We now find ourselves in Dharmashala (residence to the Dalai Lama and headquarters of the Tibetan Government in exile), it took us a couple of days to get over our mammoth trip from Kashmir and settle in. Compared to Kashmir this place is heaving with foreigners and Indian tourists. We are staying in Bhagsu upper Dharmashala in a small damp guest house. We're told that on a good day from our balcony you can look down over the beautiful Kangra Valley, but since ...

For the last 13 days we've been in Kashmir, what a wicked place!!Firstly we hired a jeep with a guy we met in Leh and took 3 days to travel to Srinagar, Kashmir. The drive was spectacular and because we'd booked the whole jeep we were able to take our time. We visited a few Gompas (monasteries) where little girls would put run away with your shoes and old ladies sat for photos before asking for backshish, we stayed with a local family in a village within Dahanu ...

We've now been in Leh for 10 days, its a place you kind of get stuck in, though maybe we wouldn't still be here was it not for the fact that Ant got horribly ill 72 hours after arriving!We are 90% sure Ant got food poisoning from one particular grotty restaurant, though most are really nice there are some that don't care about standard hygiene.Ant spent the next 5 days being really ill, we'd just visited an ayervedic medicine guy a couple of days before the episo...

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 m...

Yay, we escaped Delhi and the bus trip turned out to be great, well as great as 20 hours on a bus can be... and we did get the Volvo airconditioned bus as promised. When we weren't sleeping the views from the bus in the morning were spectacular climbing slowly up to the hillstation of Manali, sometimes looking down the valleys with a 200m drop below us. We are now staying in the sleepy village of Vashisht, our guidebook says that there are sometimes raves in the...