The next morning the Fellowship, now filled out to a Tolkien-compliant head count of nine, simply walked the ten kilometers down the valley to the northern terminus of the tunnel. This was much faster than trying to find a vehicle in such a remote place big enough to carry such a large group. Though the altitude was high—thirty-two hundred meters above sea level—the way was nearly flat. They hitched rides a few more kilometers down the valley to a place where roads forked away to east and west. The east road would take them to the front. This was two hundred kilometers away as the crow flies, but the road distance was more than double that figure because of switchbacks on both a very large and very small scale. The way basically ran perpendicular to ranges of smaller mountains that filled the entire space between the Himalayas, which they’d put behind them, and the almost as formidable Karakorams. So in addition to being very long, the way was very slow. Along many stretches, bicyclists or even pedestrians would have left them in the dust.