Manali - Leh Highway

The highway between Manali and Leh is famously bad - a 20 hour slog on pavement that is almost impossible to maintain given the punishing elements. It's closed a good part of the year for this reason. The first three hours out of Manali going over the first pass lived up to the hype. The road was so full of potholes and big stones that it felt like an amusement park ride gone terribly wrong. Another 17 hours of that would have been pretty tough, but thankfully after we got over the pass the road improved considerably. I mean, it was still 20 hours in a jeep, but other than that...



And the scenery was truly unbelievable - some of the best I have seen on my entire trip. My pictures unfortunately don't do it justice as I missed some of the fantastic parts: huge fields of fairy chimneys carved out of the rock, and enormous ornate "palaces" that looked man-made but were far too large, being slowly revealed by sand eroding away from the stronger rock underneath. The colors of the different minerals and the scrub grass made mountain-sized designs that followed the melting paths of the snow. On other hills, different sedimentary layers had been pushed around by geographic forces, and forced into wave or even swirl patterns. This landscape was similar to the Mustang area of Nepal or the Tibetan Plateau, but with more beauty and diversity.



For most of the way, there were no villages at all to speak of. We stopped for meals in these little tent restaurants that had been set up on the side of the road - if you asked them where the bathroom was they just giggled and pointed to the hillside. The trip went by fine (a bit dusty perhaps - that swine flue mask the Tibetan lady gave me came in handy) until about the last hour, when some food in my stomach felt like it was planning to make an exit in any number of directions. Luckily right then a nice Belgian guy traded me his super comfy seat, and as I started to doze off my symptoms almost completely disappeared. Proving once again that most things are just in my head...