his is the second highest motorable pass in the world. The road is only open during the summer months, but itÆs still prone to closure when bad weather hits and bridges and chunks of road are routinely washed away. The bad weather that kept me in Leh for five extra days killed hundreds of devotees on a pilgrimage to the Amarnath Cave in Kashmir.

y vehicle for the two-day trip south from Ladakh to Himachal Pradesh was a grumbling thirty-seater minibus, whose seats reclined if as much as sneezed upon. As we moved from the dry, lunar plains of Ladakh into the guts of the Himalaya, the drive became more grab-the-mountain than gobble-the-miles.

ncoming traffic - usually ungainly trucks - meant reversing to the last hairpin bend and backing into the rock wall on the inside of the road, or poking the busÆs rear end over the drop. Shepherds pushed their flocks through the valleys and road gangs boiled tar on the side of the road, but there were no settlements apart from the occasional cluster of chai stalls at passport checkpoints.