Ladakh

• Khardung La descent
• 14:50
• 12°C, thin sun

The road down from Khardung La, compressed to a ribbon by the long lens. Everything up here is the same three colours - rust, dust, tarmac - until you notice the trucks and realise the scale.

• Hunder dunes
• 18:05
• 14°C, alpenglow

Double-humped Bactrians walking the dunes in the last light - descendants of the Silk Road caravans that used to pass this exact valley. The alpenglow lasted eleven minutes and they walked through all of it.

• Shyok valley, road to Turtuk
• 09:55
• 15°C, clear

Morning on the road west, where the valley narrows and goes suddenly green. Shot on the phone out of the window because stopping felt like breaking something.

• Shyok valley
• 18:19
• 13°C, dusk

Back east with the long lens out the whole way. One cloud caught the last of it and held over a single tree, and I shot it wide because there was nothing to add.

• Shyok valley
• 18:30
• 12°C, dusk

The Shyok does its best work at the very end of the day, when the valley goes to cutouts and one band of orange holds the line between the ridges.

• Pangong Tso
• 17:58
• 8°C, wind

You come over the last rise and the blue is wrong - too saturated, too big, parked at 4,200 metres like it has nowhere else to be. The wind owns the shore. Everyone goes quiet for a minute; then everyone takes the same photograph.