Julley (Ladakhi for Hello!)

We decided to be adventurous and catch a mini bus 17 hours to Leh, climbing up to 5,000m on roads with 2,000m drops and at one point crossing a path notorious for accidents. The scenery along the way was spectacular, but the whole experience was pretty terrifying to say the least.

We were picked up from our hotel at 2am, we'd spend the next 3 hours driving through thick mist climbing up a mountain. The road was barely 2 lanes and the mini bus was constantly stopping or reversing to allow trucks/other vehicles from the other direction pass. For the first part of the trip, when it was dark, I kept my eyes firmly closed, what you can't see can't hurt you - right? Once it was daylight we were finally able to see just how high we'd climbed - lets just say that we could not see the bottom of the valley below.

The scenery was just out of this world, 1 hour we were driving within pine forests with villages built deep within lush green valleys, next we'd be surrounded by huge snow capped mountains, driving over waterfalls with no vegetation exepct for some tufts of grass, villages were soon replaced with temporary tent camps, at one stage we left the gravel road and drove across the desert, the final part of the journey we found ourselves almost atop the snow capped mountains driving through a glacier.

The mini bus would stop every few hours at a chai shop and although at each village there was about 10 different places to eat or drink tea, there was not a toilet in site. Ant being a guy had no problem going to the toilet on the side of the road, but I wasn't that keen so I'd spend some time trying to find a place that might hide my lilly white bum... the problem was that the places I'd find would have been used by every other female who had ever travelled these paths, also it turned out to be the spot where every one went to poo - urgh! Unlucky for me - on 2 seperate occassions - I stepped in human poo, I know that its kind of like stepping in dog poo but it is far more gross and... it is human - it still makes me feel sick now thinking about it.

The last 4 hours of the journey must have been the most terrifying of my life, we'd climbed up to 5,000m barely clinging to the side of the mountain on a tiny gravel road. As we reached our highest point it started to snow and a thick mist set in for the rest our steep descent, visibility was barely 15m and with our driver becoming increasingly tired (we'd been on the road for 12 hours) we weren't that confident that we'd make it to Leh. I was so terrified that I was oddly calm, I had it in my head that should we make a wrong turn and go over the edge that we'd be dead in about 10 seconds, so there was no point becoming hysterical.

After what turned out to be 19 long gruelling hours on the road, with a lot of praying and seeing some of most spectacular scenery we finally arrived in Leh - ALIVE!

Leh sits at 4,500m, the air is thinner than we are use to and just walking up a small hill we find that we were out of breath.

We've now been in Leh for 5 days and we've spent much of our time acclimatising. This place is amazing... if not very, very touristy. There's so much to write, but I think I'll leave it for another day...