Two years after an earthquake devastated Nepal, people still live in temporary shelters, barely getting by. Kirsty Lawrence and Warwick Smith witness their struggle, after the destruction.
As the earth beneath his feet began to settle, a single thought of family dominated Sukh Gurung's mind: Are you still alive?
Working as a porter, hired to carry bags in Tsum Valley with a group of tourists, all Gurung could do was stand and watch, and worry, as his world collapsed around him.
Sukh Gurung's life has not been the same since the quake.
The 37-year-old walked back to his village through active and unstable landslides, searching for his wife, two sons and daughter.
"We had no idea, was our family alive? Was my house destroyed? I was panicking a lot."
It was almost five days before he found them. They were alive.
Fear turned to relief, but then the real hardship took hold.
Every house in the village had been destroyed, about 100 homes.
It was Gurung’s whole world.
But the village knew no help was coming. They had to help themselves.
"What we did was we took carpet and made a tent out of it," Gurung says.
"For 60 days we stayed in that tent that we made out of carpet."
A woman walks through collapsed houses on the outskirts of Kathmandu. Photo: Reuters
After the quake, displacement camps became common. This photo, of a camp in Kathmandu, was taken on April 25, 2016. Photo: Getty Images
Close to 9000 people died, and more than double that were injured.
An injured child at a UN tent clinic, after the disaster. Photo: Getty Images
Eventually, Gurung was able to move out of his carpet tent.
A relief organisation arrived, and constructed temporary shelters out of steel for the village.
Two years on, the shelters remain, with no hope of building a more permanent home any time soon.
The quake destroyed trails that gave small villages access to the outside world.
Money is a problem.
Prior to the 2015 earthquake, Gurung could make about 50,000 rupees (about NZ$670) from a trekking season.
Now, he is lucky to make half of that.
Gurung is not alone in this struggle. Countless Nepalese people are still living in temporary shelters, struggling to make ends meet.
People have rebuilt their lives as much as they can at the bottom of slips. There is nowhere else for them to go.
But life goes on.
Gurung is just focusing on what he can do, not dwelling on what he can't change.
Staring out into the mountains as a chilling wind whips through, he shares a joke with his porter companions, a big smile stretching from ear to ear.
His spirit isn't broken. This is just life now.
Tourism plunged after the 2015 earthquake. It was a year before #VisitNepal began trending on Twitter, with concerted efforts to lure back international visitors.
Nepali Times editor Kunda Dixon says the hashtag was part of a campaign to revive Nepal through tourism.
He says they were trying to let people know the country was safe and the best way to help them bounce back was to inject their money straight into where it was needed - the people.
Many Nepalese families rely on tourism to get by. For Tatapani guest house owners Raney Gurung (left), his daughter Shila Gurung, 3, and her mother Kanchi Gurung, it's vital.
Aid money is held up in government bureaucracy and even though statistics show tourist numbers are back to what they were prior to the 2015 quake, the money isn't reaching the hard-hit areas.
Lisa Choegyal, the New Zealand honorary consul to Nepal and tourism advocate for Nepal, says the Annapurna trail and Mt Everest attract 97 per cent of tourists.
Less popular trails struggle, with some being close to the quake epicentre.
Choegyal says the money tourism injects into the villages is massive.
"They are using local porters, they are paying local accommodation.
Trekkers accommodation in Tatapani.
"Sometimes the richer groups will pay for cultural displays.
"People will get really captivated by a school or by a guide or a kid so they sponsor them and make donations."
However, it is also important not to pin all hopes on tourists.
"It's really important we don't raise the expectations amongst those villages that tourism is going to solve everything."
Walking along one of these trails, one can see just how much a cash injection is needed.
The trail is winding, with steep terrain creating breathtaking views. Carved out into a hillside, the path is easy to follow for most of the way.
However, certain areas require carefully placed footing, and walking through active landslide areas is an unnerving experience.
The trail, called the Tsum Valley trek, is close to the epicentre of the quake.
Bini Gurung operates this guest house in Soti Khola situated at the start of the trail which leads to Tatapani & Uhiya. Tourism is her lifeblood.
Dotted along the trail are small shacks, the Nepalese equivalent to a cafe in an area like this.
There are familiar refreshments for weary travellers, bottles of Sprite and Coke, and the not-so-expected, eggs and rice millet wine.
Heading out to Tsum Valley, the closest village you can drive to is Soti Khola, a seven-hour haul from Kathmandu.
This drive includes some sealed road, but three hours of sand under the wheels makes it a rough ride.
Once you reach the village of Soti Khola, nestled in between two large hills next to a pristine blue river, it's walking only.
The first stop for our group is Lapu Besi.
This small village is like many, with large guest houses for travellers and small unstable-looking shacks for locals.
We ordered noodles and received an apology, they would take an extra 15 minutes as there was no electricity.
Prem Gurung, 36, the owner of the restaurant, said a boulder had taken out their power station during the earthquake, and the government would not fund its repair.
Instead, the community was saving what little money they earned to get the boulder broken down and electricity restored. Its impact was huge.
"At night times it's very hard to serve the guests, because we have limited power supplies with the batteries," Gurung says.
Prem Kumari Gurung's guesthouse at Lapu Besi has had no electricity since the earthquake.
Walking another two hours along winding terrain you stumble across Khorla Bensi.
Arriving at dusk, light switches are flipped. Again, no power.
Our party of eight orders dinner. A wood fire oven is all there is to cook on.
Looking out at the hills you can see where chunks were carved out by the quake.
Buildings around the guest house are missing walls. Bookings are being taken for rooms in partly-constructed buildings.
Quake-damaged buildings are everywhere in Nepal.
Sitting in a white plastic chair on a balcony that creaked as if it doubted its own assembly, guest house owner Kancha Lal Gurung, 46, looks out around the hills and sighs.
He has nowhere else to go.
"I'm staying here only for my business, otherwise there is no point staying out here."
When the earthquake struck, he ran with guests to higher ground, where they stayed for three days.
Eventually, he returned to assess the damage. It was massive.
"I had to renovate everything."
Kancha Lal Gurung stands in front of his guesthouse at Khorla Bensi. The huge slip in the background was caused by the earthquake.
Solar power was installed for main areas, but guest rooms are dark. Posters advertising hot showers still hang, their promise a mirage.
Together, with his three business partners, Gurung says they put in money and took out loans.
But getting back on their feet was difficult, as guest numbers plummeted.
"Before, I used to have an average of eight to 10 guests every day, now sometimes the number is zero."
Money is not his only concern, either. The psychological scars of what happened still remain.
"I still have trauma."
Already-ramshackle buildings were left worse-off following the 2015 earthquake.
Gurung does not expect to get financial help from the government.
"I know I'm not going to get the money.
"Access is a big challenge here, they haven't got here to assess it."
Walking to Khorla Bensi also means walking through active landslide areas, which poses some risk.
Up the trail, about an hour away, is Tatopani, where most trekkers continue onwards to complete the Tsum Valley trek.
However, we headed to the small village of Uhiya, a five-kilometre uphill climb to about 2300 metres.
It's March and bitterly cold, but this isn't even winter.
Houses that were ramshackle even before the earthquake are now a greater shambles.
Looking out across the village of Uhiya there is a sea of tarpaulins, flapping in the crisp wind.
These people spent almost two years isolated, facing higher food costs with little income.
On the day the quake struck, social worker Sun Kumari Gurung was working in the fields.
The shaking was so strong people were thrown from one end of the field to the other.
As soon as the earth stopped moving she went to try and help people in the village.
Social mobiliser Sun Kumari Gurung, from Uhiya village.
"Many of them were injured, some of them had died."
The trail that led to their village was taken out in a landslide, so it was nearly impossible to get in and out.
Gurung says it was five days before the injured were flown out by helicopter to receive medical care.
She accompanied the injured on one of the flights, and was then able to organise food to be transported back to the village.
Sun Kumari Gurung cooking in her home in Uhiya village.
What she didn't realise was it would be difficult for the food to get there. This would remain difficult for the next two years.
Food was delivered by helicopter in the initial aftermath of the quake, but the village could not afford that for long.
They realised early on that the government would not be offering support, so they had to help themselves.
Villagers devised a makeshift trail, but it was dangerous to traverse.
When the World Food Programme, an organisation run through the United Nations, came to build new steps and connect them back to the main trail, they were over the moon.
This would see thousands of steps built in place of the makeshift trail they had created in order to connect them back to the Tsum Valley trek.
After two years of struggling, this was the hope they had been looking for.
WFP engineering unit business support assistant Rabindra Ojha helped build the trail and says they used local villages to forge it, as they were the ones who would benefit from it.
"Plus, we were offering them employment as well."
Villagers were paid for their time and learned new skills, which could be put to use to gain employment in the future.
The trail has made life significantly easier for locals.
The trail has halved the price of rice in the village.
Gurung says it is improving their quality of life, too.
But she still worries for the safety of her children.
The school suffered extensive damage in the quake, but with no other options, children are still being sent there.
"Sending my children to that building for studies, it doesn't feel safe."
Min Bahadur Sunar teaches a class at Uhiya village.
It was going to cost about 2 million rupees (about NZ$26,900) to fix the schoolhouse, money the village doesn't have and has no sign of raising.
But like the rest of the country, they are just getting on with it, living the best they can in the in-between.
Kirsty Lawrence and Warwick Smith's trip to Nepal was funded by the Asia New Zealand Foundation.