It's Cold In Them Thar Hills!

The road from Leh to Manali is about 450km.

For 350km there are no petrol stations.

For 200km the road is above 4000m.

It's October.

The road is officially closed from 31st October onwards - There's a reason!

It's cold!

The road ascends pretty quickly from Leh to the second highest motorable road in the world. Tanglang La at 5338masl. (The highest Kardung La 5602m, is actually north of Leh. I got confused and thought we would be riding it. Hence why I excitedly bought a T-shirt - bugger it I'm still wearing it! Aparently there are higher passes in Tibet but none are 'motorable roads')

As I may have already pointed out, its cold up there. So cold in fact, the water in my camel pack on my back froze.

The air is also thin. At one point I got off the bike to walk 400m to see where Marc had gotten to. I was physically shattered. You literally have to gasp for air - so does the bike which suffered from a lack of power but kept going none the less.

The thin air makes the landscape appear more vivid though. Either through lack of polution or lack of oxygen to the brain.

We spent the entire day above 4000m. The landscape is incredible. The only people who seem to inhabit this region are those who maintain the road - and they are few and far between. We probably saw no more than 20 other vehicles all day.

Sometimes the road was good, mainly it was bad. An icy pothole got the better of me and both Marc and I had to push and pull the bike out. We were exhausted!

The final pass after 10 hours of riding was very snowy. Ice on the road was dificult to navigate, especially with very numb hands despite having heated grips and thick gortex gloves.

On our way down the sun was setting when we met a couple on a Royal Enfield on their way UP! They said they were going to camp on the other side of the pass, which was colder than the side we met them. Guy's, I hope you've made it!

We trudged onwards into the night in an attempt to get to Keylong, the first place with hotels since Leh. By the time we got there all the hotels refused to open their doors so we pitched our tent in the middle of the village square and settled down for the night. It was still cold, but I managed to sleep despite numb feet.

COLD!

Today we had an easy ride to Manali. Over the final pass of 4000m we found hundreds of Indians on holiday in bright shellsuits being shown what it's like to be cold in the snow.

There were so many of the going up and down a single lane road it was blocked for a couple of km in each direction due to a small avalanche.

The Indian method of dealing with any obstruction in the road is to drive as close to it as possible to prevent it from getting away presumably. Then honk your horn a lot to scare it into submission. It was quite amusing seeing hundreds of 4x4's in stationary traffic just honking, but luckily there was enough room for a bike to squeeze past.

The obstruction meant that we had completely clear roads on our way down to Manali. Here the roads were once again perfect tarmac.

When we got to Manali I had to take some clothes off since I was so warm now. Only 2000m altitude.

We bathed in the hot springs in front of our hotel. When the owner announced that the room is only 150 Rupees a night (about £2.50) we didn't even bother to haggle the price down as we usually do. Most places announce that a room is 1000Rs which we can mostly get down to less than 500.

A couple of nights are due here to recover from our ordeal whislt I plan what to do next...