Where does my Himalayan rock salt come from?

I've lately been using Himalayan rock salt (crushed pretty fine) in cooking (Coles own brand), and I like it.  It flows easily, and is sort of easier to see where you have applied it compared to your common white cooking stuff.   I didn't buy it, but I assume it must have dropped in price in order for Coles to be doing their own in-house branded version.

It's from Pakistan, apparently, and that made me curious as to what the salt mines there might look like.   NPR reports:

The salt is mined from rolling red-brick hills that rise from marshes in Khewra, about two hours from the capital, Islamabad. They are hundreds of miles from the iconic snowy peaks of the Himalayas, and the area shimmers with heat. The hills — known as the salt range — are distant tendrils of the Himalayas and are a remnant of a lagoon that existed some 600 million years ago, said Shahid Iqbal, a lecturer in the department of earth sciences at Quaid-i-Azam University.

Mining here was once a small-time industry that attracted little attention. Some 400,000 tons of salt are exported a year, largely as crude rock, according to Nadeem Babar, the adviser to Pakistan's prime minister on petroleum and natural resources. About a quarter of those exports were shipped at around $40 a ton to India — Pakistan's neighbor, with which it has fought four wars. The salt was literally blown out of mines, hauled in trucks and dispatched some 160 miles to the border.

Here's a France 24 video about the salt mining enterprise there, including tour into a pink salt mine cave:



I posted recently about the Indus valley civilisation, and noted that Harappa has a big archaeological site that looks as if it would be good to visit.   But it's in Pakistan too.

It's a pity that it is considered a very unsafe place to travel, as it looks as if it could have a decent tourist industry if it could get its act together.