Fairy Meadows & Naran

Some places earn their name. Fairy Meadows, a grass plateau at 3,300 metres sitting directly under the Raikot face of Nanga Parbat, is one of them. German climbers in the 1930s called it Märchenwiese, the fairy tale meadow, and the translation stuck. Locals call it Joot. The internet spells it Fairy Medows, Fairymeadows, and every variation in between. Whatever you type, it is the same green shelf under a four-kilometre wall of ice, and it is one of the most extraordinary campsites on the planet.

Getting there is a story you will tell for years. From Raikot Bridge on the Karakoram Highway, you transfer into local jeeps for a track that regularly makes lists of the world's wildest roads. It is narrow, it is unpaved, and the drivers have done it thousands of times. Then the track ends and your legs take over: a two to three hour trek through pine forest, climbing gently, until the trees open and Nanga Parbat is suddenly, absurdly, right there.

We spend two nights at the meadows, and that second night matters. Day-trippers see the mountain for an hour. You get sunset turning the Raikot face orange, and sunrise doing it again in reverse while you drink chai outside your cabin. In between, the sky does its high-altitude thing. The Milky Way from Fairy Meadows is bright enough to cast shadows, and the bonfire conversations under it tend to run late.

For the restless, there is an optional walk toward the Nanga Parbat base camp viewpoint, further up the ablation valley through summer settlements and glacier moraine. It is a proper half-day out and back, entirely worth it, entirely skippable if your plan is a book and a view. Both are correct answers at Fairy Meadows.

Then the trip changes key. We descend, rejoin the highway and climb again over Babusar Top, 4,173 metres of switchbacks with half of Kaghan spread out below, before dropping into Naran. After the raw drama of Nangaparbat, the Kaghan Valley (you will see it written Naran Kagan or Naran Kaghan) feels almost gentle: trout streams, pine slopes, and a bazaar that stays lively past dinner.

Naran's centrepiece is Saif-ul-Malook, the lake of the fairy tale prince. Spell it Saiful Muluk or Saif-ul-Mulook, everyone will understand. It sits in a glacial bowl at 3,200 metres, green-blue and ringed by peaks, with Malika Parbat, the 'queen of mountains', watching from the far end. You can boat on it, walk its shoreline, or hear the legend of Prince Saif and the fairy Badri Jamala from a local storyteller who has clearly told it ten thousand times and still enjoys it.

A note on difficulty, because this trip involves the word 'trek'. If you can walk uphill for a couple of hours with breaks, you can do Fairy Meadows. Porters and horses are available for bags and for anyone who wants the climb without the cardio. Kids do this route every summer. So do people celebrating their sixtieth.

Five days, two legendary valleys, one night sky you will not forget, and the ninth-highest mountain on Earth outside your cabin window. The brochure has the full plan, including what to pack. Bring a warm layer even in July. The meadows are called meadows, but they sit at 3,300 metres and the nights remember it.