Enjoying a long slog in the Himalayas

I was 13 when my father, Jagdish, took me on my first trek. It was 1983 and he had just retired from the Gurkhas to set up his trekking company, Insight Himalaya. I was at school in Darjeeling and, although I'd had the chance to study in the US, I decided to join him. I was 18 when I led my first trek over a 5,500-m pass. Now I'm 35 and married to Rupa. We have two children, Jaya, seven, and Anugrah, five, and live with my parents in Kathmandu.

In the 1960s it was an Englishman, the late Col James OM Roberts, who was the first to realise that trekking would appeal to tourists. He had spent years in Nepal attached to the British Residency so he knew the hills. In 1965 he founded Mountain Travel, the first trekking company, and began taking groups of visitors into remote places for days at a time backed up by teams of guides, cooks and porters. That is how we run our treks today.

We walk for five to six hours each day with all equipment, stores and personal possessions carried by porters or yaks, so guests have nothing to carry. We produce wonderful lunches and dinners in a dining tent and after a hot shower - which is an exciting innovation - guests sleep under canvas in a sleeping bag with a hot-water bottle. The spring months of March, April and May are busiest when the rhododendrons and spring flowers bloom. During the summer monsoon we switch to Tibet, where it is dryer, until we resume at home in the autumn.

The trend is shorter treks with smaller groups and a week is the average duration. We employ four to six guides, a cook, three to five kitchen support staff and as many as 40 porters on a single trek. We use more guides than other companies, which is better for the locals and clients. Our fees are higher, but we're more flexible. We can't keep meat fresh on the move so we buy live goats and chickens from villages along the way, which boosts the pockets of the locals.

Many of our clients come back again and again so I have got to know them. One lady always changes for dinner - she brings three suitcases. Another fine gentleman always treks in a tie. No other Himalayan country competes with Nepal because it has so many different terrains and habitats in a small area, which can take you from rice-growing valleys and mountain forests to the snowline at 3,600m. People living in the hills - most of them subsistence farmers - welcome visitors into their villages. They never talk about their work in hours, only in days. We get to undisturbed areas where people wear traditional clothes.

Test

Director: S Sashikanth

Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan

Star rating: 2/5

The White Lotus: Season three

Creator: Mike White

Starring: Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Natasha Rothwell

Rating: 4.5/5

NO OTHER LAND

Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal

Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham

Rating: 3.5/5

The National's picks

4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young

Crisis in Lebanon

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Profile Box

Company/date started: 2015

Founder/CEO: Mohammed Toraif

Based: Manama, Bahrain

Sector: Sales, Technology, Conservation

Size: (employees/revenue) 4/ 5,000 downloads

Stage: 1 ($100,000)

Investors: Two first-round investors including, 500 Startups, Fawaz Al Gosaibi Holding (Saudi Arabia)

Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)

Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi

Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi

Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai

Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi

Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia

Bombshell

Director: Jay Roach

Stars: Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie

Four out of five stars

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The smuggler

Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.

Khouli conviction

Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.

For sale

A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.

- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico

- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000

- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950