You've got to get used to India. You can read about it all you want and glean information from friends who've been there, you can research it until you feel you know it like an old friend, you can compile your lists of places to go and things to see, make notes of potential scams [...]
So here's the thing about Leh; it's remote as fuck. Seriously. There was no Internet for three days when we rocked up and the town often loses connectivity. Apparently they have one line that comes in from Srinagar and if the weather is bad and the line goes down, boom, no Internet, and the only [...]
Khardung La. At 5602 metres above sea level the locals would have you believe it's the highest motorable road in the known universe and will sell you appropriately branded t-shirts that'll shrink if they so much as come within two metres of a washing machine and dye everything you own a kind of blueish colour. [...]
Roads in this region and all the way down to Manali are maintained by the Border Roads Organisation, or BRO for short. BRO loves you and doesn't want to see you career off a dodgy road to your untimely and no doubt messy death. Most of the roads are pretty shit around here, probably because [...]
One last thing you absolutely have to do whilst you're in Spiti Valley is check out Kee, or Ki, or Key, or Kye, take your pick and delete as appropriate, Gompa which has got to be the single most photogenic gompa I have ever put in my eyeholes. There are buses from Kaza but then [...]
Unless you have a penchant for towns that begin with T, you visit Tabo for the gompa, established in 996AD. It's the oldest continuously functioning Buddhist monument in India and it also happens to run the Millennium Monastery Guesthouse where you can stay in a dorm room for pretty bloody cheap, so that's where we [...]
I don't remember much of the walk to Dhankar, I just know it involved a lot of pain and with no McDonald's within hundreds of miles to provide an appropriate hangover cure, doom was imminent, at least for my liver and at least one of my kidneys. We were joined for the first part of [...]
We were assured that it was downhill all the way from Demul to Lalung so we enjoyed our breakfast of eggs and bread, packed our lunch of Tibetan bread and jam into our bags and headed on our way. So it turns out that Spitians consider terrain to be down when there's more down than [...]
This morning we were provided with a breakfast of egg and bread, and a packed lunch of Tibetan bread and jam to take on our walk to Demul, the next village. Right. Our first real walk on this trek. We were advised to take the "cow road" until we got to what passes as a [...]
So you're meant to start at Kibber or Langza for the Spiti Valley Homestay Trek, that's the classic route, but apparently that first leg from either of those two villages to the village of Komic is an absolute bitch of a walk, up a massive, relentless, unforgiving hill at altitude. Remember, even Kaza is around [...]
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