Before I had children, I would always try to take a month off each year to travel, meet new people and make new work. Even though I have been away for work a lot since, I've not really taken extended periods of time away from the family, for my personal work at least, anyway.

That was, until I made the acquaintance of Dan. Dan is the husband of one of my partner, Laura's oldest uni-friends, Vicky. Still with me? Good, I'll continue.

Dan and Vicky live and work in the south of France, so Laura had fallen out of close contact with them both. But after a concerted effort to find them again, Laura finally got to see Vicky, and I met Dan. During the few days we spent together, he told me about a book project he'd always had in the back of his mind, which sounded like it could be incredible, but following those initial chats, I hadn't really thought too much about it .

Fast forward almost a year and I received an email out of the blue from Dan, after only having met him once, with a list of about 15 countries around the world that he had planned for us to visit. That was a pretty rad email to find in the inbox!! I of course jumped at his offerings and various wheels were put in motion.

The first port of call on our long global excursion was Nepal, somewhere Dan had long-standing contacts with, so flights were booked, an itinerary put together and off we went. The images here are not ones to be used in the book, but ones I shot for myself during our 17 day trip.

I had wanted to document how the Nepali people lived and worked the land around them, so I divided my time between communicating with diverse people in which ever way seemed to work best, and observing the beautiful scenes I found myself in, daily.

The country and the people blew my mind, it was the most indulgent photo-mission I'd ever been on and I absolutely loved every moment, many of which were pretty gruelling, thanks to the epic trek in the Annapurna conservation region we were sent on! Anyway, I now have a huge body of material in the archives, and I've not quite settled on a good way to use it all, so watch this space...