Her Pakistan Handbook and trekking guides introduced a generation of visitors to the country
GENEVA: Isobel Shaw, the Irish-born travel writer whose guidebooks introduced thousands of visitors to Pakistan, passed away on Wednesday Nov 11 at her home in St-Cergue, Switzerland. She was 83.
Ms Shaw first came to Pakistan in 1978, when her husband, Robert Shaw, was posted to Islamabad as the Ford Foundation’s representative. During her three years in Islamabad she learnt Urdu and, with Hilary Adamson, wrote A Traveller’s Guide to Pakistan, published in Islamabad in 1981 and one of the first modern guidebooks to the country.
Her Pakistan Handbook, published in London and Hong Kong in 1989, was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel and Guide Book Awards. Her illustrated guide to Pakistan went through five editions between 1988 and 2003. Reviewing it in The Sunday Telegraph, Sir Fitzroy Maclean said it brought “both the country and people alive”.
From 1987 she walked the valleys of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush with her son, Ben Shaw. Together they wrote the Pakistan Trekking Guide (1993), which described about a hundred treks from Chitral, Gilgit and Skardu. The American Alpine Journal called it “required reading” for anyone planning to visit Pakistan.
Her books became standard references for those who followed. Reviewing the trekking guide, The American Alpine Journal noted that readers of her general guidebooks had been “eagerly awaiting” it, and called it a welcome addition to the limited literature on trekking in Pakistan. The cycling writer Laura Stone later described her as “the best guidebook writer on Pakistan”.
In 1990 she led the Swiss mountaineer André Roch, then 84, up the Baltoro Glacier to Concordia, 56 years after his first expedition there.
During the 1990s she worked as a tourism consultant to the Government of Pakistan and gave the keynote address at the Pakistan Tourism Convention in Karachi in 1993. After the 2005 earthquake she gave talks to raise funds for orthopaedic care for survivors. That year the Pakistan Society in London gave her its award “for the advancement of public knowledge and understanding of Pakistan in the United Kingdom”.
Her last book, Trekking Guide to the Karakoram and Hindu Kush of Northern Pakistan, was published by Vanguard Books in Lahore in 2013. She returned to Chitral that year, at the age of 70.
Her writing stressed the hospitality she met across the country. “Pakistanis are amazingly welcoming, hospitable, friendly and helpful towards visitors,” she wrote in that final guide.
Born Isobel O’Beirne in County Meath, Ireland, in 1943, she studied at Newnham College, Cambridge. She had lived near Geneva since 1981 and is survived by her three children, nine grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. A funeral will be held in Switzerland on Saturday, Nov 14.
