We left mahandri early in the morning, did breakfast at Naran and navigated quickly to burawai...
Last night while have dinner at mahandri, a local driver warned us not to go to batoka he explainined that the local population there is mostly chilas based sheprds and farmers who come there only in warm season and abundon and move back to chilas in winter.
And those peasant usually do not like company or aliens at all... he said that even he is local and belong to balakot and his elders were looted while using that track to reach chilas, we are tourist and we should not take this risk.
We established "PLAN B" on the fly that we will still inquire on the way till gitidas and if every local had same views we would abundon batoka top and move directly to Astore and navigate and camp at 'Alllah wali Lake"...
when we reached burwai we met many locals took feedback the replies were positive the most negative was... "sir ab halat achay hain phly masla hota tha"
We still hired a local driver along with his 3 Door Toyote Cruiser... loaded all our lugauge on it... and advised hm to stay on bikes tail ...
So far so good every thing was going really coool....
We started climbing batoka top and the track was seriously sick one for the cruisers like Suzuki Inazuama and Cyclone...
A moderate one for Standard small bikes...
how ever the trails were feeling at home...
while climbing I over heard lot of locals "Yelling" at us on passing them by.... I tried to Nod "assalam o alaikum" to any body how would directly stare at me... some responded some did not... there was only yelling from Teenagers and kids so far which was bit harsh... so ignored as the beauty of the track is 10000% .... itslike Old babusar...
some snaps on lulsar jheel as usuall....
We had the news that the glacir still blocks the top but we were hoopeful that we might find some slight way to slip bikes ahead of it... but when we reached the top it was firm no vehcle or a human can go beyond it was crumbling shaky glacier and was very dangerous to be near it and it blocked the way completly...
we did spottted two lakes each on both sides of the Batoka top... beautiful enough but too far for any one to do it who has never trekked before...