Sandwiched between its enormous neighbours India and China, Nepal spans the highest stretch of the Himalayas with eight of the world’s ten highest peaks, and reaches down to the fertile Ganges plain. Never colonised, Nepal was allied with the British Empire and more recently suffered a ten-year civil war which only concluded in 2006. The mountains which characterise so much of the country are geologically young, the result of the Indian continental plate colliding with Asia, forming and continuing to push the Himalayas skyward at a rate of five millimetres per year. Nepal has one of the world’s most unusual time zones, at five and three-quarter hours ahead of GMT, presumably to be different from India, itself sitting half an hour either side of Pakistan and Bangladesh. In another claim to fame, Nepal is also the birthplace of the Buddha around 563 BC.

I spent a week in Nepal in 2011 on a trekking holiday booked through Intrepid Travel, travelling from Dubai where I was working at the time. As I was time-limited, I picked an expedition which packed a lot in to a short period, walking through Sagarmatha National Park in the direction of Everest base camp to the point where the summit would be visible, then turning back to the airstrip at Lukla. The Khumbu valley, as it’s known, was like walking through the pages of National Geographic, both in the scenery and the people that I saw and met. I also spent a few nights in Kathmandu either side of the trek, which was a riotous place.