Two's company...

Smithy and I have just found out that we will be the only two trekkers on the Tibet trip - a "private" group of two, as our trek company leader put it! Oh well, just as well we've had a bit of practice being a pair of princesses...

In 2004, we arrived in Kathmandu a week after the riots that resulted when those Iraquis kidnapped and executed 12 Nepali migrant workers, and discovered that everyone else booked on the Annapurna Circuit trek had cancelled! Now, this was to be a camping trip and it probably would have been very easy to convert it to a tea-house trek, but no Ama Dablam decided to forge ahead as originally planned. So there was Smithy and me, the trek leader Mukund, the sirdar Santa, the sherpa Dev, five kitchen crew and five porters. 13 crew for just the two of us!

Still, 13 people earned 3 weeks wages that they would not otherwise have got and we certainly got the royal treatment. Told one day that lunch would be just over the next hill, we crested said hill to discover a dining table, complete with pink table cloth, folding chairs, and an aluminium tea kettle all set up beside a burbling brook!

This year's Annapurna Circuit we'll be accompanied by Ms Libra and Bluey - a "private" group of four. But we'll be staying in tea-houses this time so there will be plenty of opportunities to meet other people. It won't be until we join the Peregrine trek to Island Peak that Smithy and I will be in a large group of strangers - 10 are booked on that one. I just hope we will not have lost the art of conversation by then!