Zhangmu, Tibet

We arrive into the chaotic border town of Zhangmu at 8.30pm, brought to a standstill by gridlocked roads of trucks waiting to cross into Nepal. We’ve gone from 5000 metres to 2300 metres in the matter of a few hours.

I’m looking forward to laying down my head but the paper-thin walls and windows are no match for slamming doors and disco music. At 9am we join a messy crowd of people at Chinese immigration. Among the crowd are some hardcore climbers with beards, ruddy cheeks and frostbitten noses. The classic explorer stereotype. Many of the voices are British. I overhear one conversation:

- ‘I’m going home but then coming back to climb K2’
- ‘Have you climbed Everest?’
- ‘Many times’

I’m so impressed that I strain to hear more of the conversation. I learn he’s a guide and lost a toe on one of his expeditions. His aim is to climb every mountain in the Annapurna range. I’m really impressed.

Eventually I’m called inside where my details are hand-typed on to a computer but the x-ray machine is broken so our luggage isn’t checked. We’re still eight kilometres from the Nepali border and there are queues of trucks all the way. It’s chaos. Even though it’s raining heavily and the road is one of the roughest I’ve driven on, the views are still stunning: sweeping gorges and waterfalls around every corner. We close our windows as we pass waterfall after waterfall thundering down on to the road.

Our land cruisers finally drop us off at the border. We have a 500-kilometre walk with our backpacks in the mud and rain across the Friendship Bridge and down the hill to the Nepali immigration office. Immigration is just as chaotic on the Nepali side but it seems less regimented than in Tibet. It’s then a three-hour drive through verdant landscape back to Kathmandu.