Nepal has always been a meeting point. Nepal has Mongoloid (Tibet) and Caucasoid (India) influences. It has always played a major role in the trade between India and China. The trails that mountaineers have made famous have been used for several centuries. Mountaineers who wanted to climb the Himalaya summits discovered them in 1960’s, and since then the number of foreign trekkers has been increasing steadily (more than 80,000 trekking permits are issued every year).