“Of course. I’m dying to see the view from the top. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

He pushes Daisy’s possessions across the desk towards her then dismisses her with a wave of his hand. He doesn’t speak to Al, Leanne or me, and our documents are processed wordlessly. When we’ve been checked, the two armed men standing either side of the gate take a step back to let us enter the trail.

Daisy grabs my arm the second we’re all through. “Wow.” She pushes her sunglasses onto the top of her head. She has bags under her eyes, and dozens of red blood vessels streak the white around her eyeballs. “That was mental.”

She releases me and links her arm through Shankar’s before striding off up the path. If she notices him flinching at the unwanted physical contact, she doesn’t let on.

The muscles in my thighs burn from weaving my way from left to right and back again as I climb the three thousand steps up the Annapurna mountain. I was expecting actual steps – I think we all were – but these aren’t evenly sized concrete blocks; they’re slabs of rock, dug into the side of the mountain, so uneven and wonky you have to look where you’re placing your feet. They’re the rustic, higgledy-piggledy winding steps of a fairytale. Or a nightmare. With the exception of Al, we all go to a gym back home in London, but running 5K in thirty-three minutes on a treadmill prepares you for this in the same way that jumping in puddles prepares you to swim the English Channel.

It’s 2 p.m. and Shankar is leading the way, leaping from stone to stone, as enthusiastic and energised as he was when we started our trek five hours ago. Daisy and Leanne follow in his steps, both breathing heavily, both swearing whenever they look up and see how many more steps there are to go until we reach the end of the trail. Green mountains striped with brown paddy fields and capped with snowy peaks wrap around us, hiding us from the rest of the world. I have never been anywhere so breathtakingly beautiful or so back-breakingly harsh. We passed donkeys earlier, roped together, stumbling up the steps with huge saddle bags strapped to their backs, their knees buckling, their hooves slipping under the weight of their heavy loads. One of the donkeys was carrying a fridge, strapped on top of its saddle bag like it was the most normal thing in the world. Watching the poor animals climb and stumble, heads down, eyes sad, was more than I could bear. I wanted to set them free and tell their handler that he was cruel for forcing them to live such a miserable life, but I bit my tongue.