Between 2008 and 2011 I spent a lot of time in Nepal, photographing people I met on mountain roads — road builders working stone by stone, families who became friends.

Then, on 25 April 2015, the earthquake. Around 9,000 people died.

In the aftermath I tried to contact my friends, acquaintances & also families I shared meals with and photographed . I managed to reach some but other who had no phones or lived in remote areas were unreachable.

Along with my close Nepali friend Nathan we have travelled the roads looking for those people. Sharing old printed images and following the path where locals told us we may find the families we searched for.

The route runs north out of Kathmandu and keeps going: Nuwakot, Dhunche, Rukum, and eventually to the villages that took the worst of it. Along the way there is a palace that stood for centuries and came down in a minute, now being rebuilt by hand, stone on stone. There are new concrete houses where old stone ones stood. There is a valley where a mountain came down and the village had to be rebuilt somewhere else entirely.

Nepal rebuilds with its hands. That's most of what I've photographed here, one way or another.

What I really feel we have built are friendships. United by images of a nation crafting, working and eating together under the shadow of the Tiger, the Himalayas that give and take.