Who goes up north in the winter? my friends remarked, looking at me as if I had gone completely mad.

Yes, no one goes to the Northern areas in the winter, but when ace mountaineer and brother of the first Pakistani woman to climb Everest, Samina Baig Mirza, Ali Baig invites you to his village in Shimshal for a few days and throws in the words ‘ice-skating’ and ‘skiing’, there was no way I could have refused.

Perhaps I was a little mad. It was -7°C in Hunza. Back home in Karachi, where I was 24 hours earlier, it was 23°C.

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking from the cold, I wore everything I had brought with me, basked in a spot of sunlight like a cat, had a gas heater placed next to my couch and still felt cold. Had I made a mistake?

Hunza is a strange place in the winter — it’s off-season, and so everything was closed. It was like going to the fair after everyone had left.

A few locals I met on the streets were surprised to see a tourist and asked if I was there for a wedding.

No, I responded, receiving confused faces in return.

I was looking forward to the infamous Café de Hunza’s famous walnut cake and some ‘real’ coffee, but that too was closed.

The Hilltop Hotel where I was staying is perhaps the oldest establishment of its kind. The owner, Javed, lives around the corner, sports an American accent that caught me off guard every time and really goes out of his way to make sure that his guests are all warm and toasty and catered to at his establishment — even if it means opening it up for just one lone guest during the season.

Heated blankets are a godsend. I discovered them only as I was climbing into bed and they gave me hope that perhaps a Karachiite can survive in the north in winter.

I pulled the blanket over the laptop and myself and created a small fort so that all of me was warm, and not just the parts that were covered.

“We’re going to go to Shimshal and will spend a night there so that you can acclimatise to the altitude,” said Mirza when I met him the next morning. I wasn’t the only friend going at this time — Henriette from Norway, was on her way from Gilgit, along with Mirza’s older brother Gul.

While we waited, my preparedness for this trip was inspected: my sneakers were rejected for being unsuitable for hiking, and my Karachi winter clothes (turns out they were made of cotton and not wool) were rejected as being anything but ‘wintery’.