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 [...]
I didn't really know what to expect from Kaza, the main town in the remote Spiti Valley, but I certainly wasn't expecting super fast Internet access and electricity 24/7, so I hung back in Manali an extra day just to chill out and check out of real life for a several hours whilst compulsively scrolling [...]
So apparently, Shiva and Parvati were wandering around and happened upon present day Manikaran and because it was beautiful they decided to just chill there for eleven hundred years or so. Shiva was meditating and more than likely enjoying the charas of the region, as Parvati bathed in the water. Anyway, she lost her jewelled [...]
Our hike down from Khirganga finally finished at Barshani where there are dhabas so you can rapidly replace all those calories you just burnt before your body thinks you're attempting something healthy and goes into shock. Our next stop was going to be Tosh which is up a hill. Quelle fucking surprise. You can walk [...]
On account of the fact we were already in Kalga we started the hike up to Khirganga from here, and it wasn't even raining. We headed off as soon as we could to take full advantage of the lack of wet stuff falling from the sky. There are two routes up which eventually converge and [...]
We'd been assured that the path down to Kasol was easy, "You just go down down," and it was more used than the Malana to Rashol pass and a guide most definitely wouldn't be needed. We set off in the morning and it was indeed down down. It's slightly less simple than anticipated on account [...]
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