Video
I Had an Accident at the Most Dangerous Bridge in Pakistan 🇵🇰
· 26 min · Watch on YouTube
I Had an Accident at the Most Dangerous Bridge in Pakistan 🇵🇰
A morning at Hussaini Bridge in upper Hunza Valley with Mac and the guides — a rope-and-plank crossing with wide gaps between the boards, done at −5°C over water between 1 and 5°C.
Then he loses his drone. He is flying it on the far bank, gets talking to some locals, loses concentration and crashes it. It recovers on its own, flies back the way it came, runs out of battery over the river and goes into the water. It is never found. What the page keeps is not the accident but the response: he says on camera that it is his own fault and nobody else’s, and gets on with the day.
Two smaller things survive it. Akram posts on Facebook asking anyone who finds the drone to return it, and says with confidence that people here would — which is the safety claim the whole cluster keeps making, tested on something worth losing. And the coffee stand on the far bank produces the best twenty minutes of the video.
Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles. The guesthouse Harry thanks by name in the transcript is not named here, because its website is linked in the previous video’s description.
Key moments
- [01:01] 4,800 rupees for four meals for two — two dinners and two breakfasts, about $27 — at the guesthouse, and some of the best food of the whole trip. He notes they finished none of it.
- [02:38] 100 rupees to get in, about a dollar.
- [02:38] The bridge was built by locals and is still used by them, school children included, who run across it. The gaps between the planks are wide enough that running is genuinely dangerous for anyone else.
- [03:40] The jagged mountains here are his favourite in Pakistan.
- [04:10] Why he came in winter, answering the comment he expects: there is nobody here. One other person on the whole bridge.
- [04:40] Maximum seven people on the bridge, and he zips every pocket before stepping on.
- [05:10] The real risk assessment: falling in is unlikely and survivable; dropping the camera is very likely.
- [06:11] One-handed, because the other hand is filming, with hands already frozen. The handrail is not strong and the wood does not look it either.
- [06:42] −5°C.
- [07:12] The fear argument, prompted by Mac: life begins at the end of your comfort zone, and fear only harms the person feeling it. His list of the things people told him not to do — don’t go to Pakistan, don’t eat that, don’t drink that, don’t have tea with locals, don’t talk to locals — and his answer, which is that dropping the fear is what makes the trip.
- [08:42] The advice he passes on: always look back at where you came from.
- [09:13] Water between 1 and 5°C.
- [11:59] The crash. Flying while talking to locals, one of them English, he loses concentration and puts the drone into the far bank.
- [14:03] It gets worse. The drone recovered itself, flew back across to where it took off from, ran out of battery at the water’s edge and was taken by the river. They walk the bank and find nothing.
- [15:43] It’s my fault, I can’t blame anyone else. Sometimes you’ve got to deal with failure and stare it right in the face. First drone he has ever crashed. See own the risk you took.
- [16:45] The mistake he identifies is the panic, not the crash: he disconnected to go and look for it, which is what triggered return-to-home, and home no longer meant anywhere it could land.
- [17:47] The verdict on the bridge: not that dangerous once you’ve done it a couple of times, which is why locals treat it as a footpath.
- [18:17] Akram puts a Facebook post out asking for the drone back, and says people here will return it if they find it.
- [18:55] The coffee stand, running since 2017 — started with help from an Australian visitor — with a book customers sign with their name and country, mostly British and American.
- [21:31] The speciality: ingredients beaten by hand rather than brewed, cups warmed with hot water first so the drink doesn’t go cold, and a shaking routine performed at the table.
- [24:14] Harry’s verdict, which is the point of putting it in the video: it makes him forget the day’s disaster.
- [25:18] 350 rupees, and he pays 500, for the show and because he liked him.