---
type: Video
title: "I Survived 24 Hours in PAKISTAN with NO MONEY 🇵🇰"
description: Harry spends 24 hours in Karachi with nothing, hitching lifts and asking strangers for food, to answer everyone who told him he would be kidnapped — and finds the language barrier is the only real obstacle.
tags: [pakistan, karachi, challenge, hospitality, hitchhiking, street-food, floods]
timestamp: 2026-08-04T12:00:00Z
resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB3dBuPkKfM
video_id: bB3dBuPkKfM
upload_date: 2022-10-13
duration: 2291
---

# I Survived 24 Hours in PAKISTAN with NO MONEY 🇵🇰

Twenty-four hours in [Karachi](/places/karachi.md) with no money at all, run
as an argument rather than a stunt: everyone Harry told about the plan — his
parents, his Pakistani friends — said he was mad and would be kidnapped, and
the video exists to answer them. He needs transport, food and a bed, and gets
the first two almost embarrassingly easily. The first car he flags down takes
him across the city; the first English speaker he finds buys him a cheese
paratha without hesitating; chai, a mocktail and a full matka biryani are
pressed on him by people he never asked. What defeats him is nothing to do with
hostility. Very few people in the areas he works speak English, and asking a
stranger to put you up for the night turns out to be a different order of
request from asking for a paratha. He runs out of daylight, falls back on a
Couchsurfing host, and says plainly at the end that he'd want to do it again
without one.

It is the earlier sibling of
[the same challenge in Manila](/videos/lOF4vVxBQ-s.md), where the problem was
earning money rather than asking for it. He also uses the video to raise money
for the 2022 floods, pledging ten US cents for every subscriber it brings in
against a $10,000 target.

*Obs: per the video description, the final segment — meeting the Couchsurfing
host and the night at the house — was filmed on a different day, because the
app had to verify his account first.*

## Key moments

- [00:00] The premise, and the warnings: every single person he told said he was
  crazy or that he'd be kidnapped.
- [00:32] The first obstacle, and it isn't the one he prepared for — nobody he
  approaches speaks English.
- [01:04] The plan: reach Boat Basin, an hour's walk away, where the cheap food
  is. So he hitches.
- [01:37] The first car he flags down stops and takes him, despite being headed
  somewhere else.
- [03:18] Flood damage still visible along the road, a month or more after the
  water came.
- [04:20] The fundraiser: ten cents per subscriber from this video toward flood
  relief, aiming at $10,000.
- [05:05] Asking restaurant to restaurant for a single cheese paratha. Several
  don't understand; one tells him he has to buy it.
- [06:35] The first person he finds who speaks English says yes straight away.
- [07:39] The man who pays is a teacher who also works in a restaurant. Harry
  sits down with him and his friends.
- [08:44] They warn him to watch for pickpockets in the area, which he notes
  does not help his confidence.
- [09:21] Food solved. The two remaining problems are dinner and, much harder,
  a bed.
- [09:55] Recognised on the street by viewers, who buy him chai.
- [11:56] A man runs after him to hand him a free cup — Harry isn't sure whether
  he was recognised or not, and takes it either way.
- [13:40] An hour sitting in a park in Clifton. The honest part of the video:
  not knowing where he will sleep is a genuinely horrible feeling, and he says
  he has never had it before, while noting how many people have it nightly.
- [14:47] More lifts, one of them from a driver he only waved at.
- [16:24] Ellie Goulding on the car stereo, and a driver whose uncle lives in
  Birmingham.
- [18:03] Sunset, still nowhere to sleep, and he admits the backup plan — a
  Karachi Couchsurfing group he hasn't contacted yet.
- [18:57] [Walid](/people/walid.md) arrives, on his first trip to Asia, and says
  he can't see how the challenge is survivable.
- [19:40] Harry's own breakdown of the difficulty: transport is ten seconds with
  a thumb out, food is a coin flip, and a bed is the one nobody understands the
  request for. He also notes it is a bigger ask of a household with women in it
  than of single men.
- [20:19] A rickshaw to Burns Road for 170 rupees, paid by Walid, since Harry
  can't spend anything.
- [21:42] Burns Road, and a man called Daniel who agrees to buy him dinner and
  disappears to order it.
- [23:48] While he waits, a drinks shop insists on making him their signature
  lemon special — lemon and mint paste with pink salt — and won't take money
  for it.
- [25:20] The staff on Karachi: the City of Lights. Also cricket, and the fact
  that a Pakistani asked who'll win says maybe either, where an Englishman
  would say England.
- [27:39] Matka biryani: chicken and rice layered in a clay pot, sealed, and
  finished on charcoal so it steams in its own spice.
- [29:18] Harry is now well enough adjusted to the heat that he asks for spicy
  and finds it normal.
- [29:48] The green chilli that undoes that, with no water anywhere.
- [30:53] The Couchsurfing host, met at a bakery, having never spoken to Harry
  before.
- [32:35] Nutella paratha, which retires the cheese paratha permanently.
- [33:18] The observation he keeps: late-night chai is a social institution here
  in a way it isn't in Britain, and his host drinks it around ten times a day.
- [34:32] The house, in an area the host describes as safe in the morning and
  not at night.
- [35:06] Karachi against Lahore, settled by the host: Lahore has the better
  food, Karachi the better people.
- [35:40] Why the living room works — the furniture faces itself instead of a
  television, so people talk.
- [36:10] The host gives him a Saint Benedict medal off his own neck.
- [37:20] The closing note: everyone said it was impossible, he did it, and the
  Couchsurfing fallback is the part he wants to remove next time.

## Extracted pages

- Place: [Karachi](/places/karachi.md)
- Country: [Pakistan](/countries/pakistan.md)
- Person: [Walid](/people/walid.md)
- Tips: [Judge a place for yourself](/tips/judge-a-place-for-yourself.md)