The Horseshoe Ridge is a circuit that spans across four peaks: Fan Y Big, Cribyn, Pen Y Fan, and Corn Du. The distance is around 10 miles long, and as expected there are a lot of steep inclines. It took us 7 hours in total from where we started to reach the car park of the Taf Fechan Forest, our final stop. This included many pit stops and breaks, and of course photoshoots.

The journey featured breathtaking views along with breathtaking uphill scrambling, but all in all these steep sections did not make up the majority of the hike – it was far more relaxed and straightforward once we got our heads down and got the hard parts out of the way.

Our journey was full of twists and turns. It began with an early morning 6am bus journey from Swansea to Ystradgynlais – a very difficult to pronounce Welsh town name. My brother had to say it four times before the proud bus driver even let us on. The views of the Welsh valleys as the sun began to rise were dampened only by the smell of the hiker sat in front of us on the bus. This man clearly hadn’t washed in weeks, yet he had the audacity to open the bus window when one my brothers whipped out his boiled egg-on-toast breakfast. As the freezing cold air blasted into our faces, we laughed all the way up to the town of Brecon. Here we waited for a taxi to take us to the start of our route.

The forests were mesmerising; you could see for miles. I didn’t feel like I was in the UK anymore - it felt more like Nepal. Interestingly, we found out that Brecon town is twinned with Dhampus, a village in Nepal which is close to where our father was born. Although the hills of Wales could never compete with the ones in Nepal (after all, Dhampus is 1650 metres high, which is still higher than even the tallest point in the UK), we all felt a deeper connection and familiarity with this place. It was like a piece of home.

The first hour was definitely the hardest and most challenging. Especially with the freshly risen summer sun glaring down on us. As the three of us sat on a rock, drowning our lungs in Lucozade, we wondered if we’d overestimated the difficulty level of this course. We’d hiked harder routes in Nepal of course, so we’d assumed that this would be a simple walk in the park in comparison.

Luckily, the path evened out, and we were walking on level ground for the next few miles. It was here we met a lone hiker, a young teenage boy, who asked us for directions to Cribyn. His phone and power banks had run out of charge, and he told us he’d been wild camping for the past two nights. After helping him on his way, we walked on and soon realised we’d sent him in completely the opposite direction: oops?

When we finally reached the summit, we thought we’d made it, standing proudly while batting off insects that swarmed the height marker. It was here we drank the last drops our water reserves along with our lunch. This was a mistake: we were probably only half-way done. We still had the ridge to walk back down to the forest, which felt like a never-ending course, and it was miles until we came across the nearest stream that we could scoop up cold water in our filtration water bottle.

The best piece of advice I can give here is that you should never underestimate nature: big or small, the human body always pales in comparison.