Manali to Leh road by Jeep

The Manali-Leh road is not just any other road. Connecting Himachal Pradesh with Jammu-and-Kashmir (two Indian states), this Himalayan road trip crosses over the Himalayas as the second highest motorable road in the world, reaching some 5000 meter altitude in the process! It's a pretty fantastic experience driving from Manali to Leh (or from Leh to Manali) on this road. We rented a jeep with a driver to take us, but there's also buses and people crossing over on motorbikes. But its a harrowing ride at times. The only reason the Manali-Leh road exists in the first place is that it provides a route for the Indian Army to mobilize on the border to Pakistan and China. Well, after I got back, I wrote the following little story which will fill you in on the road conditions:

Manali to Leh (Himachal Pradesh to Ladakh)

I'd been staying in this cheap hotel-room in Manali over the weekend, just decompressing and catching up on some reading after a hectic couple of weeks in Varanasi and Delhi, preceded by a hectic couple of months in Kathmandu. This was the first time in three months that I was in a place where nobody knew my name, and I didn't know anybody. On my own. A complete unknown. With no direction home...

Incense sticks had been burning on the little porch, while I’d been sitting there, breathing the fresh country air, quietly, without the constant hustle and bustle of the city. Now was a time for a change of pace. It was - finally - time to hit the mountains. This was gonna be the crown of my Indian adventure, I just knew. Taj Mahal would have to wait. So on the early Monday morning on the 25th day of August, I picked up my backpack and headed out in the starlit night, down to the rendez-vous point with the jeep that was going to take me up to Leh. Five other guys, 2 Aussies, 2 English and a citizen of the United States, were pretty much all packed up and ready to go when I got there, so I threw my backpack up on the top of the roof of the jeep, and a little after 2 o'clock we set out on what we expected to be a 20-hour drive north, up to one of the most remote outstations of civilization.

Given the early hour of the day, everybody was quiet as we rolled out of town and onto the lonesome Manali-Leh road, the second highest motorable road in the world. But we hadn't driven more than five minutes before we hit upon the first major obstacle. A fuel-truck was lying across the road and blocking off all traffic up and down, except for pedestrians. Nothing to do except to wait for somebody to wake up somebody to make a decision on what to do, to get out the heavy machinery and clear the road...So 6 hours later, the truck was pushed aside and the hundreds of vehicles now gathered here, slowly re-commenced their raucous flow. Our driver, a Punjabi fellow that didn't speak much English, now put the pedal to the metal and raced up the winding little mountain road, taking over every bus, truck, jeep and tractor he could, driving sometimes with two wheels on the edge of the abyss, trying desperately to make up for the lost time, ignoring every one of the corny, creative and convoluted roadsigns, cautioning drivers to slow down: 'I want you Darling, but not so fast', 'Heaven, Hell or Mother Earth, the choice is yours' and 'Go slow friend, on my bend' is some of the more and less profound messages you see. We reached the Rohtang La Pass a couple of hours later, the driver had a curry in a little mountain shag restaurant owned by some relatives of his, and after that, he was more shanti shanti. What is a Punjabi, without his curry?

Proceeding downhill through the green, cliff-dotted landscape, we went through the villages of Khoksar, Sissu and took a right in Tandi. Road conditions had been pretty good so far, but now that we had turned north-east, conditions deteriorated a bit. Shortly before noon, we saw a cloud of dust rising up ahead on the road and surely enough, when we got there, a good chunk of the mountain had decided to crash down on the road in front of us, but the rock was so fragile that it had shattered into hundreds of medium-sized stones, stones we could all handle manually and chuck out over the side of the road, down on the valley floor far below, and that way we cleared the road in less than ten minutes.

Picking up the trail, we drove up through the villages of Keylong, Darcha and Zing-Zingbar towards the Baralacha La, while watching the greenery thin out and the dusty, but breath-taking moon-landscape of the Western Himalayas approaching. Big rocks were lying everywhere, up and down the hill-sides and on the road, making us bounce up and down in our seats inside the jeep. And finally, we passed the Baralacha La on top of the Himalayan ridge. Around us, mountain-tops were covered in snow and glaciers on their northern sides, one glacier had collapsed and caused a huge avalanche all the way down pass the former road, which had been washed away, bulldozers now being busy carving out a new road through the rock-, dust- and ice-debris. The sun was getting low in the sky as we descended down to the vast plains of Sarchu, where we passed the tent-camp and followed the canyon-ridge all the way to the foot of the Zanskar Range.

Sarchu plains, Manali to Leh road

As the sun was setting in the west, we started to rise up along the southern side of the mountain, thereby expanding our horizon, prolonging the sunset and catching every last ray of the sun. As we reached the 5000 meter Lunga-lacha La around dusk, the evening winds were blowing, and up in this altitude, it means that it's getting cold. So without further ado, we swiftly moved on, but with a peculiar thought about having stood on a piece of road that is higher than any point in Europe or the USA or much of the rest of the world.

Looking back as we climbed up towards the Lunga-lacha La

After the pass, we spent the next three hours in a slow descent, caught in a virtual Himalayan traffic jam. It was dark now, and the discomfort was becoming more and more annoying for every turn we took. The day-long bumpy ride, the static sitting position, the strangulating exhaust-fumes and smell of burned motor-oil from the trucks struggling with the steep road and my mild symptoms of altitude sickness were all putting my meditation-skills on a strenuous test. So I was relieved when, around 9 o'clock, we reached a little nomadic teepee encampment and decided to stop there for the night.

So we stepped out of the jeep and into total darkness and gazed up upon the clear, moon-less night sky and all the stars and the Milky-way and half of the Universe. Wow! Never did I realize that there were so many stars. But the air was cold, so we took shelter in one of the teepees and the old ladies there, took care of us like our mothers, gave us warm food and chai and tugged us in under stacks of heavy blankets and I had a wonderful sleep in all my clothes and woke up the next morning a little before sunrise, ready to face the world and the mountains and the passes and whatever and whatnot.

So somewhere along the road, probably Monday evening, we must have crossed the border into the badlands of Jammu and Kashmir where the mighty Taglang La was awaiting us with all of it's 5325 meters, the highest point of our route. Snowcapped peaks could be seen near and far, where the rugged, sand-colored mountain walls weren't blocking our view. The road was clear and our journey this morning went smooth, as we passed the Tanglang La and descended into the Indus Valley and the vast desert plains with only sporadic isles of vegetation and around noon, we reached the town of Leh.

Juley Leh!
The multi-purpose word that means welcome and hello and goodbye and please and thank you and you're welcome and all other common pleasantries you can think of. You hear it all the time. During the short, 4-month season, Leh is a busy little town filled with smart-looking tourists. Everybody here is fit and up to something big. We're all doing extreme sports and wearing 'The North Face'-jackets, 'Goretex'-hiking boots and trendy glacier-style sunglasses. Or hemp-clothes with Tibetan patterns, bandanas and blankets in all sorts of orange and Dalai Lama-red colors. Here, we all look like a damn fine bunch of people!

On Main Bazar in Leh

I spent a good week based in the homely Oriental Guest House, getting acclimatized, seeing the sights, getting a bit in shape and arranging my trek. I decided to do an 8-day trek in the Markha Valley.

(Read about that experiences in this blog post: The Markha Valley Trek in Ladakh)

When I got back to Leh, I spent another good week, reading books and playing cards and generally doing as little as I possibly could. The town had gotten quieter while we'd been away and on the 20th of September, Stefan and I took the bus back to Manali, passing through the same landscape once again, but it was now markedly more snow-covered. The festival was over and in 10 days the road will be closed along with most of the shops and restaurants in Leh, the whole region going back into it's eight month of winter hibernation, living with the nature, repeating the endless cycle of the changing of the seasons.

Crossing the lonely Zanskar Mountains near Pang, 4600m altitude, Leh-Manali Highway, Ladakh, India. (Photographic Poster Print by Tony Waltham, 16x12 inch.)

Buy this photo as a 12x16 inch poster!