Air of Mountain Sage - Hunza Valley

Margret and I arrived to Gilgit early in the morning, wandered out of the airport and into an unbelievable landscape of soaring gray mountains. No hotel bus waiting to greet us, we wandered around to find a taxi, and somewhere along the way, found a kind looking man (very hard to believe he was pakistani, his complexion snow white as mine, he looked more uzbeki) who offered to drive us to an internet cafe. We then hired him to drive us over two days to the Pakistan border.
After finding a cobbler to fix my beautiful new orange embroidered sandals which had already broken, we headed onto the Karakoram Highway...the Old Silk Road. The mountains rising around us were breathtaking, with the wind blowing through the blue WWII jeep with the japanese engine, and the air smelling of mountain sage, we drove on and on until we could see snow on the peaks. Luckily there had not been rain recently, so the chance of landslides and falling pieces of mountain were not as likely, though some stretches we drove quite fast to avoid. The highway was a dirt track with occassional stones laying at the side to prevent the car from going over the cliffs. I felt extremely safe, though, in the care of our driver, Ehsan. The bridges were all Chinese style, as they were built by chinese workers, every few tiny mountain towns we passed had cemetaries for the chinese laborers who had lost their lives while working on completing the highway.
Four or five winding hours later we arrived in Karimabad. Though Margret had been talking about the altitude since last january, I had no idea what it would mean to be at high altitude. But, when we arrived I finally got a hint of what it means to "be HIGH". Ehsan told us not to sleep for at least 2 hours, so we would start to adjust to the height. It was torture to stay awake, every cell of our bodies wanted to lie down. A piercing headache started in, and when I tried to walk my feet would cross and I would start laughing, not able to form a clear sentence. Altitude works like inertia, seems like nothing is happening, but something is naturally happening.