Travel in the off season

Harry keeps being asked why he came to northern Pakistan 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 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, 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 🇵🇰 — 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 🇵🇰 — 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 🇵🇰 — 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 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.

Harry takes the correction. Asked in the Pakistan Q&A 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.