Crazy Glacier in Hunza Valley🇵🇰

The last morning at the first Hunza hotel and a drive out to Hopar Glacier with Mac and the group. Two things worth keeping from it beyond the scenery.

The hotel staff moved the wi-fi into his room. Harry had said the previous day that the connection might stop him uploading at all; the staff carried the router upstairs so he’d have the best signal in the building. He calls it well beyond the call of duty, and it is the most concrete example in the cluster of the hospitality he keeps describing in general terms.

He answers the question he says he is asked most about the valley — whether Hunza is worth it in winter. His answer is yes: summer is the obvious choice, winter is just as good, and the thing to know is the temperature.

Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles; the glacier is named from the description, which renders it Hopar where the transcript hears “upper”.

Key moments

• [00:30] The staff put the wi-fi in his room so he could get a daily video out of a valley where the connection is bad.
• [01:00] Breakfast: the omelette he has become attached to, cooked with a lot of vegetables; a very thin many-layered crepe; and Hunza bread, hard and heavily buttered, unlike any bread he gets at home. Assembled into what he calls a double-decker egg omelette on toast.
• [03:04] The cook’s pitch: everyone in Europe makes a crepe, but theirs is handmade with organic flour.
• [03:04] Mac’s verdict: the best breakfast he has had in Pakistan.
• [04:09] The road out — riverside, sheer cliff on both sides, a steep drop.
• [04:40] Hunza in winter, answered. Summer is the desirable season but winter is just as good; expect −7 to −9°C in the evening and around 2°C in the day, and when the sun is out it is completely fine.
• [05:11] The road stops being a road: loose rock and barely a track. His summary is that you have to risk it to get the biscuit.
• [05:41] Harry’s glacier credentials, offered unprompted: a four-hour A-level geography exam and a B.
• [06:18] You park at a hotel and walk. He expects an hour’s trek; the first view is five minutes away and the viewpoint about ten.
• [06:18] Four layers on and he calls the temperature close to perfect, because the sun is strong.
• [07:50] He deliberately hiked light — one camera, a drone and spare batteries, rather than his usual gimbal, camera and three lenses, which he says always exhausts him.
• [07:50] The mountains are full of stones the local people gather; rubies come out of them.
• [09:23] The glacier runs from the base of the mountain all the way down to where they stand.
• [10:58] Mountain green tea at the viewpoint, and — the moment of the video — the sound of the glacier calving into the frozen water below, which he describes as a low, echoing, distant explosion.

Extracted pages

• Hopar Glacier
• Hunza Valley
• Pakistan
• Mac
• Akram