A Bittersweet Goodbye: My Journey Through Pakistan

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 Ready? This video is going to be a bit different than my other many. Let's go! It is a goodbye. Oh well, sort of; you'll see. After 3 months of traveling all over Pakistan, it's time for me to make my way home back to the Netherlands. So I traveled all the way to Karachi, the business hub of Pakistan, to spend my final days there. As I heard, this city is famous for its food. Of course, I had to embark on one last Pakistani mission.

A Culinary Adventure

I reached out on Instagram and met up with a subscriber, Assad, who was kind enough to show us around and take us on a vegetarian food tour. If there's one thing Pakistan knows how to do, it's how to make a good crispy bread. We started off with the infamous cheese Bata that is food one, I guess, and that is potato one. Wow, it's a lot of food! So let me show you how to eat a piece of bread.

If you are immature and don't know exactly how to do it, basically, you can put it like this. So I take it like this, yeah, and then that's the thing. It doesn't work. We see everyone doing it with one hand; we have to like, okay, now how can you do it without making a mess? You have to just grab three for tip like this. Yeah, like this. How is it? That's really good; it's a bit spicy.

Street Food Delights

We continued our food quest with some popular street food named gapa. Big one! Yeah, you can't really have like only take a bite; it's a lot of flavor. You can't be honest; at first, I was like, "What is going to get stuck in your throat?" Right? But like the aftertaste is really good; it's like an explosion of flavor.

After we ate our way through bread and chickpeas and spices, we roamed around the city for a bit. Spending my final days here felt strange. This year has been a pretty wild one for me. I traveled all over Southeast Asia, finished my Master's Degree, and quite spontaneously started this YouTube channel. As a result, I found a new passion.

Discovering a New Passion

However, I definitely did not come here as a YouTuber. I didn't even record anything for the first 1 and a half months of traveling here. It was only after experiencing how much Pakistan has to offer that I felt like it deserved to be shared with a wider audience. I figured I had nothing to lose, and Pakistan had everything to gain in being seen the way I saw it by more Western people.

But I had no idea or knowledge of how to make videos, how to film and edit, and on top of that, I had no gear—not even the basics like hard drives or a microphone. Just a phone, a cheap tripod, and a barely functioning laptop that was not nearly strong enough to edit videos on. It's not even playing, which as a result caused a lot of technical problems, errors, lost footage, and sleepless nights. But I just decided to keep going, keep learning, and experimenting, editing around the clock, and now I don't really want to stop anymore.

Reflecting on the Journey

The last 3 months in Pakistan have honestly felt like a dream—from hiking in the most beautiful nature to exploring Pakistan's rich culture to eating our way through Pakistani cuisine to hitchhiking around the north along with tons and tons of other modes of transport. It was one big adventure. Yet Pakistan gave me so much more than just an amazing travel experience; it allowed me to find a new passion as well.

I've always known I love traveling, but I never knew that documenting my travels could be so much fun. Thanks to your love and support, I might have a chance to actually turn this passion into something more meaningful, and for that, I couldn't be more grateful.

Looking Ahead

At this point, I had been traveling for over a year in total, and my savings were officially running out. More sad than I expected, Pakistan was supposed to be my final destination before heading home and searching for a job. But now I can only think of one thing: to come back as soon as I can and keep creating videos because I'm not nearly done here. This country has captured my heart, and now I'm determined to find a job, work as hard as I can, and save up as much money as I can so that I can come back and keep sharing my adventure on YouTube.

Conclusion

Let's go! For now though, it's time to say goodbye to Pakistan and to YouTube. However, it's not a final goodbye; just consider it a short pause because I'll be back—back to Pakistan, on to the rest of the Middle East, and then the world. This isn't an end; it's just a beginning. This journey will continue, and I have big plans ahead. So if you want to stay updated in the meantime, you can always follow me on Instagram, where I'll be posting regular updates. Thank you, and make sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you'll get a message when I post a new video again in a while. Well, my dad is supposed to pick me up, so let's see if he's waiting for me. Thank you for taking the time to watch my videos; I appreciate every single one of you, and I'll see you soon.