Samantha Shea, a Miami native, has penned a loving essay about her adopted home Hunza, saying that her quality of life here is infinitely better.
“I save thousands each month compared with living in a US city, and my quality of life is infinitely better,” Shea wrote for Business Insider.
Stating that she finds American hustling culture “toxic”, Shea said that the people in Hunza are generally polite and respectful.
“I breathe clean air and eat organic, home-cooked food for every meal,” she writes.
Shea writes that people from back home think Pakistan is a desert, and she herself didn’t know much about it before travelling to the country after college.
When she first came to Pakistan in 2019, she had never lived outside of the US.
“In Hunza, electricity comes on for only a few hours a day, you walk to the local market if you need anything – Amazon doesn’t deliver to the mountainous valley region – and running hot water isn’t guaranteed,” she says.
However she writes that the valley is now her home:
“Here, I don’t lock up my bike or my front door, I can walk everywhere, and my recent major home renovation cost me only $3,000.”
And though she travelled to Pakistan from India, she says she found it easier to travel here.
“I found it easier and more fun to travel here than in India, a much more ‘mainstream’ backpacking destination. I encountered fewer scammers traveling in Pakistan. I also found Pakistan had less trash on the streets, and the roads were in better condition.”
Samantha, who is now a travel blogger, says she has learnt Urdu and is now learning Burushaski, one of the two major languages spoken in Hunza.
