Hunza Through Foreign Eyes: What Western Travelers & the Press Are Saying

For decades, Gilgit-Baltistan sat in a strange blind spot: home to five of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre peaks, yet barely mentioned in mainstream travel media. That has changed. In January 2025, CNN Travel put Gilgit-Baltistan on its list of the 25 best places to visit in 2025 — coverage picked up across the region, including by Arab News and Dawn.

CNN's write-up was refreshingly frank: flight schedules to the region can be unreliable and roads can close seasonally, but supported ten-day treks through the 'Little Tibet' of Baltistan were available from around USD 3,000 through operators like G Adventures, Wild Frontiers and Intrepid. That mix of honesty and enthusiasm runs through almost all recent coverage — and it matches what we tell our own guests.

If you are weighing a first trip, this guide collects what international journalists, vloggers and independent travelers have actually published about Hunza, Skardu and the Karakoram Highway over the past two years, with links to every source so you can read them yourself.

National Geographic Traveller UK's April 2025 issue carried a long feature called Karakoram Calling, following one of Intrepid's new Pakistan hiking departures. The story is told through Aneeqa Ali, the local female tour leader whose company The Mad Hatters runs women-led trips, and it describes northern Pakistan as part of “an often misunderstood country” where visitors remain thin on the ground.

Six months later, National Geographic returned with These underexplored trails lie in the shadow of K2 (October 2025), a piece about the trekking country beyond the famous base camps — the granite walls of Nangma Valley and Hunza's 1,655-step Ondra Poygah stairway among them. Tellingly, the article credits “Pakistan's newly free e-visa system, expanded domestic flight network, and improved security” for the region's growing accessibility.

That free e-visa is real and current: since August 2024, citizens of 126 countries — including the US, Canada, the UK and the EU states — pay nothing for a Pakistan tourist e-visa, as Dawn reported when the change took effect. Our visa guide walks through the application step by step.

In August 2025, Noraly Schoenmaker — the Dutch motorcyclist behind Itchy Boots, one of the biggest solo-travel channels on YouTube — rode Season 8 of her world tour through Skardu and Hunza, including an episode on the gemstone miners of the high valleys. For millions of viewers, her footage of the Karakoram Highway was their first look at Gilgit-Baltistan that wasn't a news bulletin.

A few months earlier, British YouTuber Jay Palfrey documented an 18-hour overnight drive from Islamabad to Hunza (April 2025) — lost luggage, dam-construction roadworks and all — before the payoff: Attabad Lake, the Hussaini Suspension Bridge and the old lanes of Karimabad. The video is a useful reality check: the road is long, and the destination earns it.

Irish blogger Johnny Ward, known for having visited every country in the world, went a step further and ran his own group trip up the KKH and over the Khunjerab Pass into China in June 2025 — a route that passes within sight of the Passu Cones and through the high border country of Khunjerab.

Some visitors never quite left. American writer Samantha Shea arrived as a solo backpacker in 2021 and now lives part of each year in Hunza; her site Intentional Detours hosts what is probably the most detailed Western-authored Hunza travel guide online, updated for 2025.

In May 2025 she co-organized a 14-day, women-oriented Karakoram trip with UK outdoors creator Hannah Hobbs (@alittlehobbs) — glacier hikes, alpine lakes and homestays with local women in Hunza. It is part of a genuinely distinctive pattern in Gilgit-Baltistan travel: solo women and women-led groups consistently single out Hunza as the easiest region in Pakistan for female travelers, something we explore in our guide to the women of Hunza.

Not all coverage is a postcard, and that matters. In June 2025, British creator George Buckley posted a video alleging that a luxury resort was discharging untreated sewage into Attabad Lake. Within days the Gilgit-Baltistan Environmental Protection Agency had sealed part of the property and issued a Rs 1.5 million fine, as Dawn reported.

A million views held a business accountable in a way that quiet complaints had not. As a company owned and staffed by people who drink this water and farm this land, we think that scrutiny is healthy: the valleys' future depends on tourism that treats them as a home, not a backdrop. It is also a signal to travelers — the world is watching how Gilgit-Baltistan grows, and choosing operators who take that seriously has never been easier.

Read together, the coverage says three things. First, the fundamentals that impressed CNN and National Geographic — the mountains, the hospitality, the free e-visa — are permanent features, not a moment. Second, the practical frictions the same articles mention (weather-bound flights, long roads) are real, and the fix is simple: build buffer days and travel with people who plan for them, as our honest logistics guide explains.

Third, timing favours the early. Pakistani media reported a sharp drop in arrivals after the India-Pakistan tensions of spring 2025, yet within weeks the big creators and group trips were back on the highway — and travelers who came anyway found the viewpoints uncrowded. Adventure.com's Sarah Reid put it precisely: Hunza is “more developed for tourism than Skardu, but no buzzing backpacker scene—yet.” That 'yet' is the window.

When you are ready to plan, start with the best time to visit, sketch a route with our 7-day Hunza itinerary, or simply write to us — we have been hosting the travelers behind these stories' footsteps for years.