In October 1978, as soon as the Karakoram Highway opened as far as Hunza, my husband Robert and I took a long weekend to fly from Islamabad, where we were working, up to Gilgit, the capital of Pakistan's Northern Areas, about 175 miles from the Chinese border.

We hired a jeep and drove on the new highway from Gilgit to Hunza, around the foot of Mount Rakaposhi, at 25,550 feet the 27th highest in the world. Our jeep labored up the steep dirt track to Karimabad, the main village of Hunza, which looks across the valley to Rakaposhi, a shimmering, glaciated face soaring 19,000 feet up from the Hunza River, the highest unbroken slope on Earth.

We stayed in the mir's (king's) guest house, the only available accommodation. We were the only visitors, the object of curiosity. After a supper of curried chicken, lentils and chapatis, we played cards on the porch before a silent audience of curious men.

The next day these same men sat in a group in the weak October sun, in the center of the village below the abandoned, 600-year-old Baltit Fort, once home of the mir. The short summer growing season was over, the wheat, barley and millet harvests completed. The animals were down from the high mountain pastures. The byres were full of hay. The village was preparing for the long idle winter ahead.

The village's three shops were stocked with kerosene, cooking utensils, cigarettes and soap, the bare essentials in a poor community. I left my husband with the men and walked alone along the main irrigation channel, as old as the fort, that runs through the village.

The women here are unveiled and wear brightly embroidered pill-box hats. They are Ismaili Muslims, followers of the Aga Khan. Some were milking cows or goats, others sat on their flat roofs sorting their dried fruit and vegetables to get ready for winter. One woman invited me noisily into her stone home, waving her arms, laughing and shouting to her neighbors. The single room had a fireplace in the center and cushions and bedding on raised platforms on either side. In a large alcove behind the fire were the store boxes filled with dried apricots, mulberries and grapes, dried peas, beans and spinach, carefully stored apples, potatoes and cereals. We communicated in broken Urdu and shared a cup of yogurt.

I visited Hunza again in October last year. Karimabad is now a bustling tourist center. More than 40 hotels line the main street, connected by a surfaced road to the Karakoram Highway. Several buses a day link the village with Gilgit to the south and the Chinese border to the north. Tourist handicraft shops sell Hunza embroidery, hand-loomed cloth and imported porcelain from China. The fort has been restored and turned into a museum, library and restaurant. Tourists sip coffee and admire the view.

Rakaposhi and the river Hunza have not changed, but every village in the valley seemed to me to have doubled in size, and there are far more poplar trees along the irrigation channels and around the terraced fields. A new water channel irrigates new land on the mountain slope above the highest village.

There were no idle men below the fort. I spoke to Haider Ali, sitting on the porch of his shop weaving woolen cloth. Tourism creates jobs, he told me, and it is now so easy to head south in winter to find work in the rest of Pakistan.

I strolled along the paved street with hundreds of other foreigners and visited the new girls' academy, the health center, the ladies' handicraft center and the office of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture below the old fort, to see the architectural drawings of the restoration.

I found the old irrigation channel below the new road, and I looked without success for the house I had visited 20 years earlier. The women nodded and smiled, but no one invited me in.