Taking the High Road - NYTimes.com For a few disconcerting moments, the gridlock that ensnared our minivan on the highway linking China to Pakistan sent my mind reeling to the countless hours I'd wasted on Beijing's perpetually congested, smog-choked ring roads. But then I stepped out of the vehicle and saw that we were facing an entirely different nemesis. A few dozen yards ahead, a rivulet of glacial melt from the Kunlun Mountains looming above us had suddenly changed direction, turning the Karakoram Highway into a watery scree course. A line of cargo trucks, taxis and buses snaked toward the horizon. But what a gorgeous horizon it was, with snow-doused peaks puncturing Windex blue skies. Double-humped Bactrian camels lazed insouciantly amid a reddish, rocky moonscape. Even if the air was uncomfortably thin at 10,000 feet, it had none of the acrid bouquet I'd come to know during five years living in the Chinese capital. And as we waited for a lone bulldozer to clear the road, there was another consolation prize - the kaleidoscope of fellow travelers who emerged from their vehicles, passed around cigarettes and kept one another entertained. There were giddy Pakistani gem traders returning from a successful buying trip in China's southwest, a triumphant Kyrgyz medical student who had just passed his exams in eastern Shandong Province and grizzled Chinese migrant workers heading to an iron ore mine near the Tajikistan border. At the head of the column of stalled traffic, members of a Tajik wedding party, outfitted in embroidered tunics and felt pillbox hats, invited strangers to a banquet scheduled for that evening, road conditions permitting. Stretching more than 800 miles from Abbottabad in Pakistan to Kashgar in China's western Xinjiang region, the Karakoram Highway is the world's highest transnational roadway and a testament to modern China's determination to shape and contain nature's most daunting obstacles. Completed in 1979, the roadway's ostensible aim was to foster trade between Beijing and Karachi, but also to sweeten a marriage between two allies united in their enmity for India. More than 1,000 lives were lost during the two decades it took to blast out the highway from dizzying escarpments, and keeping the road passable depends on an army of workers kept busy by one of the world's most seismically active regions; in 2010, the collapse of a mountain on the Pakistani side created a lake that inundated a dozen miles of highway, forcing goods and passengers onto boats to continue the journey through the Hunza Valley. Over the course of a leisurely three-day expedition from Kashgar to Tashkurgan in late summer, our vehicle was forced to navigate at least a half-dozen recent landslides that helped explain why the word Karakoram, which means "black rock" in Turkish, strikes fear into the hearts of local travelers. Since 1986, when it opened to tourists, though, the highway has provided access to a mesmerizing slice of a Chinese Central Asia, a high-altitude melting pot of seminomadic tribes who share a landscape of harsh but breathtaking beauty. Except for the smooth asphalt and steady cellphone service that puts Verizon and AT&T to shame, the journey is little changed in the 2,000 years since Silk Road traders shuttling between Europe, Asia and the Middle East found safe passage through the Karakoram Mountains at the Khunjerab Pass. Visitors today are confronted with the same barren stretches of dun-colored stone punctuated by the occasional glacial lake, the roiling Gez River and emerald grasslands speckled with white yurts and black yaks. For accredited journalists in China like me, and the two others I was traveling with, a reporting trip to southern Xinjiang can be a frustrating experience, with local police officers often serving as unwanted chaperones who sometimes insist on joining you for meals. This time, we enlisted the services of Kashgar Guide, an officially sanctioned travel agency, and made clear we would be on holiday. Besides guaranteeing a seamlessly executed visit, the arrangement apparently convinced the authorities that we had left our notebooks at home. We would have a rare unfiltered look at a timeless place, weaving through the myriad communities for whom it is simply just home. Andrew Jacobs is a New York Times correspondent based in Beijing.