Video
$100 Overnight Train to LAHORE 🇵🇰
· 30 min · Watch on YouTube
$100 Overnight Train to LAHORE 🇵🇰
The overnight Green Line sleeper from Karachi to Lahore, booked as an entire six-berth business-class cabin for two so Harry and Mac could work through it. Seventeen hours in the end, not the eighteen he keeps saying.
Two things make it more than a travel-day video.
The ticket was fiddled in front of them and they say so. The fare was around 44,000–45,000 rupees; the clerk at the station rewrote it as two adults and four children to get a cheaper rate, kept part of the difference, and the pair paid about 36,000 — roughly $200. Harry and Mac explain the whole mechanism on camera rather than presenting it as a good deal.
They ate nothing served on board. Multiple people had told them not to take the train’s food or water, so they loaded up on packaged snacks beforehand and turned down breakfast twice. The one thing Harry did buy — a Pepsi from a man walking the carriages — had a loose cap, so he didn’t drink it.
Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles, which are garbled in places; amounts the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified.
Itinerary
Escorted to Karachi station → a private business-class sleeper cabin → working through the night → rural Punjab through the window → a five-minute platform stop → arrival in Lahore at sunset, 17 hours later.
Key moments
- [02:09] The cabin: six berths, fold-down beds, fan, lights, power sockets and a screen. He rates it above the sleeper he took in Bangkok.
- [03:10] What it cost, and how. About 36,000 rupees, roughly $200, against an original 44,000–45,000: a station clerk reissued it as two adults and four children and pocketed part of the saving. Harry’s justification for the spend is that it replaces a hotel night and buys a working day; a flight would have cost about the same.
- [05:14] Don’t take the food or the water, on the strict advice of several locals. They decline the water on offer, decline breakfast twice, and live on snacks bought before boarding. Harry is also avoiding anything made with local water after stomach trouble earlier in the trip.
- [07:56] Chai and coffee brought to the cabin, 300 rupees with the tip. The chai is nearer English builder’s tea than the desi chai he’d got used to.
- [09:31] Rural Punjab out of the window — farms, villages, palm trees, half-built houses, animals on the line — which he calls the reason to take the train.
- [15:24] Stations stop for about five minutes, which is not enough time to get a drone up, and he says so with some regret.
- [16:25] The SIM card doesn’t work. They bought one in Karachi for £15–20 and it will not run in a Western handset; the only fix is buying a Pakistani phone, which he refuses to do for a three-week trip.
- [17:56] The onboard kitchen: an assembly line of four or five men turning out something like 290 meals, one a minute — chicken, rice, potatoes, naan and a dessert.
- [20:47] The Pepsi with the loose cap, bought off a hawker against the advice he had just repeated, and left undrunk. 100 rupees.
- [22:49] Why the whole journey is smoggy: rubbish is burned because there is no collection to take it away. Mac’s observation, agreed by Harry, who has seen the same in Thailand.
- [24:27] Train staff coming to the cabin asking directly for money, cheerfully. Harry’s read is that word had got round that they tip.
- [28:29] Their booking policy, stated as a policy: nothing booked more than a day ahead for three weeks, because the flexibility is worth more than the saving — see book nothing in advance.