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We didn't hold up much hope of a Himalayan panorama from Poon Hill at sunrise when we were woken in the wee small hours by the heavy rain. Sure enough, when the alarm went off at 4ish we were still sat in a cloud. Devendra took one look at this and shook his head - we needed very little persuasion to crawl back into bed for a couple of hours before breakfast.

We had a fairly leisurely morning and discussed our options in terms of where we'd aim to reach by the end of the day. Devendra seemed to think we'd struggle to make it all the way to the end of the circuit as the descent is so steep (around 1.8km down more stone steps). So we looked at which villages we might make a final stop in.

Once we got going we found it was easier to go down quickly than lowering yourself down every step gently. This took a lot of concentration and we both nearly tripped once or twice and had to remind ourselves not to day dream. When we weren't having to stare at our feet (getting sore necks from looking straight down) we enjoyed the beautiful surroundings; more lush rhododendron forests which reminded us of the path between Tharapati and Melamchigaon. The stream we were following was crystal clear and formed several fantastic waterfalls amongst the trees.

We got to our intended lunch stop at Ulleri (2010m) before 11am, so decided to keep going to Hile which we could see 500m almost vertically below us. This is where we'd talked about stopping for the night, and it was down something like 4000 stone steps which turned our legs to jelly. We got there at a respectable time for lunch though, and started to think it would be frustrating to stop this close to the end of the circuit when we had a lot of the day left, and could still (almost) walk okay.

With the end in sight, we were quicker and more purposeful than we've sometimes been after lunch. We hadn't anticipated that these would be our last few hours on the trek, and suddenly our surroundings seemed all the more beautiful - perhaps this was partly sentimentality. The stream had widened to a become a small river, but was still very clear with inviting pools of green begging Heather to go for a paddle.

We reached the last checkpost around 3pm and were soon on a bus waiting to get underway on the fairly short journey back to Pokhara. It was not long before Heather was saying she'd prefer to get off and walk - bus travel here can be quite frustrating. On the way back we passed hundreds of ill-fated goats being sold for the upcoming Dasain festival.

We were back at our hotel with a cold beer by about 6. We were very sad to say goodbye to Devendra, who has looked after us now for 6 weeks or so on and off and has been great company as well as a brilliant host and guide.

We headed out to a favourite restaurant round the corner for a celebratory meal, and were pleasantly surprised to bump into the rest of the group of trekkers we'd been with round most of the circuit. It was their last night before moving on, so we'd have missed them had we not finished a day earlier than we'd been thinking we would. We enjoyed an evening of indulgence and recounting trekking tales.

We're pleased to have made it round over 210km of the circuit on two feet in only 15 days carrying all our own gear. This is a greater physical challenge than either of us have ever faced before, but we found it very rewarding.

Pizza and a glass of red wine for dinner, which was as good as we'd fantasised it would be for the past two weeks.

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