To celebrate my sixtieth birthday, I went on a group trip to Nepal. We landed at the airport in Kathmandu and then spent three exciting days in this chaotic city. Car horns blasted all day and stray dogs barked all night. I loved the ancient temples, the bicycle rickshaws, and the beautiful Buddhist prayer flags flapping against a clear blue sky.

Then it was time to climb into our minibus, leave the city and head for the mountains. We set off through the dust and the noise, and edged our way through snarled up junctions, where no one seemed to have the right of way. We travelled slowly, as the roads were so bad, and as we bounced our way through potholes, we had plenty of time to see life in the villages. Children played among the fruit trees, dogs slept in doorways, and goats fed on the vegetable waste thrown from roadside stalls.

Eventually we left the villages behind too, and entered an idyllic land of clean, sparkling rivers, hills covered in wildflowers and, in the background, magnificent snow-capped mountains. Not much traffic now, just beautiful countryside.

I looked out of the bus window and saw an old woman on the river bank – perhaps washing, or just resting? How lovely, I thought, to sit by the water in such a gorgeous landscape. What a wonderful life. But then, as the bus turned, the sun glinted off something in her hand. Intrigued, I asked the guide, did he know what she was holding? “It is a hammer”, he said.

She was smashing river stones by hand, and selling the resulting aggregate for road building. She worked all day, pounding at the pebbles, filling her bucket for just a few rupees. Life for her was not idyllic at all, it was brutally hard, long into her old age.

I had been entranced by the beauty of the place, and failed to see the reality. You don’t understand a country from one sanitised, fleeting visit. You need to dig deeper.