Some roads exist purely to get you somewhere. The Makran Coastal Highway exists to remind you that the journey itself can be the destination.

National Highway 10 stretches 653 kilometers along the Arabian Sea, connecting Pakistan’s largest city Karachi in Sindh to the rising port city of Gwadar in Balochistan. Before this road was built, the same journey took nearly two full days on broken dirt tracks. Today, it is a six to seven hour scenic drive that has fundamentally transformed travel, trade and tourism across one of Pakistan’s most stunning yet least explored coastlines.

The landscape shifts almost every hour. Leaving Karachi’s urban density behind, the road eases through the industrial town of Hub before the terrain opens up entirely and the Arabian Sea announces itself on your left, dramatic and endlessly blue. The highway climbs to 323 meters above sea level at Buzi Pass, where the views alone justify the trip.

Along the way, the wonders stack up quietly. The Princess of Hope, a naturally sculpted mud formation inside Hingol National Park roughly 275 kilometers from Karachi, was named by Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie during her 2002 visit to the area. Nearby stands a Sphinx-like rock structure that nature carved without any human hand. Hingol National Park itself spreads across 1,650 square kilometers sheltering 250 plant species, 35 mammal species and 185 bird species — Pakistan’s largest national park, sitting right beside the highway with almost no crowds.

Kund Malir beach, Ormara, Pasni and Astola Island a rare Arabian Sea island near Pasni each offer something the tourist trail elsewhere in Pakistan simply cannot replicate: solitude, raw coastline and the kind of silence that only the sea produces.

The road ends in Gwadar. But anyone who has driven it knows it doesn’t really end there at all.