Life in the Himalayas

So... turns out the 36 hour minibus ride was worth it! After taking a few days to acclimatize to living at 18,000 ft we were settling in pretty well in Leh, the town is only accessible by road for 3 months of the year - it's a really old Buddhist city on the border with Tibet and is surrounded by some stunning mountains and valleys...

(if not in need of some professional builders!)....

The downside to these stunning views is that the air is quite thin so we've spent the last few weeks getting totally knackered just doing simple things like climbing the stairs !

During in our time in Leh we've been lucky enough to be staying in the best hostel in town - "Goba" - It's right on the edge of town and run by a lovely local Ladaki family. Matt was slightly put off by the hippie drumming circle in the front garden as we arrived but after checking out the view from our bed was persuaded to stay...

And once we realised that our co-habitants were actually normal people and not total hippies (well maybe Sean & Annabel are) we were very happy that we'd chosen GOBA.

Since then three weeks in Leh have flown by and although we've done our fair share of sitting around chatting & drinking we've also managed to squeeze in some adventurous stuff as well -

We've mountain biked down the worlds highest motorable road (albeit very slowly in Charlotte's case) which starts at a very chilly 18,567ft and is more than a bit hairy in places !

We've also had 4 chicken's killed in honor of our new friend Annabel's birthday BBQ, Charlotte didn't realise when she walked into the shop and asked for them that they would kill them in front of her so ran off up the street - Matt on the other hand was only too happy to pick them out and even named a couple of them

We've visited Pang-Gong Lake (which is bloody huge by the way !) with some of our new friends, the lake was stunning but the trip was made even more enjoyable thanks to our group, particularly our American friend Scott's front seat commentary and constant haranguing of our driver Jimmy as he negotiated the slightly suspect mountain passes that we had to cross to get there "Precious cargo here Jimmy, slow down man !".

Whilst there we stayed with a local family which was a communal experience to say the least with all of us sharing one big room where the bedding consisted of the worlds dustiest mattresses and a concrete floor and the food was...errrm...well let's just call it "basic" (no more home-stays!);

One other thing worth mentioning is that at Pang-Gong Lake there is nothing other than the lake....really, nothing (except a couple of goats and a donkey and they get boring pretty quickly). Oh and Matt says it's bloody freezing to swim in !

We've also visited (many) local monasteries...

And ridden a Yak...

We leave today (wednesday) on a local bus for a 20 hour journey to a place called Srinigar, so provided we survive the trip we'll have more updates for you soon !

Across the Himalayas with One Direction

So after 5 days of chilling and researching in Vashist we had a plan. That plan was to head 450 miles north to a place called Leh which is described as an idylic Tibetan village deep in the Himalayas. What we didn't realise when we bought our tickets was that A.) we would be going on a privately run mini bus and B.) It is not advisable to attempt to drive across the Himalayas before the official government bus service thinks it's safe to do so!  So armed with our ignorance of this fact we rocked up at 2am for the start of our supposed pleasure cruise to Leh.

We should have realised something was up when it turned out that the semi comatose lunatic who was in the seat behind Charlotte (who 20 mins into the trip had stood up, dropped his pants and attacked one of the english boys on the back of the bus with a plastic bottle for no reason whatsoever) turned out to be the driver for the 2nd leg of the trip.......still this is India and you have to expect these things....right ??

The next indicator that things were not as they should be came when 45 mins into the trip the driver pulled over at the bottom of the first mountain pass and anounced "road closed, we sleep !". After a couple of hours we were on our way again driving up a steep mountain pass with great views of the valley below until suddenly the rain started pouring down and we were stuck again 

The driver informed us that there had been a landslide ahead and that it was time to sleep again, Matt slept, Charlotte cried and then slept. A few hours later Matt awoke to find that he was in the front seat of a mini bus that was sliding backwards down a steep, muddy, mountain path with a lunatic Indian driver steering towards the cliff edge in some maniacal attempt to get some grip and make it up the mountain. This time Matt cried, Charlotte slept. Once Matt had recovered from the pant-crapping terror of this incident he decided to wake Charlotte and share his experience, at this point Charlotte "calmly" questioned the wisdom of their current journey... but what could we do ? we had to press on ! 

Eventually it stopped raining, we think this was mainly because we were too bloody high for rain as we were now at about 16,000 ft ! This also meant that as we crossed some of the highest motorable roads in the world we got some fantastic views of the Himalayas in all their glory....

...which were only slightly ruined by the sight of the occaisonal burnt out mini bus at the bottom of some of the  ravines.

During the trip we got chatting to the 3 young English lads who had been attacked by the crazed driver - Cyrus, Joe & Harry......or as Charlotte named them 'One Direction'. They had been travelling round India together for a little while and were doing the same as us in heading North to avoid the monsoon. Matt rediscovered his inner child. Charlotte cried. She then pointed out that Jenner (aka cradle snatcher) would be crying too.

The journey carried on in much the same fashion with further landslides and our drivers stopping for a break every time one of them fancied a whisky so it soon became apparent that our 'guaranteed one day trip to Leh' wasn't going to happen and eventually we pulled into a hill station called Pang where we camped up for the night sharing a Yurt (big tent) with the boys who informed us over dinner that we were currently traveling on the 2nd most dangerous road in the world (we hit the most dangerous one when we get to Bolivia!) which was a cheery thought for us to sleep on.

The next day started badly with Charlotte shaking Matt awake at 5:00 to report a problem, it was not the Yak in the tent scenario that Matt had envisaged but rather the fact that Charlotte had altitude sickness and couldn't stop throwing up....just what you need when you've got a 6hour drive ahead of you ! After a morning of puking and major headaches we piled ourselves back into the van and headed for the worlds largest plateau, the whole time Charlotte focusing on not being sick and Matt focusing on who's responsibility it would be to clean out the mini bus if she was. 

Finally after 36 hours of travel (20 hours my bum !) we arrived in peaceful Leh which we will tell you all about in the next installment......