In the days of jet travel and packaged tours, Peter Hillary and Graeme Dingle choose to travel the hardest way - on foot and carrying their supplies - through the toughest terrain in the world: the Himalayas. They climbed and tramped for 5,000 kilometres. It took them ten months. They passed through regions and countries which are merely exotic names to most of us - Sikkim, Nepal, Garwhal, Himachal Pradesh, Kashmir, Ladakh, Tibet - and of course India and Pakistan. They moved amongst three major ethnic groups, and heard more than fifty dialects. They stepped back in time, visiting places normally inaccessible to the outside world, and with a way of life which has remained unchanged for centuries.