Days sixteen to eighteen of the Ladakh Sky Trail GHT, a three-week hiking adventure in the Indian Himalaya unique to The Mountain Company. Due to extreme weather — the first snow in August in Ladakh in 15 years — things didn’t go entirely according to plan…

From Padum the next stretch was super scenic, with the recent snow blanketing the landscape.

The road was less scary and more enjoyable to travel along.

We stopped at the Drang Drung Glacier View Point, which offered great views of the second-longest glacier in India.

We headed up the 4,400m Penzi La before the long descent on the other side. We camped for the night in Rangdum.

The next day should have been a clean run to Kargil, to change buses and head towards Leh, as due to unions Leh-registered buses can’t run beyond Kargil.

Instead, we got half an hour down the road before reaching this impassable section, where the road had fallen away and the cliffs overhung more than we could safely pass with our bus.

The slip occurred overnight and we were one of the first large vehicles to not be able to get through. Relatively soon some heavy machinery appeared, followed by road workers (not that easy to identify other than two engineers in hi-vis), and they started to fix the road. They smoothed it and, more importantly, built wire bundles of rocks which were strapped to the hillside to widen the road.

It was taking a while though so after three hours we abandoned the bus with our bags, walked across the dodgy road section, and got into a truck on the other side for the three-hour drive to Kargil.

The landscape changed noticeably, from barren and Buddhist to much greener and Muslim. The road was pretty awful for much of the way but scenic in places. There were endless signs promoting that the Suru Valley had been featured in National Geographic’s “25 places to visit in 2025.” We had a great view of the 7,135m high Nun mountain.

Kargil is a large but uninspiring town, the second largest in the region after Leh, which sprawls over what is a naturally attractive place at the confluence of the Suru, Wakha, and Sod Valleys.

Here we waited an hour and a half for the bus to arrive as the road had been fixed and the bus had the rest of our gear plus half the crew. We had to change buses in Kargil as transport in Ladakh is heavily unionised, and buses from Leh can’t go further than Kargil, and buses from Kargil can’t go to Leh. So we had a busy half hour moving everything over before hitting the road again at close to 6pm to make some progress toward Leh.

It didn’t take long for stupas and prayer wheels to reappear, though there were also a number of mosques.

We drove into the dark, finally stopping at a homestay around 8pm. It had a ridiculous shower setup, requiring sitting on the floor underneath a barely lukewarm tap. Still, it was my first shower in a week, and first encounter with a toilet seat in nearly three weeks.

The next day we had a final five-hour drive back to Leh, passing many more slips and road blockages that thankfully had been cleared. It was such a relief to finally make it back in time for onward flights the next day.

The map below shows how far we had to drive to get back from our hike. We saw a lot of Ladakh!