$80 Northern Pakistan Homestay 🇵🇰

A two-hour drive further up the Hunza Valley with Mac, through Chinese-built tunnels and past Attabad Lake, to a small guesthouse in upper Hunza run by a family — and, in Harry’s telling, the best food of the whole Pakistan trip.

Two threads close in this video. The first is the SIM: three weeks after buying one in Karachi that never worked, he finally has mobile data, from a regional provider that covers the far north. The second is the running claim that Hunza food is the best in the country, which here gets an explanation rather than an assertion — the vegetables are grown on site, the yak comes down off the high pastures only in winter, and the cook was taught by a chef from a Pakistani television cookery channel who came for a month and stayed two.

Obs: the guesthouse is not named here. Harry links its website in the description, which puts it under the rule that a business viewers are being directed to isn’t named in the bundle; what the stay actually consists of is recorded in full.

Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles; figures the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified.

Key moments

• [00:30] Cricket is his answer to what surprised him most about Pakistan. He knew it was popular; he did not expect every park and every spare patch of grass to have children playing on it. His comparison is that Britain has lost this entirely.
• [01:00] The SIM problem ends. After nearly three weeks with no mobile data — the SIM he was given in Karachi never worked — he buys SCOM, the provider that covers the far north: under $10 for 20 GB, working in places nothing else does.
• [02:02] A tunnel through the mountainside that takes about seven minutes to drive, built with Chinese help — the sign calls it friendship tunnel number five.
• [02:32] Attabad Lake, teal-green and ringed by snow-capped mountains, seen from the road with the moon coming up.
• [03:02] Another police check on entering a new area.
• [04:11] The room: spacious, rugs on the walls, big windows onto nothing visible until morning, and a heater, which by this point in the trip is the feature that matters.
• [04:42] The two catches again — slow wi-fi and serious cold — and his response to both, which is that this is a remote area in winter and nobody is to blame. We chose the wrong time of year to come, so we can’t blame anyone else.
• [05:45] He records the same piece to camera three times because the camera keeps failing, he thinks from the cold. In the unheated lobby you can see your breath.
• [06:15] Asked whether he is ordering for his partner as well. Harry freezes, Mac requests a rollaway bed, and Harry’s on-camera reading is that it is a language barrier at a place set up for couples and families — no disrespect to the hotel.
• [07:16] A heater under the table, warming their feet, which he calls the best thing about the building.
• [07:46] Handmade noodle soup with yak and local cottage cheese — a cheese he is told is made only here.
• [08:49] Hunza food is not spicy, and he likes the change; he likes spice but not sweating through a meal.
• [09:49] The main course: yak with rice and vegetables, tender and beef-like without being beef, closest to a beef stew.
• [10:54] Mac’s dish is yak stew cooked in apricot oil — sweet and savoury at once, and the most unusual thing either of them eats in the valley.
• [11:55] Why yak is a winter food. The animals live at 3,000 m and above and are not hunted; they go up to the pastures in summer, which is when the meat is hard to find, and come down in winter when the grass runs out. One animal is over 100 kg and yields, the host says, thousands of meals.
• [12:26] Where the cooking comes from: local dishes from grandparents and tradition, plus a chef from a Pakistani TV cookery channel who was booked to teach for a month, liked the area, and stayed two.
• [13:30] The vegetables are grown on site.
• [14:01] The host’s account of yak as food: grass-fed at altitude, neither beef nor mutton but between the two, and good for you — she says it does not raise your blood pressure (the health claim is hers, recorded as given).
• [14:38] He doesn’t film the evening — hours spent talking and drinking with the family after dinner — and says so.
• [15:08] Breakfast: omelette, fried eggs, French toast, local bread, paratha, syrup, salsa, butter, and the first cappuccino he has had in a long time.
• [17:51] His verdict on Hunza food, and it is the strongest thing he says about eating anywhere in Pakistan: every meal in the country has been good, but Hunza is a special case because it is all organic and all from the mountains around you — a food lover’s experience, even if you’re not a foodie.

Extracted pages

• Hunza Valley
• Pakistan
• Mac
• Akram