Alexander The Great

The people in these parts of the country are very hard working. They take the mountain and slowly turn in into beautiful terraced and lush fields. Also the aquaduct methods that they use are out of this world. Every village and every household have water right to their homes. All by engineering methods of redirecting the river and making these aquaducts.

As we took a closer look at these people, they have blue eyes, a fair complexion. They are totally different from the Muslim Pakistanis, in fact they do not want to be called Pakistani, because they are not, they stated this to us. Michael and I even joked as to which one of these men were our brothers. As the day came close to the end, we decided to spend the night at a town called Dir. To our amusement, again more of our brothers and sisters were visible. We walked the main street of Dir. There we saw the small shops where people were selling anything they could sell. At the restaurant, we had mountain tea, this bread called Chipati, a flat, round in the middle loaf of bread. In the east they call it Pita bread. They also served us yogurt or I call it sour cream, and a delicious plate of cucumbers, yogurt and garlic.

The next morning , off we go to Chitral, a town and the valley called Chitral. It was about 100km. to Chitral, a very remote area, no road as we would call it. River flowing, rocks falling and rivers crossing and blocking the road. Now I understand how these people remained in isolation. We drove to a height of 10.500 feet. It was cold and windy and you couldn't stand at the edge of the road for fear of being blown over.

People live and make a living from the mountains. We stopped for tea where a family lived and worked. We also bought goat cheese for the long drive. The speed we travelled was not more than 10-20kmh.

We reached Chitral valley. It was beautiful. The river flowing through the middle of the valley. The people have very fair complexions, with blue eyes; mind you there were darker people among the lighter skinned or Kalashe as they call themselves. Sadly, creeping civilization is not always good for some people and some more areas in the world. But they must accept change, and as change comes, we lose the innocence and the old traditions. As far as Michael and myself are concerned, we came here in the nick of the time. The first Macedonians and hopefully not the last.

Daily, I was writing my findings, as we witnessed everything. Early the next morning to be precise July 29, 1995, we are leaving Chitral for another valley called Kalash Valley. It took 2 1/2 hours , over the most treacherous road you could imagine. Again, these are not roads, goat trails. If it were not for the jeep, we would never have reached anywhere. Stones were all over the road, falling everywhere, it was very scary. At one time, our driver, a Muslim asked if we could stop the jeep and pray. We agreed and even asked him to pray for all of us. As we approached the Kalash valley, we were stopped by an official and he asked us to record the purpose of our trip, the passport number and the length of out stay. Naturally we had to pay him. They told us this is frontier territory and the locals do not like the Pakistanis, so we obeyed as instructed.

As we entered the Kalash valley we could see the beauty before us. The lush scenery, the river flowing and merging, the fruit trees, mainly apricots, plums, mulberries and grapes. The vegetation, small pots of land terraced into the mountain, with fresh vegetables growing everywhere. They grow two crops a year on the same plots, thus enabling them to survive because of land shortage. To make a plot of land, first they have to remove all rocks from the lot, then they built a stone wall horizontally so won't be any land erosion, then a slow process of planting first grass so that top soil could be retained. All this time an aquaduct has to be built to irrigate the soil and then a house will be built to accommodate the rest of the family.