This article investigates the implications of everyday life for the development of sustainable community-based tourism in Shimshal, Northern Areas, Pakistan. Focusing on the circumstances of Shimshal’s trekking porters, it argues that the sustainability of community-level tourism strategies rely to some extent on their success at complementing the tactics community members develop to incorporate tourism involvement into the exigencies of their everyday lives. This claim is situated in a more general discussion of the need to avoid abstracting from the scale of the individual to that of community, and from the realm of tactics to that of strategy, in conceptualizing and operationalizing sustainable tourism.