Our honeymoonThe Neelum Valley
After the walima, seven nights with our heads in the clouds.
July 20267 nights
Rida and Taha
Our story
Two hearts. One valley.
Everyone said go abroad. Taha said he wanted to show Rida the valley his nana used to talk about, where the clouds come down to the road in the afternoon and you can walk into one. So we drove up from Muzaffarabad with a flask of kahwa and one shawl between us. These are the places where we were above the clouds.
Together
7 nights
The places
From the city up to the last village
Day 1Where the two rivers meet
Muzaffarabad
The city under a grey sky
We arrived in rain, which Rida took as a sign and Taha took personally. By evening it had lifted off the hills and we stood on the bridge where the Neelum meets the Jhelum, watching one green river pour into one brown one, and decided that was us.
Rida is the green one. Obviously.
Day 2The Jagran river
Kutton
A river that would not stop talking
A wooden hut above the Jagran, which roared all night and all morning and all through breakfast. We walked up to the waterfall, got completely soaked by the spray, and came back down to a fire and a pot of chai someone had quietly left for us.
Day 3The river bend
Keran
The afternoon the cloud came to us
The road bent round the river and the whole village lay in the curve of it, fields and all. We sat on the bank with our feet in water that was far too cold, and at four o'clock, just as nana had promised, a cloud came down the hill and walked straight through us.
We were inside a cloud. Inside one.
Days 4–5The old stones
Sharda
Two days in the clouds' own town
Sharda sits in a bowl of pines with the cloud resting on the ridge above it like a hat. We crossed the footbridge that swings, climbed to the old university that has stood here for a thousand years, and ate trout by the river with the mist coming in round the table.
Day 6The meadow above Kel
Arang Kel
Up the cable car to the top of the world
A tiny cable car across the gorge, then an hour's walk up through the pines, and then it opened: a green meadow in the sky with wooden huts on it and clouds coming over the trees like sheep. We lay in the grass and did not say anything for a very long time.
Taha's favourite place on earth. Mine too.
Day 7The last village
Taobat
Where the road ends
The last village before the road gives up, wooden houses by a river that has just crossed the mountains. We slept in a hut with the window open and woke in a cloud, and then drove the whole valley back down in one day, quiet, holding hands over the gear stick.
In numbers
Seven nights of us
- 7nights, just the two of us
- 6places above the clouds
- 19cups of kahwa
- 1shawl, shared the whole way
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