The brown goat had been quietly munching on the flower bed by the garden wall Now it was dragged over to the front of the car. The wicked looking but prettily garlanded khukri was grabbed off the table and with one swift chop, goat head was detached from goat body. The two men picked up the still twitching carcass and quickly moved round the car so fresh blood would spill on all four wheels. There were more ceremonies to complete, but soon Stan could be assured of not just reliable but safe motoring until Dasain rolled around next year. “Everybody from the office brings theirs round so it gets done at company expense. Fortunately we don’t have to sacrifice anything for computers any more. But the sewing machine also needs a sacrifice every year, I think another chicken will do.”A sewing machine? Well, Stan employs a full-time tailor to repair tents, sleeping bags and other trekking equipment as each party returns to Kathmandu from out on the trail.

I’d just got back from trekking the Annapurna Circuit and, as usual, Stan, who has run a trekking agency in Nepal for almost 30 years, had put together the trekking group for me. Along with my wife Maureen, our 18-year-old son Kieran and his girlfriend Abby, we’d also brought three friends, two of whom had never been trekking before.To look after our seven “members” we had a sirdar (head Sherpa) named Lal, four Sherpas, a cook named Saila, supported by five kitchen crew, plus what seemed like a cast of thousands of porters. In fact there were 23 of them, but as we consumed the food they carried we would cast them off; by the end of our 19 days’ walking we would have just 13 left.The walk to the Everest Base Camp may be the best-known trek in Nepal, but in fact the Annapurna Circuit is justifiably the most popular It’s almost the perfect trek. As its name indicates it (almost) completes a circuit, so there’s no need to fly one way or do a large slice of the walk in two directions. It starts in the subtropical lowlands and runs right up to the “north of the Himalaya” Tibetan region, so you experience a huge range of terrain and meet people from a wide variety of Nepalese ethnic groups.

The route makes a complete circuit of the spectacular mountains of the Annapurna massif and also gives you close-up views of two other 25,000ft peaks, Manaslu and Dhaulagiri, the world’s sixth and seventh-highest peaks. And as a finale, just to prove you’re not getting all of this for free, the walk crosses a high pass, the 17,764ft Thorung La, all of 200ft higher than the Everest Base Camp.By day seven the looming presence of the Thorung La was beginning to make itself felt. We’d talked about it over dinner every night, we’d read the warnings about Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), which affects walkers who go “too high, too fast”, we’d discussed taking Diamox, a mildly controversial treatment for AMS that has the annoying side effect of being a diuretic – nobody wants their bladder demanding that they crawl out of a tent at 3am when the temperature is well below zero. And we’d met trekkers coming in the opposite direction who had turned back, unable to cross the pass because of the onset of AMS.We needn’t have worried. A rest day in the village of Manang, at the useful altitude of 11,611ft, had aided our acclimatisation and we took the opportunity to clamber up to the Praken Gompa, perched on a hillside, high above the town. Not only had that little ascent further improved our fitness and adaptation to the altitude; it had, equally important, given us all the most thorough blessing I’ve ever experienced. The little wizened 86-year-old lama with his pointy red hat looked as if he’d just auditioned for a part in the next Harry Potter movie.

As we knelt before him he tapped each of us on the head with a weighty Tibetan holy book, tied sacred threads around our necks and intoned a serious-sounding mantra that reassuringly included that important name Thorung La several times. There was even a cup of tea from his equally colourful wife, who had carefully extracted a 100-rupee (£1) donation from each of us before we were ushered into the holy man’s presence.On Day 10 we made our assault on the pass. We were out of our tents by 4.30am to start the long slog up to the pass by dawn. It was an anti-climax; even the stragglers in our group got there by 9am, although in the hero photo in front of the chorten – the prayer-flag-draped Tibetan Buddhist stupa that marked the top of the pass – we look happy enough to have conquered Everest. In fact a tea stall set up nearby confirmed that there was nothing so heroic about our feat; our porters were alreadydown the other side carrying all our gear, and footprints leading across the snowfield to the summit of the 21,268ft Khatung Kang, towering on one side of the pass, indicated that other people had come here with more serious intent.