On the morning of June 26 I got a jeep to Ayun and on to Chital. From Chitral I found a jeep leaving for Mastuj. I wanted to go ahead and suss out the way. We were considering going north from Mastuj, then crossing over the Darkot Pass, down through the Yasin Valley, and to Gilgit. We needed to know if there was grass, or 'boose' (straw) for our horses to eat north of Mastuj. Also i had heard that the bridges over the rivers had washed out the previous year. I also wanted to find out ice conditions on the Darkot Pass.
The front seat of the jeep was occupied by the driver, and a passenger and his wife,who were going to a village called Sargoz just before Mastuj. I stood in the back of the jeep with 6 other male passengers on top of some wooden door frames and several 5 gallon tins of ghee (cooking oil). The scenery was incredible, though our knuckles got whiter and whiter gripping the side rails of the jeep bed as we bounded over a road that was more rocks and boulders than road. One of the ghee tins broke and what dust and grit that didn't stick to our teeth, stuck to our clothes. High rock mountains, rising to snowy peaks, on either side of us. The rocky Mastuj River gorge, sometimes falling more than a thousand feet at the side of the road.
By Mastuj most of the passengers had disenbarked. It had taken us 8 hours from Chitral. Just the driver Aziz, his mate (and cousin) Nadir Khan, and myself were left. Aziz asked me if I wanted to go on with them to their village, Turi Khuz, 12 km further up the road. We pumped some petrol into the jeep's tank from a 50 gallon steel drum at the Mastuj 'filling station'. It took us another hour to get to the village of Chapali. There we parked the jeep and crossed this suspension bridge over the Yarkhun River.