One of the greatest of all adventure travel destinations, Nepal is blessed with a wonderful mix of landscape; from the rich forest and terraced farmland of the ‘middle hills’, northwards to the separate and spectacular mountains and massifs of the Nepal Himalaya; from Kanjiroba in the west to Dhaulagiri, the Annapurnas, Manaslu, the Ganesh peaks, Langtang, the Rolwaling, the Khumbu, Makalu and Kangchenjunga. Attracted by its natural splendour, the world’s travellers quickly fall under the spell of Nepal’s other main attraction: a charming and welcoming people.

The Everest and Annapurna regions have always exerted the greatest pull on incoming tourists and in these areas, within the last 25 year or so, the entrepreneurial Nepalese have built lodges and developed the infrastructure needed to provide trekkers with many of the comforts of home whilst enjoying their holiday-of-a-lifetime beneath the world’s biggest peaks.

But there is another way to explore and one which harks back to a time when anyone wishing to get close to Nepal’s mountains travelled with full camping gear and needed to be self-sufficient. Thankfully, there are still parts of Nepal where this holds true, where there are no lodges, where the next night’s camping place is not always certain and where the local people still treat trekking groups as something of a novelty. This, we would suggest, is the ‘real Nepal’ and there are lots of KE holidays which can take you there.

Shey Gompa and Inner Dolpo

High and wild, Dolpo is the land that time forgot, with a mix of ancient Tibetan religions and a hardy people who make their living through farming and through trade with both Tibet and Nepal. Peter Matthiessen’s book, ‘The Snow Leopard’ shed some light on this special place and little has changed here since the author’s visit in the early 1970’s.