“One thing that surprises people is that there are very good quality hotels. Particularly in the Skardu area, there are two exceptional, palace style boutique hotels. What people forget is that if you go back to the early 1990s there was a large tourist population throughout the summer. And indeed, when I started running trips there, I had to book hotels and experiences a year in advance. Travelling between Chitral and Gilgit, you would find rafting parties, trekking parties, mountain bikers, horse riders, even people paragliding. You name it. I am not talking mass tourism, but large numbers of adventure tourists. But since the troubles and 9/11, it has really dried up. So, the brilliant thing about travelling in northern Pakistan at the moment is that you have all these wonderful experiences to yourself. And as a consequence, travellers feel more special and the people you are meeting haven’t been in any way changed by tourism.”

“Everyone who goes to Pakistan, the word that always comes back is ‘surprise’. Everyone is always surprised by how hospitable, how friendly and – I know it is a bit of a cliché – at just how welcomed you are made to feel by the Pakistanis. I think there is a sense of gratitude that you are going to their country and treating them normally. And experiencing their country and going home with good stories about it. And they’ll possibly come up to you and say, ‘wow, thank you for visiting, you are very welcome.”

“Pakistan is where our company started. I wrote a book about it, and it was from that book that I started the company. Wild Frontiers is named after the North West Frontier, which is the province that runs along the Afghan border. I even have a small log cabin in the Kalash Valley and I go up there every year. One of the big draws that people don’t know too much about here is the pagan tribe the Kalash, and we usually spend three days with them on most of our trips. It’s an extraordinary phenomenon that they are still around, really. And one of the main reasons why I started in the travel business.”