Islamabad to Skardu

Ask the internet how long this drive takes and page one currently answers three different ways at once: twelve to fourteen hours, eighteen to twenty-two hours, and five to six hours, all in the same confident voice. At least two of those are wrong. The five-to-six-hour figure isn't a road time at all, and if you plan a day around it you'll still be on the Indus after dark.

So this page gives one answer, says where it came from, and says when we checked it. The table below is the whole basis for it.

The two routes are not the same road

Via the Karakoram Highway and Besham. The year-round route, and the longer one. It runs through the stretch between Mansehra and Chilas that carries an advisory warning, which has consequences well beyond comfort. See below.

Via Babusar Pass. Shorter, better to drive, and unavailable for most of the year. Babusar opens to light traffic first and fully around two weeks later, and it can shut again at short notice with snow that arrives overnight. Any figure quoted without naming the route it describes is useless to you.

Settle which road your driver has in mind before you agree a price. Most of the arguments we've had on this trip started as a misunderstanding about that.

Why the flight is not simply the better answer

It's shorter, the approach is extraordinary, and it removes the advisory stretch completely. It also cancels. Skardu is a visual approach into high terrain, and weather at either end stops it.

The cancellation isn't the trap. The trap is building an itinerary that assumes the flight and then discovering that the fallback eats a day and a half you had already promised to something else, usually the part of the trip you were most looking forward to.

Read Skardu and Gilgit flights for how they actually behave, and one night before flying north for the practical version, which is mostly about where you sleep and how easily you can cancel it.

So which one

Fly if you can, drive if you must, and plan as though you'll drive. Book the flight. Book a room in Islamabad you can walk away from at the desk. Know the road answer cold before the morning you need it.

Drive on purpose if you want the Karakoram Highway to be part of the trip rather than a punishment for bad weather. It's one of the great road journeys anywhere, and treating it as a failure state does it a disservice. Start early, don't drive it after dark, and read the KKH guide first.

The advisory and insurance point

The KKH route passes through an area under an advise-against-all-travel notice from several governments. Policies linked to those advisories may not cover that leg, and the moment you discover it is the worst possible moment. Flying avoids the whole thing.

Work this out before you choose, not after. Is Pakistan safe has our read on it. Then read your own policy wording, because we're not qualified to give insurance advice and none of this is any.