Video
$36 Pakistan Market Hunt 🇵🇰
· 22 min · Watch on YouTube
$36 Pakistan Market Hunt 🇵🇰
The day before heading north to Hunza, spent buying cold-weather clothes in a street market in Islamabad with Mac. It is the clearest price list in the cluster: a thick jacket for 3,000 rupees (about $16), a shirt for 200 (about $1), gloves for 300.
The haggling is affectionate rather than sharp. He talks gloves down from 250 to 200 and then hands over 300 anyway, and says why on camera: he enjoys the haggling itself and liked the man. The same thing happens with the taxi — 200 rupees owed, 500 given, because the driver didn’t try it on.
It ends at the shoe cleaners working the market kerb, where a shine that should cost around 100–150 rupees gets 2,000 from him.
Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles; amounts the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified.
Key moments
- [01:02] Islamabad again: clean, unpolluted, warm in the day and chilly at night, and he takes his jumper off while saying so.
- [01:33] The Beverly Center in F7, a food court with Western options — omelettes, toast and smoothies for two came to 2,990 rupees, about $17.
- [06:46] 200 rupees owed for the taxi, 500 given, for the usual reason.
- [07:58] The jacket: asked 3,000, and Harry’s counter of 2,500 fails — he pays the 3,000, about $16, and rates it the right price for something thick enough for sub-zero Hunza.
- [11:04] A shirt for 200 rupees, about $1, carrying a British high-street label he assumes is fake and concedes might not be, since a lot of it is made here.
- [12:35] Gloves: 250 asked, 200 agreed, 300 paid. His explanation is that he haggles because he enjoys it and then pays over because the seller was decent.
- [14:21] Shoe repair, 150 rupees, done at the kerb in ten to fifteen minutes, and he watches enough of it to call it a real craft.
- [16:21] A shoe shine, which turns his year-old shoes out looking new, from the cleaners working that stretch of pavement. He asks what the work pays and is told about 500 rupees a day.
- [20:53] He pays 2,000 for it, roughly $10, against a going rate he puts at about 100 — the largest over-payment of the cluster, and he says plainly that they earned it.