The layman’s guide to hiking the Himalayas

Hindu scriptures say that in "a hundred ages of the gods" you could not do justice to the Himalayas. So where do mere mortals start? Knowing where to go in an area 10 times the size of France is daunting, especially when just getting there is expensive. Everest gets most of the headlines, but the Himalayas are vast, especially when you include mountain ranges west of the Indus – the Pamir, Hindu Kush and Karakoram. This 4,000km crescent, stretching from Kyrgyzstan to Burma, is a geography of superlatives – the highest mountains, the deepest gorges, tracts of wild forest, the rolling high plateau of Tibet plus, in Bhutan and the Indian state of Assam in the eastern Himalayas, some of the greatest biodiversity on the planet. Then there are the people. It is true that in some areas the Himalayas are wild and barely populated, but in most there is an incredible diversity of cultures that have adapted to surviving in an environment that can be exceptionally hostile as well as inc