Swat

A broad valley in the north of Pakistan, about four hours by road from Islamabad and the first stop on Harry’s seven-day northern tour. Pakistanis call it the Switzerland of Pakistan for the scenery: the flat country gives way to mountains, new roads run through tunnels, and the Swat River runs through the middle of it.

The town itself is linear and very spread out along the valley rather than built up in one place, and it is noticeably less polluted than the big cities — Harry can see clear across the valley for the first time on the trip. Asked what people do here, the guide says farming and transporting goods.

Swat was under Taliban control from 2007 to 2009, which comes up repeatedly. There is a passport check on the road in — courteous, and more interested in Mac’s American passport than Harry’s British one — and the damage to the archaeological site above the town is still visible.

What Harry did

He arrived on 1 January 2022 with Mac, a guide (Akram) and a driver, stopping on the way for an omelette and paratha at a roadside kitchen — oily, salty and good, eaten Mac’s way with the bread and egg mixed together, with a strong sweet chai after it.

The Buddhist site above the town

A stupa on a hillside, identified by colonial-era archaeologists and reached by a short scramble, with a small eroded praying figure at the entrance and a cave at the top. Harry reads the information board out on camera and openly gives up on it; he puts the site’s age at somewhere between 1000 and 3000 BC (from video – unverified) while saying himself that he can’t be sure and isn’t going to pretend otherwise. The guide says the Taliban damaged it during their years in the valley.

The views from the top are the point as much as the ruins — farmland below, the river, and the town running away down the valley. Around 10–15°C in the daytime in early January.

The museum

The archaeological museum in town covers grave goods from around 1700 BC, then several galleries on Buddhism, then the Muslim and Wali of Swat periods, and a memorial listing hundreds of names of people killed in the fighting. A model inside shows how much the hillside site has been rebuilt over the centuries.

Filming inside costs a great deal more than entry, so they paid the ordinary ticket and walked round without the camera. Harry’s verdict: they went in expecting nothing and it was worth it.

Where he stayed

A hotel on a rise above the town with snow-capped mountains in view, named after the international chain without being part of it — the joke survives the whole tour of the room. Comfortable and quiet, no pool or gym in a place this remote, and cold enough inside in January that he tours the room in his jacket while trying to get the heater going.

Practical facts

• About four hours by road from Islamabad, on good modern roads with tunnels through the mountains. Harry passes a truck that has rolled off the side of one of them.
• Museum entry roughly 200 rupees a head, one to two dollars. Filming is charged separately and much higher.
• Cash is the problem here, not the prices. Only a couple of international banks accept foreign cards anywhere in Pakistan, and outside Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad there are far fewer branches of them. Harry and Mac tried several and got nothing; the one that had worked in Karachi failed here, as it had in Lahore.
• Western Union will change dollars, at a rate Harry expects to be poor and doesn’t check. Of $400 handed over, $200 was refused as not eligible; Harry is not told why, and says so.
• Daytime around 10–15°C in early January; the hotel rooms are colder than outside until the heating is on.
• The Swat River is swimmable, but not in winter.
• Bottled water handed over by a shopkeeper is not automatically safe — Mac stopped Harry drinking one, on the grounds that he’d already been ill once.

The bazaar

The market is best at dusk, with the mountains behind it, and it is organised by trade — a whole quarter of car repair shops, known regionally for cheap wheel rims, in the way Harry remembers Jordan being zoned. He describes the density of street stalls as closer to Thailand than to anywhere else he has been in Pakistan, and the main junction as Karachi all over again: no rules, every man for himself.

• A table-sized griddle cooking eggs, beef patties, tomatoes and spices together at one stall.
• Dried fruit, nuts and spices, and separately sugarcane juice pressed to order from locally grown cane cut down at the stall.
• Pomegranate everywhere, as fruit and as juice — a Pakistan-wide pattern Harry keeps remarking on.
• A stretch selling wedding decorations, garlands and bright colour, which he reads as of a piece with how much colour Pakistani public life uses.
• Local winter clothing at 600 asked, 500 paid — about $2.80. He wore it out of the shop and was stared at more, not less; see wear the local dress.

The bakery

Cakes, pastries and biscuits. Rather than choose, Harry asked the staff what to try and was given three shortbread-type biscuits — plain, with nuts, and with coconut. The plain one was his favourite, and his comparison for it is an English biscuit with a cup of tea.

Eating out

The restaurant they used, five minutes from the hotel, seats people in individual tin huts with fire heaters rather than in a dining room. Asked whether that is for privacy, the answer is privacy and warmth both — this is January in the mountains.

• Chicken fried rice (Harry’s default order across Pakistan, the chicken cut very fine), a red paratha with sesame seeds, chai and green tea.
• 830 rupees for two large meals and four chais — about $4.50, and Harry notes it as the local price rather than a foreigner’s.
• Portions are enormous. He says there have been very few meals in Pakistan he has managed to finish, and he does not finish this one.

Harry’s tips

• Draw your cash in the big cities before you head north. Coming to Swat with none was the mistake of the day, and it cost them an afternoon.
• Know which banks take your card before you leave the cities — there are only a couple, and they aren’t everywhere.
• Carry some of your own home currency as a fallback. Mac’s dollars were the only reason the day worked, and Harry says on camera he’ll do the same from now on.
• A guide is worth it here: without one, he says, they’d have been running around like headless chickens.
• Ask before filming in museums — it is often permitted but priced separately.
• In a bakery, ask what to try rather than picking. It is how he ended up with the biscuit he liked best rather than another chocolate cake.

Source

• First Impressions of SWAT, Pakistan 🇵🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0XqPK6RRM0
• Delicious Food Tour in SWAT, Pakistan 🇵🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdrHKR9Yek