Attabad Lake: What to Know Before You Go

Attabad Lake is the image that sells Hunza: an improbable turquoise lying between brown mountains, with the highway running along its edge. It is also about fifteen years old, and there are villages underneath it.

What happened

On 4 January 2010, a landslide came down at Attabad and blocked the Hunza River. The debris formed a natural dam, and the river began to pool behind it.

It kept pooling for months. The rising water submerged Ayeenabad, much of Shishkat and part of Gulmit, displaced thousands of people, and drowned roughly twenty kilometres of the Karakoram Highway. For a long period the only way through was by boat — vehicles, cargo and passengers ferried across the water that had swallowed the road.

The tunnels you now drive through, built with Chinese assistance and opened in 2015, are the replacement for that lost stretch. The lake that tourists photograph is the flood that put it there.

This is worth knowing before you arrive, because it changes what you are looking at. The people who live here remember the road and the houses under the water.

What to do there

• Boat trips. The standard way onto the water, run from the jetty, and the way to see the scale of the thing.
• Jet skis and speedboats operate in season for anyone wanting something faster.
• The tunnels. The Pak-China Friendship Tunnels are an attraction in their own right — five of them, cut to replace the drowned highway.
• Sitting still. The colour changes through the day as the light moves. It is worth an hour of doing nothing.

When to go

The lake is reachable whenever the highway is open, which is most of the year, but the boats and the water sports are seasonal. Spring through autumn is the straightforward answer.

For photographs, go early or late. In the middle of a bright day the water is at its most saturated but the light is flat; in the first and last hours the peaks behind it catch the sun and the picture has depth.

Getting there and staying nearby

The lake sits directly on the Karakoram Highway between the Attabad tunnels and Gulmit. From Karimabad it is about an hour. From Shishkat, on the upper shore, it is around 5 km — close enough to go down for the light and come back.

If you are choosing where to base yourself and the lake is the reason you are coming, staying north of the tunnels saves you two hours of driving a day.