---
type: Video
title: "First Impressions of KARACHI, PAKISTAN 🇵🇰"
description: Harry's first full day in Karachi — a rickshaw to wherever the food is, a lift from a politician on a motorbike, a biryani, a rickshaw fare he forgot to agree first, and SIM cards.
tags: [pakistan, karachi, first-impressions, street-food, rickshaws, sim-cards]
timestamp: 2026-08-06T12:00:00Z
resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYjgR4oZQAQ
video_id: sYjgR4oZQAQ
upload_date: 2021-11-29
duration: 1028
---

# First Impressions of KARACHI, PAKISTAN 🇵🇰

Day one on the ground in [Karachi](/places/karachi.md), with
[Mac](/people/mac.md) and no plan beyond finding breakfast. The method for the
whole day is to get into a rickshaw and ask to be taken wherever the good food
is, then ask whoever is standing nearby where to go next.

What he keeps reaching for is the phrase **culture shock** — the biggest of his
life, he says, and he is careful to say it as a compliment rather than a
complaint. His summary of why: there are no rules, and it works anyway.

The one sour note is a rickshaw driver who asks 1,000 rupees for a five-minute
ride. Harry pays 400 and blames himself rather than the driver — they got in
without agreeing anything first, which he calls the lesson of the day.

*Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles, which are garbled in
places; amounts the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified.*

## Itinerary

Rickshaw into the back streets for breakfast → a pastry stall → a lift on the
back of a politician's motorbike → a coffee chain to recover → chicken biryani
at a local kettle kitchen → SIM cards → a 20-minute walk to the beach at sunset.

## Key moments

- [00:31] **English is widely spoken** — noticeably better than in Amman, and
  the reason the day turns into a string of conversations.
- [01:02] The travel method that runs the whole series: get in a rickshaw and
  ask for good food rather than for an address.
- [03:06] A fried pastry off a cart, sweeter than expected — 100 rupees for two,
  about twenty cents.
- [05:24] **About 30°C in late November**, and the two of them are the only
  people in the street wearing shorts.
- [05:54] Buses that never quite stop: passengers grab a rail and swing aboard
  while it is moving. No lane markings and constant horns.
- [06:26] Flagged down by a group of young men, then given a lift on the back of
  a motorbike by a man who turns out to be a politician — he points out his own
  face on the billboards while driving.
- [09:19] Chicken biryani cooked in bulk in big kettles at a place with only
  local customers, plus chai in a handleless mug, very sweet. **700 rupees for
  two meals and two drinks**, about $4–5 — cheap, but more than they expected,
  and Harry says openly he can't tell whether they got a foreigner price.
- [13:28] The rickshaw that wasn't agreed first: 1,000 asked, 400 paid. His own
  verdict is that the mistake was theirs.
- [15:30] **SIM cards, about 3,000 rupees** for the pair (roughly £15–20), with
  good data speeds. They were told to stop filming inside the shop and did.
  *(Ten days later he reports that the SIM never actually worked — a Western
  handset won't run it. See
  [$100 Overnight Train to LAHORE 🇵🇰](/videos/euRYdj569C4.md).)*
- [16:00] Walking to the beach past skyscrapers on one side and mosques on the
  other. He puts the city's population at around five million (from video –
  unverified) — far below the 22 million he cites on a later visit.

## Extracted pages

- [Karachi](/places/karachi.md)
- [Pakistan](/countries/pakistan.md)
- [Mac](/people/mac.md)