, for now I shall abandon the philosophical side of my nature and give rein to the connoisseur within. 
We began our excursion on the 3rd day of Eid-ul-Adha on 15th of September'16 by taking a flight with PIA from Karachi to Islamabad. If you do believe in omens, then maybe it's a good one that our plane flew exactly at the designated hour of 4 pm. For those who are unacquainted with the volatile performance of our domestic flights, let me enlighten you! PIA has gained great fame in recent years for cancelling flights, or delaying them for hours. So now you know how lucky we were! From there we went up to Skardu, Hunza, down to Naraan, and then straight from Islamabad to Karachi, a journey I will trace in the following posts.

A bird's eye view of Islamabad and the grandiose Faisal Mosque