Pakistan travel blog: What happens when two American chicks go to Pakistan?
Two American executives fly into Pakistan expecting danger and leave talking about hospitality instead.
Anna Zervos, CEO of the mobile app Pao, and her co-founder and CFO Sara Zervos didn’t set out to make a political statement. They packed cameras, boarded a flight to Pakistan, and started filming — mostly because almost nobody they knew back home believed the trip was a good idea. The result is “Pakistan travel blog: What happens when two American chicks go to Pakistan?”, a YouTube travelogue built entirely around one blunt question: is the country actually as dangerous as American headlines suggest?
Their answer, delivered on camera rather than in a press release, is no. Zervos and Zervos say flatly that they never felt safer or more welcomed in a foreign country, and the video spends most of its runtime backing that claim up with footage rather than argument — mountains, markets, meals, and a steady stream of strangers going out of their way to help two American women navigate a place they’d never been.
- The video was produced and published by Pao, the mobile app co-founded by Anna Zervos, who serves as CEO alongside CFO Sara Zervos.
- Zervos and Zervos state directly that they felt safer and more welcomed in Pakistan than in any other country they’ve visited.
- Despite filming dramatic landscapes throughout the trip, the pair say the standout part of the journey was the people they met, not the scenery.
Two Tech Executives Select Pakistan
Pao is a startup, and startups don’t usually send their CEO and CFO on a joint trip to a country most State Department travel advisories flag with caution language. That’s part of the point. Anna and Sara Zervos frame the trip as a deliberate test of the gap between how Pakistan gets covered in American media and what actually happens on the ground when you show up with a camera and no agenda beyond documenting the trip honestly.
That framing puts the video in the same lane as other creators who’ve built entire followings on visiting places Western travelers are told to avoid — the same instinct behind flying into Lebanon against a government warning or spending a single day as a tourist in Somalia. The pitch is always the same: don’t take the advisory’s word for it, watch the footage.
The Camera Records Factual Evidence
The video leans hard on landscape footage — the kind of terrain that rarely makes it into American nightly-news segments about Pakistan. But Zervos and Zervos are explicit that the scenery, however striking, wasn’t the highlight. It was the people: locals who fed them, guided them, and treated two visibly foreign women with a level of hospitality neither expected going in.
We never felt so safe and welcome in a foreign country.
That line does the heaviest lifting in the entire video. It’s not a policy argument or a statistic — it’s two women who run a tech company saying, on camera, that their lived experience directly contradicted the warnings they’d absorbed before booking the flight.
Countering the Narrative
The video doesn’t pretend Pakistan has no security concerns; it simply argues that the day-to-day reality for ordinary travelers looks nothing like the worst-case narrative that dominates American perceptions of the country. That’s a familiar move in the travel-vlog space — creators using firsthand footage to push back on secondhand fear — and it’s the same logic that’s driven interest in vlogs from North Korea, where the gap between reputation and reality is treated as the whole story.
For Pao’s Zervos and Zervos, the goal isn’t tourism marketing for Pakistan — it’s a personal record of a trip that surprised them, posted publicly so other Americans weighing the same decision have one more data point beyond the travel advisory.
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