I just got back from a very exciting holiday in the Himalayas. What an experience!! No wonder they’re call the mighty Himalayas. Definitely not for the weak-hearted like myself.

You drive on roads (?) cut into mountainsides that can slide all of a sudden, roads that are so narrow that you’d be better off on 2 wheels … forget it if there’s an oncoming vehicle. Sheer vertical drops of a few hundred meters from the edge of the road – in some parts even the edges are missing!

You arrive in picturesque valleys that are some 4000 meters high (I couldn’t sleep an entire night out of breathlessness). Not a sign of vegetation until you reach these remote oases. Just miles and miles of mountains that change in size and shape each time you go around a mountain.

The towns are quaint, virgin and mellow. All have Chinese sounding names and have 1000 year old monasteries tucked on higher reaches. We drove on stretches where the glaciers had swallowed the roads and were left no option but to carve our own roads through river beds. One 24-Km stretch took us the best part of 3 hours to cover, never once knowing what to expect ahead.

See the first set of pictures here