Video
First Impressions of SWAT, Pakistan 🇵🇰
· 22 min · Watch on YouTube
First Impressions of SWAT, Pakistan 🇵🇰
The first day of the seven-day northern tour: an early start out of Islamabad with Mac, a guide (Akram) and a driver, and a four-hour drive up to Swat — the valley Pakistanis call the Switzerland of Pakistan, and which was under Taliban control between 2007 and 2009.
The sightseeing is an ancient Buddhist site on a hillside above the town and the Swat museum, but the day is really about money. Harry and Mac arrive with no cash, having assumed they could withdraw on arrival, and spend the afternoon working through banks that will not take a foreign card. It ends at a Western Union counter changing Mac’s emergency dollars, where half the notes are refused.
Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles; amounts and dates the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified. The tour operator whose booking links appear in the description is not named here — see Pakistan.
Key moments
- [00:30] The team for the next seven days: a guide and a driver, and a forecast for Hunza of −6 or −7°C.
- [03:09] Swat was under Taliban rule from 2007 to 2009, per the guide, and there is a passport check on the way in — the American passport gets the attention, politely, as usual.
- [02:37] New roads and tunnels through the mountains; Harry rates the infrastructure. Moments later they pass a truck that has rolled off the side.
- [03:39] Bottled water handed to them by a shopkeeper, which Mac stops him drinking — “probably safe, but you can never be too sure”, and Harry has already been ill once on this trip.
- [04:09] Roadside breakfast: omelette and paratha, oily and salty and good, eaten Mac’s way with the two mixed, plus a strong sweet chai.
- [06:22] The town seen from above is linear and very spread out. Asked what people do for work, the guide says farming and transporting goods.
- [06:53] The hilltop site — a Buddhist stupa identified by colonial-era archaeologists. Harry reads the sign out and admits he can’t follow it.
- [09:30] The Taliban damaged it during their control of the valley, the guide says, and the damage is still visible.
- [11:02] At the museum, a memorial carrying hundreds of names of people killed in the fighting.
- [11:34] The galleries: grave goods from around 1700 BC, then Buddhism, then the Muslim and Wali of Swat periods. A model shows how completely the hillside site has been remodelled since.
- [12:05] They are told to stop filming — filming is allowed but costs considerably more, so they pay the ordinary entry and walk round instead.
- [13:07] Entry about 200 rupees a head, one to two dollars.
- [13:37] No bank will take their cards. The same problem as Lahore: only a couple of international banks work, and outside the big cities there are fewer of them.
- [14:38] The hotel, on a rise with snow-capped mountains in view, and cold enough inside that Harry keeps his jacket on while trying to work the heater.
- [18:21] His summary of the mistake: come to the north with cash already drawn in the cities, and know which banks take your card before you leave them.
- [19:23] Mac’s emergency dollars save the day. $400 handed over at Western Union, $200 refused as not eligible — they leave with half what they asked for. Harry’s note to self: always carry some of your home currency.