It’s a long, hard, remote trek from north of Dhaulagiri to Jomsom through passing Tarap Valley, across the roof of Nepal. The region offers opportunities to visit ancient villages, high passes, beautiful Lakes, isolated monasteries and also to experience the vast array of wildlife inhabiting the region, including Blue sheep, Mountain Goat, Jackal, Wolf and the legendary Snow Leopard. The people follow an amalgam of Buddhist, Bon, Shaman and Hindu traditions and behind many houses throughout Dolpo you will find carved wooden faces, dok-pa, which offer protection against evil spirits. The narrowness of the gorge makes for exciting walking, with sections of trail carved straight up steep cliffs or else traversing skimpy sloping ledges. In some places, these airy rocky walkways vanish altogether, leaving gaps the local path makers have bridged with thin poles, some of which look frighteningly old and rotten, and then overlaid with flat slabs of rock. The path climbed repeatedly over steep-sided spurs that ended in cliffs at the rivers edge, each time descending back to the valley bottom. Eventually, tired of such ascents and not liking the exposed look of the next one, we decided to ford the river. This proved harder than it looked, the ice cold water being deep and strong, and most people, including many of the porters, needed help to cross safely. Eventually the gorge began to level off and the steep sides drew back as we entered the broad flat upper Tarap valley. A series of small villages line the river here and we camped by the first one, Dho Tarap, a wild place with the air of a medieval town. Visiting Dho is like visiting the past. Out in the tiny terraced fields villagers were threshing the barley with wooden flails while others ploughed the dusty soil with crude, wooden, metal-tipped ploughs dragged by yaks. Children with large wicker baskets on their backs prowled the nearby slopes collecting yak dung, which was then spread out to dry before being used as fuel for fires. It's the only fuel there is in this treeless land. At dusk, herds of goats, sheep and yaks came back from distant grazing grounds. The people, especially the children, were friendly and curious, watching everything. Trekking groups visit Dho regularly so foreigners are not totally unknown. Even so we were clearly of great interest to many of the locals.