---
type: Tip
title: Travel in the off season
description: Go when nobody else is going — Harry's January in northern Pakistan, where the queues, the crowds and half the prices disappear, and so does some of what you came for.
tags: [planning, seasons, crowds, winter, pakistan]
timestamp: 2026-08-06T12:00:00Z
---

# Travel in the off season

Harry keeps being asked why he came to northern
[Pakistan](/countries/pakistan.md) in January rather than in summer, and by the
third time he answers it directly: **because there is nobody there.** He treats
it as a straight trade rather than a hack, and states both sides of it.

## What you get

- **No queues for anything.** At [Attabad Lake](/places/attabad-lake.md) in
  summer, he is told, every boat is taken and you wait your turn. In January he
  walked straight onto a jet ski and then onto a boat.
- **The places to yourself.** On [Hussaini Bridge](/places/hussaini-bridge.md),
  a bridge that exists on the tourist map because of how it looks, he counted one
  other person, and thought that one was a local.
- **A different version of the same place.** His framing is that every season has
  its case: winter has its own charm, and spring, summer and autumn are green and
  warm. Not a lesser trip — a different one.

## What you give up

- **Cold that changes what you can do.** −5°C on the bridge; his hands were numb
  crossing it, and his camera stopped working repeatedly in the guesthouses,
  which he put down to the temperature.
- **Short days.** In the mountains the sun goes behind the ridge around 2:30pm.
- **Things are shut.** The restaurants ringing Attabad Lake are closed out of
  season, and the trees that make the valley in summer are bare.
- **Infrastructure runs thinner** — hotels on generator power with the heating
  unusable, and connections slow enough to plan around.

## Where he applies it

- [Crazy Glacier in Hunza Valley 🇵🇰](/videos/KR2_um8_8GE.md) — answering the
  question he says he gets most about Hunza. Summer is the desirable season and
  **winter is just as good**, provided you know what the temperatures are.
- [$6 Jet Ski in Hunza Valley, Pakistan 🇵🇰](/videos/_yfhIIb5Tk4.md) — the
  concrete version: no queue for the boats, which in summer is a real wait.
- [I Had an Accident at the Most Dangerous Bridge in Pakistan 🇵🇰](/videos/-uawEjUw9Vs.md) —
  the flattest statement of it, given pre-emptively to the commenters who will
  ask why he didn't come in summer.

## The correction, from someone who lives there

Harry's own version is a binary — summer or winter — and **his guide gives him a
better answer than the one he arrived at.** Standing at a viewpoint on the
[Karakoram Highway](/places/karakoram-highway.md) that is packed in season and
empty in January, he asks whether summer is the time to come. The answer is
neither: **come in spring or autumn**, when the weather is good enough and the
crowds have not arrived.

That is the qualification the rest of this page needs. What Harry is actually
buying with January is not emptiness — it is emptiness *plus* −20°C mornings,
2:30pm sunsets, shut restaurants and no running water. **The shoulder season gets
the first of those without the rest**, and the person who says so lives on the
road in question.

Recorded in
[Travelling on the 2nd Most Deadly Road in the World](/videos/RUN6g8G3zII.md).

**Harry takes the correction.** Asked in the
[Pakistan Q&A](/videos/88YCycko6xg.md) when people should visit, he gives autumn
or spring rather than either of his own options — twice, unprompted, having just
spent a winter arguing for winter.

*Everything on this page comes from one trip to one valley, which is the honest
limit of it as it stands.*