Ladakh High Passes Road Trip

The Delhi flight banks over the Zanskar range and lands on the Indus plain at 3,500 metres. The rest of the day is deliberately empty: hotel, litres of water, no alcohol, no exertion. If you feel steady by late afternoon, walk the ten minutes up to Shanti Stupa for the view across Leh Palace to the Stok range, and eat a bowl of thukpa on Main Bazaar Road.

Out at six for Thiksey, nineteen kilometres down the Indus, to sit through dawn prayers as conch and long dungchen horns start the chanting, then see the fifteen-metre Maitreya installed in 1970. Continue to Shey's copper-gilt Shakyamuni and to Hemis, the largest monastery in Ladakh, refounded in 1672. Back in Leh, the Central Asian Museum in the old town explains the caravan routes to Yarkand and Kashgar.

With permits checked, you climb thirty-nine kilometres of switchbacks to Khardung La at 5,359 metres, stopping only briefly because the air is thin, then drop into the Shyok valley. Diskit monastery's thirty-two-metre Maitreya, consecrated in 2010, looks north down the river. Afternoon on the Hunder dunes among the double-humped Bactrian camels, and a night in Hunder village among sea buckthorn and apricot trees.

Drive eighty-five kilometres northwest along the Shyok to Turtuk, about three hours, the largest of the Balti villages that came to India in 1971. Walk the Farol and Youl quarters, past cold larders cut into rock, the old house of the Yagbo family, and orchards that grow the best apricots in Ladakh. Balti buckwheat bread and namkeen chai for lunch, then back to Hunder by evening.

A rough and spectacular 160 kilometres, six to seven hours, following the Shyok southeast through Agham and Shyok village to Durbuk and Tangtse. The road is riverbed in places and shuts after heavy melt, so we keep a Chang La alternative in reserve. You reach Pangong Tso at Spangmik in the afternoon, 4,225 metres, and watch the water move from turquoise to indigo to gunmetal. Nights here are cold even in July.

Sunrise on the water, then a long day south through Man and Merak, past the Rezang La war memorial near Chushul, over Tsaga La and down to the Indus at Mahe. Roughly 230 kilometres and eight hours across a plateau where you may see kiang, the Tibetan wild ass, and black-necked cranes on the marshes. Korzok village on Tso Moriri, 4,522 metres, is among the highest permanent settlements anywhere.

Walk the shoreline at Korzok at first light, when bar-headed geese are on the water and the monastery gong carries across the village. Then west past Tso Kar, the white salt lake, onto the Leh-Manali highway and over Taglang La at 5,328 metres, dropping through Rumtse and Upshi to Leh. About 220 kilometres and seven hours. A hot shower and a proper dinner in Leh feel earned.

Flights out of Leh all leave in the morning, before the valley winds pick up. If yours is late enough, there is time for the nine-storey Leh Palace built around 1600, the restored alleys and mosque of the old town below it, and the pashmina cooperatives that work Changthangi wool from the plateau you just crossed. Otherwise it is an early transfer and a last look at the Indus.