The road to Leh - mountain high, river deep

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  Kaza, Spiti valley, India
Saturday, July 17, 2004

...in which the traveller spends nine days in buses and jeeps, bumping along the highest and most insanely scary roads in the world...

If you're reading this in the European summer, switch off the computer, race to the airport and get a flight to India, because the trip up the Kinnaur, Spiti, Lahaul and Ladakhi valleys in northern India is the most stunningly beautiful roadtrip imaginable, ever. For those of you still foolishly stuck to the computer screen reading this travelogue, I'll patiently explain why.

SARAHAN

If you're fast and don't mind exhausting bus rides, the trip between Shimla (Himachal Pradesh state) and Leh (Jammu & Kashmir), via the barren Kinnaur and Spiti valleys, can be done in about five days. I wanted to stay sane and see some of the sights along the way, so I spread it out over twice that time.

After emptying out the Punjabi Bank ATM in Shimla (there's no ATM or good exchange facility for the next 700km), I hopped on the early morning bus northeastwards, changing buses at Rampur and Jeori to reach Sarahan five hours later. The road went along mountainsides from 2000m up to a forested pass 2600m, then down into hot Rampur at 700m, then twisting steeply up to Sarahan at 2000m again. Along the way, I got a preview of what was to come - steep, deep valleys with roaring muddy rivers, treeless mountainsides, and narrow twisting roads with nothing much to prevent a bus tipping over the side. We passed huge construction sites where impressive hydro-electric facilities are being built, the main one being a 1200MW underground turbine hall (the largest underground one in the world) and the longest tunnel for transporting water under high pressure to the plant (28km). And all that in a zone with earthquakes!

Sarahan is a village high up a mountainside, consisting of a few streets with simple dhaba restaurants, a few shops... and a huge Hindu temple with two 20m-high towers, slightly similar to European castle towers, holding the deities. It's here that I met Avner and Elmor again, an Israeli couple who I bumped into on the Milam glacier trek. We promised to meet up again later on in Sangla.

The mountain people here are used to earthquakes, and have developed a construction technique with alternating layers of wood and stones to make their buildings safer - something I saw before in Bulgaria (of all places) where the only surviving medieval churches are those that have layers of slanted tiles between the bricks.

The elder of Sarahan's towers was earthquaked to lean more than the tower of Pisa long ago, and strangely enough a later earthquake shook it back into a more or less upright position again. The temple guesthouse, the best and cleanest place I have slept till now in India, and that at only 100Rs), had one major problem, and that was the religious zeal of the priests, who switched on a tape with the most vulgar religious Bollywood-style songs every morning at 05:30... waking up the whole valley by having it blare from large speakers mounted on the towers. It's only at moments like this you pray for a power cut... or an earthquake. They also entertained us in the evening with an hour of religious music, and even 100m away from the temple in a restaurant we had to raise our voices to understand each other at the table.

People here are paharis, mountain people, and they're noticeably friendlier than Indians further south - it's here that a women walking along the road confidently looked at me and said hello in English. Nowhere else in India will they do that. A few days later in a café in Recong Peo, I saw a table with six Kinnaur ladies chatting over a cup of tea; again something that is seldom seen in India. Women seem to be held in much higher esteem here (they certainly seem to be doing the most work - it's them you see dragging huge bundles of fodder or wood up steep paths), and they interact with men and strangers in a much more relaxed way than elsewhere.

The pahari's still use traditional clothing every day - seated in any bus you'll see more than half the locals wearing the typical grey Kinnauri hat with a felt green rim, which is the same for men and women. Women dress in beautifully woven woolen shawls and blankets, which must be very heavy.

This area - from Shimla north into the Spiti valley - is 'Kim territory'. Bombay-born Rudyard Kipling, who lived in Shimla for years, wrote this book in a palace in Bundi (see my Rajastan travelogue) in 1900. The adventures of this streetwise Irish-Indian urchin who turns into a spy for the British (playing his part in the 'Great Game' - the division of territories between the powers) and who follows a Buddhist lama into the mountains on a quest, is partly set here. On my father's recommendation I read the book, and it was great to recognise the descriptions of landscapes, people, mountains and routes as I travelled. India has changed a lot since Kim was written, but in many ways it's exactly the same.

THE HINDISTAN-TIBET ROUTE

From Sarahan I decided to follow part of the famous Hindistan-Tibet (HT) Route, the old trade route from the Indian plains to Western Tibet which was later used by English escaping the summer heat to reach Shimla and higher destinations (one English viceroy even preferred to spend his summers in Tibet, two weeks walk along the Route). The HT route is now mostly replaced by rail (from Kalka up to Shimla) or asphalted or jeepable roads (Shimla to Rampur) but in the higher mountains parts still survive as walking trails or quiet roads. Also surviving are the old resthouses, simple hostels placed a day's trip apart, and usually still in possession of guestbooks that list the names of traders that passed through a hundred years ago.

The HT stays hundreds of metres above the Sutlej river, usually staying at one height following the hillside contours to make travel with pony and mule caravans easier, and linking countless small villages and pine forests. I walked along a small stretch of the HT north of Sarahan, and then took a side trail heading towards the Baspa valley via a few remote villages. I planned to spend the night in Parvi, a small village in the lower Kinnaur valley, and one of the poorest in the region. Most villages make good money from their extensive orchards, selling apples to traders on the plains, but here the lower-caste inhabitants only had small orchards. Most families seemed to be subsistence farmers with extra income from the men who worked as drivers down in the valley.

Most of Parvi's houses are large wooden family homes with open balconies, housing extended families; several generations with up to 20-30 members (grandparents, their children, girls married into the family, their children, etc). With no money for stone-tiled roofs or corrugated iron, most roofs are made of messily arranged wooden planks that look like they landed there by accident. Nearly all the houses have beautifully carved porticos, and the few temples in the village are most beautifully carved of all. A new Sarahan-style tower was being built near the ancient wooden temple when I visited.

Descending from the train into the village, children came out to gape at me and try out their knowledge of English (not much), and faces of curious men and women appeared at the windows. Following the concrete paths that form the roads of most villages here, I came to what looked like the center and asked around for a place to sleep (I knew there was no guesthouse here). After some discussion, a young guy called Chand offered me a bed in his home, and provided me with the best bed of the house, tea and food, while refusing to accept any payment.

Chand was 26, recently married with one young boy. They lived alone in a small two-story house in the center of the village; unusually both their parents lived in other villages. He was a jeep driver in Wangtu, the town 4km away in the valley. I slept in the upstairs bedroom - a dark room entered via a balcony full of drying apricots.

(Villagers here traditionally let the apricots rot, and only care about the pits which hold very tasty nuts that are pressed for oil). The windows and ceiling were plastered with newspapers to keep the winter cold out - a page of an English-language paper above my head had a headline reading 'War in the Balkans seems unavoidable' - it was from 1993.

The downstairs kitchen/bedroom was furnished with only the bare essentials; some boxes with belongings, blankets, a stove, some photos. No chairs - the family lived sitting on the floor. The rooms was full of hubndreds of flies, landing on both people and food without anyone being particularly bothered by them. No running water or water either; they fetch buckets of water from the pipes along the footpaths and walk into the forest or fields in the morning to do their business.

The next morning, provided with a bag of apricot pits, I headed downhill towards Wangtu. I had heard from locals that the main path into the Baspa valley had been destroyed by a recent landslide (and indeed, the hillside north of the village had been transformed into a huge pile of rubble in the stream) so I decided to descend the 4km to the valley and use road transport straight to Sangla, my next destination.

An hour's scramble down steep paths and another wooden village brought me to the Sutlej river. It was at this point where in 1997 a huge flashflood from the Parvi valley, 100 times the usual amount of water taking along countless rocks and trees, caused the Sutlej to rise by several metres. Two important bridges were washed away, and the whole Kinnaur and Spiti valleys north of here were isolated from Rampur and Shimla. The Indian army came to the rescue, installing a temporary ferry that over a period of seven months transported 60,000 people and tons of apples across the river. In the meantime, the army built the world's longest suspension Bailey bridge crammed into an awkward angle between two sheer cliff walls - amazing to see. To avoid future isolation, the BRO (the Indian Border Roads Organisation - these guys can really build roads anywhere) is busy blasting backup roads into the rocks on banks where until now there was nothing.

BASPA VALLEY

After photographing the bridge (risky in India, as the military doesn't like people taking pictures of any 'sensitive' constructions) I hopped on a bus heading north, getting off an hour later at the Baspa valley junction and after a short wait boarding a shared jeep to Sangla. A very scary narrow road snakes up along the cliff side, climbing 1km up over 20km to reach Sangla, the largest village of the Baspa valley.

For most of the way, the road is just wide enough for one and a half vehicle, and then it's always great fun to have a big truck or bus coming from the other direction and insisting on passing in seemingly impossible places. Halfway up, all traffic stops at a small temple where a half-naked Hindu sadhu (holy man) comes out to give everyone a tilak (forehead-dot), a handful of prasad (white sugary sweets) and blessings for the rest of the journey. We needed it - just two weeks earlier a passenger bus with a dodgy driver had fallen off the cliff, killing about 41 people including two foreign tourists (they're still not sure about the amount of people as the river washed away nearly everything in the bus). I read this news in Shimla on a paper bag made from an old newspaper, it's a funny old world.

The road climbs up and up along the cliff, while the Baspa river meanders below; on the opposite mountainside some small villages with their terraces clinging to the hill. Sangla is situated on a flat stretch of the valley, where terminal glacial moraines (a huge pile of rubble pushed here by a glacier) once caused a lake to be formed. It's behind this wall of boulders that the Baspa crashes down in rapids towards the Sutlej. Sangla's upper village is the usual Indian mess of concrete garage-box-style shops and restaurants, hotels and bus stands. Just beyond and along the river however is the old wooden village, with a large wooden Buddhist temple (my first!) in the middle. I wandered between the wooden houses, greeting the friendly locals, and sat in the temple square for a while watching people walk around the main building spinning prayer wheels.

I met up with Avner and Elmor again, and the next day we took the noon bus to Chitkul, the highest village in the Baspa valley, at 3500m. The trip was beautiful - partly because the bus was so crowded that we had to sit on the roof, sometimes ducking to avoid low hanging wires, branches and rocks. It looks a bit like Switzerland, with huge mountains rising up on both sides with snow and craggy peaks at the tops, and with pine forests, small villages and fields below. Chitkul is a cold place well above the tree line, and the wooden village center is hidden in a slight slump in the valley, out of the wind. A few new guesthouses have been built nearby, a testimony to the growing importance of tourism in the valley (the owner told us that the number of visitors this year already was more than that of all last year). The villagers were celebrating the finishing of a new temple building that day, but all foreigners and women were kept out of the building and had to watch proceedings from a distance. It involved men carrying a stretcher with the local deity on it (a large object with silver faces on the side and a huge bunch of black woolly hairs streaming over it, like an out-of-control rasta hairdo) around the temple grounds to loud, clashing music. Also, a goat was beheaded and cooked up in the middle of the square. We walked a little up the valley, through fields of potatoes, beans and barley, and past a rock-strewn plateau with lots of wild flowers, that oddly enough reminded me more of Ireland than anything else (except for the towering mountains nearby then).

The next day, we took the 06:00 bus (absolutely crammed with loudly nattering Kinnauri-hat-wearing women on their way to the lower fields) to Rakcham, halfway back to Sangla. This village had burnt down the previous year - most of the old wooden part was destroyed. This is not uncommon with so many wooden buildings and the use of oil lamps. From Rakcham, we crossed the Baspa on a rickety suspension bridge and walked down the valley to Sangla, passing huge fields of boulders, pine forests, marshy patches with flowers, steep cliffs and a small village that had a new temple (the old one burnt down recently) with rather naughty erotic carvings. Easily the prettiest walk in India till now.

UPPER KINNAUR VALLEY

The next stop was Recong Peo, the strangely named capital town of the Kinnaur region, placed on the huillside 500m above the Sutlej. 'Peo' is only a stop on all traveller's itineraries because it's the place to obtain an Inner Line Permit (ILP) - the document foreigners need to pass within 40km of the Tibetan border. Until some years ago, no foreigers were allowed along the next stretch of road. Nowadays getting the permit is a formality (give three photos and 50Rs to a travel agent and it's arranged within hours) and restrictions on photography and sleeping within the area is relaxed.

Another reason to pass through Peo is to ascend another 600m by minibus to Kalpa, which is a scruffy wooden village along the HT route, surrounded by orchards and overlooking the massive Kinner Kailash mountain range just across the valley. Snow-clad peaks of well above 6km seem to be within reach, and every time you look up from your book on your guesthouse terrace you're surprised by the view. It's here that I met up again with Catherine, who I had met before in Rishikesh and who I convinced to travel up to Leh via Kinnaur and Spiti instead of the well-trodden Manali route.

Kalpa is so nice that we stayed for a few days, taking a day off to walk along the HT road which just west of Kalpa is a jeepable rack hacked out of a near-sheer cliff with the Sutlej river visible 900m (!) straight below. Nearby we also wandered to a Buddhist monastery with a big Buddha statue, and a few ancient Hindu temples that merge worship of pagan deities and elements of Hinduism and Buddhism - people here pray to whoever they feel like praying to.

Up till Peo, travel is easy as there are plenty of buses and shared jeeps shuttling up and down the valley. But from here on, true wilderness begins as vegetation gives up trying to cling to the barren slopes, and the road snakes up the remainder of the Sutlej valley, and turns left into the Spiti valley just before the Tibetan border.

NAKO

The scariest Indian bus ride is undoubtedly the 70Rs Peo to Nako trip. Even though we had a very skilled driver, hurtling down narrow roads that are hacked out of the cliffs with a river with boiling rapids below was really hair-raising. At least Elmor, Avner, Catherine and I could distract each other by talking about innocent, happy things, occasionally glancing down next to the bus into the abyss and commenting on how lucky we are to still be alive.

The state HPTCD buses look rickety on the outside, and everything rattles once underway, but they are amazingly good at bumping over impossible roads and overtaking big things on very narrow stretches. Looking straight down next to the bus, often you don't even see the edge of the road, just the slope going down... down... down. My theory is that the sturdiest parts of these buses must be the handrails in front of each seat - the passengers squeeze hard and hang on to these for dear life at every corner. Still, it's amazing how many locals always seem to fall asleep as soon as they board a bus. I can't imagine getting used to this ride.

From Peo the landscapes were awesome. Following the deep Sutlej gorge, every half hour we'd enter a wide part of the valley where there would be a village or small town clinging to the slopes above the gorge, and where smart irrigation allowed patches of green willow plantations or apple orchards to abruptly add colour to the brown-grey landscape. The road crossed the river on a few occasions, always over rickety suspension bridges. Once, all passengers had to disembark, as the bus was too heavy to cross fully loaded.

At Jispa (a collection of tin-and-wood dhabas and shops) the four of us had to show our permits to the policemen guarding the barrier to the Inner Line zone (less than 40km from Tibet), and we left the Sutlej just 10km from the Tibetan border, steeply heading up the side of the Spiti gorge. This is the only place where it's possible to cross the Great Himalayan Range into the rain-shadow area of the Tibetan plateau without crossing a pass. The road hairpins hundreds of metres up to the level of the villages on the higher slopes - the only place they can be sure their houses won't slip into the river anytime soon, and where glacier stream are the only reliable source of water for irrigating their orchards and fields. Travelling high above the Spiti, and surrounded by 6000m brown mountains spilling rubble down steep slopes into the river, we passed tiny hamlets dependent on their cool four-month summers to harvest and sell their apples and get ready for the next eight-month winter. These guys are true survivors.

After a 30-minute detour along the narrowest road ever down to the riverside village of Leo, we climbed back up to the central village of Wangtang (names slowly become less Hindu-ish here) and after a tea break (and an opportunity to score a bottle of Royal Stag whisky) further up to Nako. This high-altitude village is no more than a collection of scruffy but pretty mud-brick houses (with wood and roots stacked up on every roof), a surprisingly large area of deep green fields of barley and potatoes, and a small, scummy-looking lake. It sounds like a shit place, but it was heaven.

Wandering through the village, we were greeted (julley julley!) by everyone on the narrow paths. Between the houses were dozens of chortens (holy piles of stones, a bit like cairns) and mani (high, wide walls topped with inscribed stones) that always must be passed keeping them to your right. The largest mani wall had prayer wheels (which you give a spin as you pass, automatically spreading prayers to the heavens) set into its side. Apart from the usual copper and tin ones this one had wheels made of cloth and one very old one made of leather. Everywhere, small enclosures had been constructed with wobbly stone walls, where the cattle, sheep, goats and donkeys were kept safe at night. The squat red mud buildings of the Buddhist temple complex are supposed to hold some beautiful 1000-year-old wall paintings, but it was all locked up.

Walking past the lake, we climbed up a path leading to the next village; we stopped at the pass a few hundred metres above Nako to catch our breaths, admire the colourful prayer flags flapping in the wind, and take in the clear views of the many peaks (half a dozen 6000m+ mountains around Nako have yet to be climbed for the first time...). We could really feel the height here - the sun was mercilessly bright and hot, while the air was thin, cool and very dry. You could feel yourself dehydrating quickly. Lips, skin and head really need protection up here.

SPITI VALLEY

The trip further up the valley was somewhat of an ordeal, in a few ways. Firstly, a huge landslide had taken away about 40 metres of the main road a week before our arrival. The usually wonderful BRO (Border Roads Organisation) was having trouble repairing the gap. (In Nako we heard them blasting a new road high above the landslide with dynamite at night). The bus stopped before the affected area, and the ten passengers had to walk across to a waiting bus 1km further along the road - easier said than done. This is a known trouble spot, and a cable car had been installed long ago to shuttle baggage and motorbikes across the gap. Unfortunately, the guy operating the system was absent, so we had to walk across with bags and all.

Approaching the glacial stream that was responsible for all this mess, we heard a crack and rumble high above, and had to back up quickly to let some unsettlingly large rocks bounce down over the road into the gorge. The man walking in front of us had to run for shelter under a small cliff. Making a run for it when all seemed settled (Elmor still being hit by a tiny rock, leaving a nasty bruise), the river halfway the landslide posed the next problem - it was pretty wild and could not just be jumped over. Commando-style, we tossed the bags over one by one, and somehow got across, wet, muddy and dusty, but unscathed and jubilant. The bus, parked 500m further on, posed the third problem. It had decided to break down. A smart jeep driver was at hand to drive everyone to Tabo, the next town. Here, I broke down.

Avner, using the sharpest of his Israeli bargaining skills, was trying to get the price down from 100Rs to a more acceptable 60 or 70Rs. He must have insulted the driver, who drove off with all the locals, leaving us behind with the smirking dhaba owner, bus driver and ticket collector, who were settling down for an nice day of doing nothing at all. It was 7 in the morning, I was soaked up to my knees after helping everyone across the river, and now we were still within sight of Nako, stuck on a road notable for its absence of traffic. The next bus was to arrive in eight hours. The other three all looked pretty happy with the situation and settled down with tea and books. I decided to sulk heavily and kick stones down the mountain, feeling extremely angry with myself for not just getting on the damn jeep and paying the 30Rs extra.

The arrival of a few army trucks lightened my foul mood, and when the moustached commander came up for a chat with the funny stranded foreigners (asking me in terrible English how easily he could get a job in Holland) I couldn't help but give up being pig-headed. A well-timed pat on the head and another cup of chai also lightened my mood. As always in funny countries like India, rescue came soon enough in the form of three shining white jeeps that spilled out a group of Austrians heading down the valley from Leh - they had to walk across to change cars here, and the jeeps were returning empty. Saved! After much bargaining we agreed to pay 10,000Rs to take us up to Leh in five days, stopping off at beauty spots along the way (though local taxi union rules forced us to use local transport for off-road sights in Spiti).

The town of Tabo, on the wide Spiti valley floor and surrounded by high peaks, is one of the most important Buddhist gompas (monasteries) around. The complex is just a collection of squat, sand-coloured mud buildings; the miracles lie inside. Constructed over 1000 years ago and painted a few centuries ago by artists from Kashmir (the Buddhists didn't have the skills to do it themselves at the time), it holds beautiful prayer halls, dark except for the shafts of bright sunlight pouring from skylights. The main room had dozens of life-size statues of Buddhist deities suspended in front of the painted walls. Tacky budget tourism is starting to reach Tabo, unfortunately, and we didn't know how fast to leave the Zion Café (sic) that was run by a Spitian-turned-fake-rastafarian.

Just up the valley, the Spiti River no longer is a wild rapid carving out a gorge, but stretches leisurely across a kilometer-wide gravel-filled river bed in dozens of intertwining arms. It's here that we took a local car up the side of the valley to reach Dhankar monastery, one of the most spectacular in the Buddhist world. Built on an cliff jutting out into the valley 600m above the river, the monks now live in a new building nearby but still use the old complex for prayers. We watched a young monk make delicate decorative flowers for in the temple from butter and natural dyes, and were offered a cup of tea - thankfully not gur-gur (Tibetan-style salt butter tea). We sat in the sun on the roof overlooking the stunning valley, over the green monastery fields, to where the Pin and Spiti rivers locked their braids together, shimmering in the setting sun.

Spending the night in Spiti's main town, Kaza (internet! bananas! civilization!), the next morning we drove up a side road to Kibber, at 4200m one of the world's highest villages linked by road. In a landscape of rolling pastures and fields bounded by a sheer gorge and high peaks, this 40-house-and-one-gompa village was beautiful to stroll through. On the outskirts of the village I found a fossil; a shell pushed upwards quite a bit since this was the seabed. The recent opening of a handful of guesthouses filled with young backpackers undoubtedly will soon have an effect on village life, even though the tourist season only lasts four months.

Down towards Kaza, we stopped at Key monastery, beautifully perched high on a rock on the valley floor. This is where the current cuddly Dalai Lama probably will retire. We got a tour of the prayer halls, less impressive than Tabo, and observed dozens of very young (10 years old?) bald monks eat their lunch of stewed vegetables and meat. Key is one of the most important Buddhist learning centers around, with over 300 lamas (monks).

CHANDRATAL LAKE & LAHAUL

The night was spent 70km further upstream in Losar (4000m), the last village of the Spiti valley. Very early the next day we left to cross the first high pass, out of Spiti, into the dramatic upper Lahaul valley. Unfortunately, clouds made the pass look more like a rough misty field in Wales. After hairpinning down to the Lahaul river, we forced our unwilling driver to turn off the main road onto a rough new 4WD road leading 12km up the incredible rubble-strewn glacial valley to get to Chandra (meaning silver, or moon) Lake. We arrived before the sun had had a chance to heat up the air and cause ripples on the surface, and the sight of high peaks mirrored in the incredibly azure blue water was enough to silence us all.

We were lucky, as after a short peek at the peaks, the clouds closed in, and just an hour down the valley the rain started to pelt down. In a way the weather was fitting - the landscape is particularly forbidding here, with no vegetation at all, huge piles of glacial boulders all over the place, and bleak black-grey mountains rearing up from the typical U-shaped glacier-valley floor. Tolkien's descriptions of Mordor come to mind. Glaciers emerging from one of the biggest ice-fields outside the poles were visible all along the high ridges, but the most magnificent one spilled more than 1000m down a mountain right to the valley floor. At one of the few dhaba truckstops in the valley we made our grumbling driver take along two Israeli girls who were stuck in a particularly miserable dhaba settlement. The road got even worse, and we had to ford some deep glacial streams (only possible in the mornings when the sun hasn't caused too much melt), bouncing over big rocks that scraped the bottom of the jeep.

THE MANALI-LEH ROAD

At Gramphoo the clouds parted and we joined the main road that came from across the pass, from the tourist-haven of Manali - the route that the majority of travellers to Leh take. Villages with orchards, trees and fields reappeared, though they looked miserable, in an Albanian way, compared to the brightly painted Spiti villages. The Manali-Leh road was easy compared to some of the roads we took in Kinnaur and Spiti, and we all relaxed to enjoy the views. Stopping for sleep at the town of Keylong (at 3600m, the first place with international menus since leaving Shimla) and the tent-settlement of Pang (4600m), we crossed three high passes (4800m, 5000m and the second highest in the world at 5200m) before arriving in the Ladakh valley. Descending though an amazing purple gorge, we visited the large Hemis, Thikse and Shey gompas (seeing elderly tourists for the first time in weeks, brought here via the world's highest commercial airport) before arriving in Leh.

Next up: Ladakhi culture, a 5100m pass trek, the remote Nubra valley, more gompas, and lots of fresh lemon cake.

Currently reading: 1) Kim, Rudyard Kipling. Excellent spy-story-cum-road-trip-quest. 2) The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown. Great Holy Grail thriller/whodunnit, albeit written a bit too simple. I'm happy to have cracked some of the riddles though.

Stomach status: Holding steady, despite many long-suffering travellers around me.

Word Of The Day: Julley! (joo-lay; Ladakhi/Tibetan for hello)

Signs Of The Day:

"This is the second highest road pass in the world - incredible, isn't it?" (Tangen La pass, Jammu & Kashmir)

"I love you darling, but not so fast"; "Safety today - safe tea tomorrow" (roadside speed warnings, Jammu & Kashmir)