Journey 02 · India
The Manali–Leh Road
Five passes out of my own valley
Published 5 Sept 2025 · Travelled 2–15 Aug 2025
- 8 moments
- 14 days
- 464 km
- Summer
- India
- 24-70mm at 40mm · f/9 · 1/500 · ISO 100
- 32.9000° N, 77.6000° E
- Sarchu
- 11:20
- 9°C, thin cloud, hard sun
Two days out of Manali and the road stops being a road and becomes an agreement between you and the Border Roads Organisation. Their signs are famously strange. This one is about life and death and it is bolted to a post in the middle of absolutely nothing, which is either poetry or bureaucracy.
- 24-70mm at 70mm · f/8 · 1/1000 · ISO 100
- 33.2500° N, 77.7000° E
- More Plains
- 14:05
- 12°C, dust haze
Forty kilometres of almost-flat at 4,700 m, and an army convoy going the other way. You wait, you eat the dust, and then twenty minutes after they are gone the dust is still up and the light through it is the best light of the day. Nobody plans this. You just have to be there when it happens.
- 24-70mm at 55mm · f/8 · 1/250 · ISO 64
- 34.1642° N, 77.5848° E
- Above Leh
- 18:50
- 18°C, clear
The Stok range gets the last of the sun about twenty minutes after the town has lost it, and for those twenty minutes the whole valley is two different pictures stacked on top of each other. I walked up above the palace with the tripod and a man selling apricots followed me for a while to explain the view.
- 24-70mm at 35mm · f/8 · 1/320 · ISO 100
- 34.0553° N, 77.6672° E
- 24-70mm at 35mm · f/8 · 1/320 · ISO 100
- 34.0553° N, 77.6672° E
- Thiksey Gompa
- 08:30
- 14°C, clear, cold in shade
The gompa stacks up its hill in the way every photograph of it has taught you to expect, so I shot that and then went looking for something that was not that. This one had been sent to sweep a courtyard and had stopped to find out how much the camera cost. I told him. He seemed to think it was a poor decision.
Overheard · Khardung La · 10:40
"Don't run." — "I'm not running." — "You are walking like running. Same thing here. Walk like an old man and you go home." I walked like an old man for the rest of the trip and had no more headaches.
- 24-70mm at 70mm · f/8 · 1/800 · ISO 100
- 34.5760° N, 77.4880° E
- Hunder, Nubra Valley
- 17:20
- 21°C, clear, wind off the dunes
There are Bactrian camels in the Nubra dunes, left over from Silk Road caravans, and the first sight of one against snow is genuinely disorienting. It was standing entirely alone about two hundred metres from the tourist ride and appeared to be having a better day than the ones with saddles.
- 24-70mm at 24mm · f/11 · 1/500 · ISO 64
- 33.7692° N, 78.6431° E
- Spangmik, Pangong Tso
- 09:15
- 11°C, clear, hard light
Everyone photographs this lake and almost everyone photographs it the same way. I spent a morning trying to find a reason not to, gave up, and used the flags on the shore as the reason instead. The colour is not exaggerated. The colour is the problem — nobody believes the file.
- Shanti Stupa, Leh
- 19:05
- 15°C, clear, cooling fast
- Last frame
Back in Leh, four days before I would be back in Manali, standing under a white dome with the flags going and the whole valley below it. I had come from home and I was going home, and in between I had been somewhere that looks like nowhere else in the country.
- 24-70mm at 28mm · f/5.6 · 1/125 · ISO 200
- 34.1620° N, 77.5730° E
The route
8 stops
Journey completed
Fourteen days, eight stories
- Distance walked
- 26 km
- Frames exposed
- 1620
- Passes over 4,800 m
- 5
- Highest night slept
- 4,290 m
- Headache days
- 2
- Favourite moment
- The dust settling on the More Plains after the convoy went through
- Best food
- Thukpa at a tarpaulin dhaba at Sarchu, at nine at night, in a queue of truck drivers
