DREAM LIFE Living in Northern Pakistan Part 1

In August of 2021, we packed up our things and moved to the north of Pakistan. But first, let me give you a brief introduction if you're new to my channel. My name is Rosie Gabriel. I'm originally from Vancouver, Canada. Seven years ago, I quit my full-time job as a photographer and decided to travel to different parts of the globe by motorcycle. In 2019, I did 11,000 kilometers solo across Pakistan. I ended up falling in love with the country and not just the land. I stumbled across this guy. I've got Adil here with me, who is a traveler. He's traveled extensively all through Pakistan, which I later ended up marrying. Who knew I would travel to Pakistan and find my soulmate. You know it's love when he does your henna. We have a pretty unique love story that I really hope to share with you all soon. But back to my recap. We set up a beautiful home in Lahore. We lived there for about 10 months, but neither of us are really city people, so it didn't take long for us to say alohafiz to the city life and move to a more suitable location. The mountains! Both of us are avid adventure travelers. We crave wide open spaces, fresh air, the sound of birds, and of course, Sakoon. Adil has been traveling around Pakistan since he was just 15. This guy is almost as crazy as I am, and I call this a match made in heaven. When I was touring the north, I fell in love with the place. The mountains have magic in them, and the people are so warm and hospitable. The culture is so beautiful, and they are really community orientated people. The place we settled on moving was Upper Gojal in Himza. This is where we would call home by the next year and a half. So we packed up our entire house. The mountains are calling. Yeah, let's bust this popsicle stand. Our two beloved fur babies, and we made our way north. From Lahore, the journey takes a whole 24 hours by car. Today's road trip is sponsored by... What happened, Habs? Huh? What happened? This is our story. Now, unfortunately, things didn't actually start off on the greatest foot. It seems we have a puncture. Oh, no. It looks like the rain is coming. Go, Habs, go. You can do it. Go, Habs. Cheering you on. A day before we left, we had to get our COVID vaccine. We thought if there was any emergency and we had to fly, we would need our certificate, as this was mandatory at the time. With the shift in the weather, my immune system dropped and I ended up getting a horrific reaction. I think the weather changed very quickly last night and I was cold and I didn't put warm clothes on right away. I puked everywhere and I have such a bad migraine and I've been puking non-stop and now we're in the car. Oof, what a nightmare. We finally made it to the house. All these plans have been amazing, drawn, jots and we vlogged a whole day, but I literally puked everywhere. My heart was so sick, so that vlog was kind of a bust. Oops. My head was blasting me and now my whole body hurts, which caused me to be deathly sick for weeks and for some reason, I feel like this kind of set the tone for our time there. I struggled for months after this and I was also healing from our time in Lahore, as I was going through a lot of stress over there, but I really realized nothing can get better unless you feel better from within. Running to the mountains isn't going to be a quick fix to solve anything. It certainly helped to have the peace and quiet and space to process things, but seemingly things got a lot worse before they got better. But I think this is a whole other video topic. Let's just say it has been a wild journey for the last few years and I was really just blessed and so grateful to have the opportunity to find this beautiful space to go through all of that. The kids are so excited. Absolutely love this place. This is my favorite. Very traditional house and I'm more happier than I could have anticipated. Our stuff right now is literally everywhere, but the next few days we're going to be putting it all together. The house was way better than our expectations and what we saw in pictures. We were so excited to move in and set up our cozy little mountain abode. We personalized our space and it was exactly what we dreamt of. We spent the first couple of months just getting used to mountain life. Neither of us really have a green thumb, but we tried our best to manicure the space and make it look pretty. Talk about a dream life. Our landlord used our land to keep his cows and I couldn't be more happy. We spent every morning in the garden having our coffee, greeting the cows, playing with the dogs. This was kind of the life we dreamt of. We have a baby goat. He's so sweet. Oh yeah, we also got a goat. She quickly became part of the family. She quite literally thought she was one of the dogs. I tell you, it was never a dull moment. It brought me so much joy to share our space with these beautiful beings. The best part about living in Hunza is all of the fresh fruit. Different seasons produce a variety of the most delicious organic fruit you have ever tasted. Come on. Come on Gracie, up. Good girl. Good girl. Focus, focus. You got it. Good stuff. Good girl. We came in the middle of apricot and mulberry season. Honestly, I'd never really liked apricots before. We have an abundance in Canada, but these taste like candy. Even the dogs love them. Good girl. A little bit too much. Like apricots? Love apricots? No way. Gracie? Winston, do you love apricots? By the way, this is Winston and Gracie. Winston has been with me for the past 11 years since he was only a few weeks old. He is my little angel bear that has traveled all around the world with me. And this is Miss Gracie. She has been such a blessing in my life. And what a story she has. She's a rescue that came from Lahore. When we found her, she was in a terrible state, full of mange. I had taken her and two other dogs to get treatment at the rescue center as it is highly contagious. I knew she would be my forever pup. She spent five months in treatment and then got to finally come home. She is such a character. Where'd all the shoes go? You're not a shoe chewer, but you're a shoe collector. Are those all yours? I'll be sharing more of her full story in a video soon. Say thank you. Good job. Life would honestly not be the same without these two amazing souls. But we soon learned that living in Hunza with animals is difficult. We had our first big scare with Winston just weeks after we arrived. There are no vets in this region and we were left completely helpless. It turns out he was eating the apricots that fell on the ground and ended up ingesting a seed, which can be highly toxic for dogs. But it ended up giving him an obstruction. We had no idea what was happening or how to help. Luckily, our vet from Lahore is amazing and he walked Hubs through the IV procedure so that we could keep fluids in him and give him the medicine he needed. Thankfully, after a few days he passed it and was back to normal. September is honestly my favorite month up here. The tourist traffic kind of slows down a bit. Our own private little beach swimming area. Always grab yourself and or make the place cleaner from when you found it. So let's clean up after other people but clean up folks. The weather cools off a little. Hubsie are you going swimming? No, not today. And we thoroughly take advantage of the endless activities there is to do up here right in our backyard. It's really an adventure playground here. Another reason why we moved up here. We're gonna go for a walk around the area. Have a little adventure. See what we can find. The kids are super excited. Let's go for a walk. Come on guys. At any given time, we can just walk out our door and go on an adventure. We're going rock climbing. Oh nice one. Yeah girl. Whether it be climbing. Good. How was it? Awesome. Hiking. This place really has it all. And all seasons which is so beautiful. In fall, when the colors start to change, become so vibrant. The air gets crisp. It's my favorite time up here. When life starts to slow down a bit. And you can see the changes all around you. Like apples. It's October in Hunza which means the apples are ready to be picked. Perfect. Lots and lots of apples. Even Gertie likes apples. Get out of my apple basket. Apple basket. No no. I tell you, it is never a dull moment around our house. So I am currently on route two. I also got really involved in the community activities. In Upper Gojjal, they're quite proactive with women's sports and I love that. Hello everyone. We are from Tupersan and we are very excited for our match. We know this day is very lucky for us and we will win. We are the champions. They have teams from all over surrounding villages that gather for huge tournaments. I often went out to capture and support the local girls teams. I loved their enthusiasm and their passion. Full performance okay. One two three. All come together and just practice together from different villages. We are not from one area but we try our best to come together and practice together and come here and give our best and we always try to do that we become a champion and like we want to shine like a star. Most of these projects were run by local volunteers who dedicated their time to invest in this initiative and these young spirited girls. If you may not know, girls in general across Pakistan are not really encouraged to do sports so this is a pretty big thing that the community upholds these values and cheers these girls on. But despite having most of the community's encouragement, they still lacked things such as basic equipment, a proper playing field and also the opportunity to get scholarships or take their talent further. This is a very hard ground for us because there is no any type of safety for us. This is very hard. We like when we fall down and others we get very large type of injuries and all that. So we request from government and all the sponsors who sponsor these games. So please try to make this ground so for us and like we can play so clean and safe. Yes yes and I noticed you girls aren't wearing shin pads. You don't have shin pads. I really tried to highlight certain things while we were there to try to promote positive change and give people an opportunity to grow. Another great initiative I attended was a girls only cricket tournament. It was funded and made possible by a young leader who wanted to give back to the youth. Hello everyone this is Misbah Hina. I am from Gulmit, Gojal, Hunza. I'm a national volleyball player and I run my own organization which is called Misbah Volleyball Academy. So basically I work with young girls to empower them to sports. We use sports as a tool to make a girl self-confident and to empower them which will help them in education, in their education, in achieving their goals in their lives. So we are here today with a project which we were doing in collaboration with Right to Play and Women Win. So these are the NGOs that are working to you know support organizations like ours to work with young girls to you know changing their lives through sports and play and different physical activities. These mountain communities really lack the resources and opportunities that other people might have access to and these initiatives provide an outlet for the youth that is very much needed here. Because it's not easy to live here, separated from the world, living in tough conditions, not having the proper support. I soon came to learn and understand firsthand a small glimpse of the not so romantic side of living in the mountains. Even as prepared as we thought we were we really had no idea what was to come. Winter hit hard and fast. It was only mid-October and we weren't anticipating it coming so soon. Hubs had a job he had to travel off for a month to and I was stuck at the house having to look after all the animals. We had ordered firewood before but it just didn't come in time. With the immense wind we were having we lost all power. Electricity came only about an hour a day if I was lucky. Well AccuWeather says it feels like minus 20. It is down to minus 12 tonight. Now we had a total of about half an hour power all day in the last 24 hours. As you can see it's pitch black. I didn't even have enough power to charge my power bank so my light is off. It was very cold and a very dark month. This looks like it's pretty dark and I felt very alone. It started to affect my mental health even more. Every day it would be dark by four and I would just sit there in darkness just waiting for the day to end. I didn't film much during this time. I thought to document it but really I was in no place to do so. After three weeks the firewood that we had ordered finally arrived and this became my ritual that would take me through this time. Fears that kept me hidden, scared of my own self. It was a very transformative time for me. An opportunity to sit with myself and my own fears and I had a lot of time to do that. I definitely got my dose of fear to contend with. A few days to the end of the month and I was faced with what would be my biggest fear yet. I almost lost my beloved Winston. One night I took Gracie for a walk. It was particularly cold that night so I kept little Winston in the kitchen next to the fire. I closed the door to keep the warmth in. What I returned to was my worst nightmare. Somehow the buffari caught the carpet on fire and Winston was trapped inside. JJ come! He couldn't even breathe. Oh my god. I arrived home to a pitch black house full of smoke. I could barely see. I rushed to get him just in time. Five minutes later I would have lost the house or even worse I would have lost Winston. JJ? Oh my god. I told somebody to stay warm. JJ? JJ come! I screamed so loud my neighbors came running to the rescue and they helped put out the fire. Luckily Winston only had minor smoke inhalation but because there was no veterinarian office I had to take him to the human hospital for x-rays. And yes they were okay with this. A few days later hubs returned and all went back to normal.