On the journey home the wind drove like knives into our legs, and we were nearly attacked by mastiffs as we drove past a tribe whose encampment was close to the road. But safely back in Machu, we sat around the iron stove of a restaurant and ate huge, steaming bowls of tuckpa. It had been a good day, I said to Tsedup later. He looked at me earnestly, with a slight frown. 'You westerners are always measuring the days,' he said.

I hated being stereotyped. In fact, the girls' presence was making me realise a few things about myself. I was thrilled to have them here, but inside me there seemed to be some resistance to the little piece of England that they had brought with them. Things that had been part of my everyday vocabulary in London were now alien to my ear. As they talked, I was surprised by how my body bristled at the mention of Pizza Express, Camden Market, lattes in Ladbroke Grove and spritzers in Soho. It wasn't that I hated London, but I felt as if I was not in Amdo to reflect on the merits of McDonald's or the joy of a trip to Harvey Nicks. There was a clarity here that had been difficult to find in a throbbing metropolis. There was space, air and light. Time was only dictated by the circumference of the seasons and by the nomads' daily tasks of eating, milking the yaks in the morning, tying them up at night, preparing and collecting the dung. The most alien idea imaginable was of standing on the tube with my head in someone's armpit, crushed, breathless and late. Here, there was no late. It was only late when it was dark, but you were never late for anything. Vagueness pervaded. Maybe I will see you tomorrow, maybe not. No goodbyes when you left someone, you just went. This had been one of the most difficult things for me, as a western-bred person, to understand. But now, apart from mentioning that it had been a good day today, I felt as if I had slipped into that timelessness. I didn't want reminding of my hectic world. I was just content to be.

The next day the sun returned and we picnicked by the Machu river. We played tag like children, threw lizards at the boys and jumped into sand dunes. That night we went to a karaoke bar. The nomads sat uncomfortably under the neon bulbs as Chinese pop music boomed through the amplifier. Ells and Chloё were swept off their feet by many an obliging town boy. Gondo sat shaking, a cigarette butt in each ear, to block out the noise. Tsedup pleaded with me to make his brother dance with me. I had some trouble persuading him, but eventually he yielded and Tsedup laughed as I guided Gondo awkwardly round the floor. He had never danced before.

Later, they turned off the music and the nomads sang. Gondo might not have been a great dancer, but he was a formidable singer. He stood at the microphone, one hand cupping his cheek, his eyes closed. Everything stopped when he opened his mouth. No one talked, laughed, moved. The love song was plaintive; a deep yodel in his throat that echoed beyond that small room and out to the sleeping town. When I glanced at Ells and Chloё, their eyes were wet with tears.

Before they left there was another bike crash. We were all washing our hair in the stream's small waterfall. By this time, Ells had converted the men into glossy-haired, moisturiser-coated examples of maledom. Our neighbours were popping over for a shave. She had even located a shower in Machu town and insisted that, after she left, I went at least once a week. That day, she and I had been racing on the motorbikes in the grassland. We were going pretty fast and were impressed with each other, until it came to stopping. As we neared the bank of the stream, I remembered to brake, but forgot how heavy the bike was and fell off. Ells accelerated and flew over the handlebars on to the edge of the bank. She landed head first, knickers up, on the stones. We rushed into the stream and pulled the bike off her legs. Remarkably she was unhurt, thanks to a strong survival instinct – she had put out her hands to protect her head. This really wasn't the place for a major head injury. When we realised she was all right, we burst out laughing then made Sanjay promise not to tell anyone about it. Tsedup's father would be angry with him if he knew we had been allowed on the bikes. He was very protective of our guests. But back in the tent, Sanjay, a typical six-year-old, wasted no time in telling both Annay and Shermo Donker. 'You big mouth!' I said to him. He giggled and ran outside as we chased him. Tsedup was duly scolded.

When the girls left, in a trail of dust, I cried. Our 'holiday' was over. A piece of England had gone and a new phase would begin for me. The long autumn and winter lay ahead. I would have to make the most of my female relationships here. Ells and Chloё had helped to reaffirm many of my good feelings for my new home, but now that they had left, I felt alone as I walked back into the town. They were part of my other life. They were the familiar, and even if that type of familiar had sometimes grated on me in this environment I knew that I would miss them.

I sat with the boys in a restaurant and we sipped tea quietly. 'Are you lonely?' they asked intuitively.

Tsedup, sensing my fragility, took me home on the bike. We made a detour on the way and, under the brilliant glare of the afternoon sun, we made love naked by a stream in the valley. Only the hawks watched us, spiralling lazily in the blue, as we lay together savouring the freedom, the breeze caressing our skin.

Eleven. Blind Date

It was the end of September. Or perhaps October. I could never be sure. I had stopped measuring the days. To begin with I had kept my diary, but as one day drifted inconspicuously into the next, if I missed an entry I lost count. It was a strange feeling. Soon I felt the ridiculousness of monitoring each day as the family looked at my Filofax with bewilderment. It seemed out of place. When they saw all the phone numbers in the address section they were amazed. So many friends, they said. What they didn't grasp was that half of the numbers were required for the exhausting practicalities of urban living: the Gas Board, job contacts, pizza delivery. My only concession to time-keeping was my watch, which I could not abandon.

Of course they knew what date it was, but it wasn't the same: their time is laid down according to the sun, moon and the passage of the planet Jupiter around the sun, which marks a sixty-year cycle. Each sixty-year period is broken into five blocks of twelve solar years. Each year is named after an animal and an element, so that year, 1998, was the Earth Tiger year. Every year the most important festival, Losar, which usually falls around February, marks the annual passage of the sun and is a time of New Year celebrations. Around that time, the astrologers of the Lhasa Menzikhang are responsible for calculating next year's calendar. The solar year is divided into twelve lunar months and the Tibetans schedule all of their festival days according to the phase of the moon during these months. Many days are auspicious and some inauspicious. But my knowledge of their calendar system put an amusing perspective on the Millennium fever in the West. It was all rather inconsequential here, as the Tibetans were already enjoying the year 2125.

Without any real sense of time measurement I was learning to be more responsive to the changing seasons. One morning I woke, stepped out of the tent and turned to pass alongside the stream gushing freshly from a night of sky-falling. The sight of the snow-capped mountains sent my spirit soaring. I stood still for a moment and breathed in the moist air, watching the yaks grazing silently on the cloudy prairie. The land was changing. What had been a lush, emerald carpet flushed full with wild summer flowers of blue, violet and yellow, with skylarks whistling up out of their ground nests, was now a rough ochre expanse of autumnal shades. Welts of black earth and mahogany dung-spread patched the umber grass where the yaks were tied at night. Dotted about the encampment, like miniature mountains, were sculptured mounds of dung, taller than a man, some composed entirely of dense faeces, caked dry and smooth like an upturned mushroom head. Others were carefully constructed from dung pancakes, dried in the sun and arranged like intricate, vertical parquet flooring. Downwind the cliffs cleaved by the Yellow river stood like black scarps, shearing into the mud current that churned round the bend. The air was chilly these days and given to gusting under the lip of the katsup, threatening to carry off the tent on some blustery nights. We would huddle inside, drinking tea from soot-sprayed bowls, while outside the tethered yaks hugged the ground for comfort, those exposed at the end of a line catching the worst of it. For me, the component conspicuously missing from this autumn experience was the chorus of shivering leaves on creaking boughs, since as we were above the tree-line, there were no trees.