For the third time in the past nine days, I say goodbye to Karimabad, Nagar and its four 7,000m mountains, which I now know like the back of my hand. I had planned to discover some new treks and thus be able to attract tourists to Hunza even in winter time. But in order to stay longer in the North, I must first get a visa extension, and that too from Islamabad or Lahore.

But to reach Islamabad or Lahore, I have to use the Karakorum Highway. Problem: the highway is shut for security reasons. The Gilgit office, two hours from Karimabad, can only grant an extra 15 days. So for those wishing to stay longer in Hunza, they must endure, in the best-case scenario, a gruelling 24 hour ride in a bus. Back and forth.

En route, I stop in Chilas, Dasu, Besham and Manshera to change from one local bus to the other. Another two times, stoppages are enforced: once due to a puncture, and the second time, due to an overheated engine. That people even in “wild” Kohistan and especially my different travel companions take more care of the only ‘Angrez’ than of themselves is so familiar to me that I nearly forget to mention it here.

When I arrive at three in the morning in Mansehra, the police take over the ‘look after the gora’ department. They say something about a strike across Pakistan, and that they will escort me to the bus station in Abbottabad, for my own security. Eventually, they put me from one police car to another until I was in Lahore.

Now this really isn’t part of the official duties of the Pakistani police, and I certainly tried to get them to not take such pains over me. You already know the image of the Pakistani police: according to a human rights report, the Pakistan police is the most corrupt institution in the country. But I witness another side of that coin: of overworked people who spend more time in their police cars than at home. I see people with monthly salaries of Rs12,000, who suffer poor working conditions, endure danger, are hit by load-shedding, inflation and uncertainty – just to provide a better future for their children. I laughed with these people who were able to make jokes about themselves, who know that corruption is one of the biggest problems in Pakistan, who know about their own bad reputation. I met Pakistanis.

Two days later, I lay in the sand pit of a courtyard in Lahore. The morning haze adds a pretence of freshness to the otherwise polluted air. One pehlwan (wrestler), smeared in oil and sand, stands on my back and another on my calves; something like an after-workout massage. While I am torn between smiling and screaming, another pehlwan is walking up and down the akhara with a 60-kilo iron tube around his neck. The khalifa is busy in the moment: he is playing with his five-year-old daughter. Next to me lay another pehlwan; an old man in a pink shalwar kameez is standing on his thigh.

After the massage, I feel like a newborn baby, happy to still be in one piece. I sit with the other pehlwans, drinking the traditional protein shake Sardai with them. They come from all walks of life: students, factory workers, small businessmen, all with familial responsibilities. In this moment, they are all the same, part of the family of pehlwans, part of another amazing piece of culture to discover in Pakistan.

The next day, I meet a French teacher who fell in love 39 years ago with a Pakistani woman and is now running a school for impoverished children. His aim: “We don’t want to teach the children only to read and write; we want to teach them what it means to be a citizen of Pakistan.” He speaks breathlessly, without full stops and commas. He tells me about Pakistani tourist attractions off the beaten track: the 9,000-year-old settlement of Mehrgarh and other archaeological sites of global importance, many of which I had never heard of. Then he talks about Sufi shrines, every one of them a world of its own and a thousand of them all over Pakistan. By the time he moved onto the Old Fort of Lahore or the Shalimar gardens, my mind was, as they say, blown!

Ah, and my visa extension? I applied for two months but was only given a month; Pakistan’s visa rules dictate a tourist can stay for six months per year in Pakistan. I was told by the visa office to extend the visa further in Gilgit where I had already sought my previous extension of 15 days. But this isn’t a complaint; last year many other tourists I had met didn’t get even a month-long extension while I got two extensions in a month! Instead, this is a plea: don’t let the few foreign tourists here pay the price for a person like Raymond Davis.

So I was unable to go to Hunza this year, because after another two bus rides along the Karakorum Highway in the next weeks I just don’t have the heart. Why is that, you ask?

Last year, even the best mountaineers in the world who conquered K2 – technically, the most difficult 8,000-metre peak – would rather wait three weeks for a flight out of Skardu, than suffer a 29-hour ride on the Karakorum Highway.

When I was at Borith Lake in Upper Hunza, I met many people from Lahore, Rawalpindi and Karachi. While they were always surprised to see me, when I heard how they had got there, I was equally astonished! “You sat through a 52 hours bus ride from Karachi, or 29 hours from Pindi only to spent four days here in Hunza? You are really brave, you are the real heroes!”

Gilbert Kolonko is the author of Let’s Go to My Favourite Travel Country — Let’s Go to Pakistan a German-language travel book on Pakistan’s Northern Areas.