Crossing Khardung La: What Nobody Tells You Before You Go

Every Ladakh itinerary includes Khardung La. Every travel blog has a photo at the signboard. None of them told me what crossing it actually feels like from inside a moving car at 5,359m.

The Drive Up

We left Leh at 7 AM in a white Innova with Dorje at the wheel. He had made this crossing over two thousand times, he told us, as he shifted to second gear on a gradient that made my inner ear complain. The road switchbacks up from Leh's valley in a series of hairpins that get progressively less genteel. By 4,800m, the vegetation had gone completely. There was only rock, pale and fractured, and a sky that was a deep saturated blue I had only previously seen on phone screens with brightness turned all the way up.

What 5,359m Feels Like

You don't feel dramatic at high altitude. That's the thing nobody mentions. There is no ringing bell or fading tunnel vision. What you feel is this: a heaviness behind your eyes, like a headache that has arrived but not quite started. A slight wooliness in your thoughts, as if your brain is wrapped in cotton. Walking twenty metres to the famous BRO signboard left me slightly out of breath.

I took the photo. Everyone takes the photo. There is a cheerful military canteen that sells Maggi and chai. The chai tasted extraordinary. Almost certainly it was the altitude making everything more vivid.

What the Signboard Doesn't Say

The signboard proclaims Khardung La as the world's highest motorable road. This claim is contested — several passes in Tibet and the Marsimik La in eastern Ladakh are measured at higher altitudes. But the signboard has been there for decades and tourists photograph it regardless. The truth is that "world's highest" or not, driving to 5,359m is extraordinary enough to need no embellishment.

The Clouds

We stayed twenty minutes, which is about fifteen minutes longer than advisable. On the way down, the clouds came in fast — the kind that happen in mountains where weather has no obligation to give notice. Within minutes, the valley below us had disappeared. We were in grey milk, driving blind on a road that dropped several hundred metres on one side, with visibility of roughly fifteen metres.

Dorje slowed to walking pace and turned on the hazard lights. He was completely calm. I was not completely calm. This went on for about forty minutes before we dropped below the cloud base and the valley opened up below us again, green and sunlit and very far down.

After

Nubra Valley appeared gradually through the descent — first sand-coloured rock, then patches of sparse grass, then a thin line of green following a river through the valley floor, then the sand dunes at Hunder rising improbably from the mountain landscape. It looks exactly like someone has placed a corner of Rajasthan inside a Himalayan range. Because essentially they have.

Dorje parked near the dunes, turned off the engine, and looked at his phone for the first time since Leh. I stood in the silence for a few minutes. The altitude behind my eyes had retreated. The sky was back to its impossible blue. Bactrian camels moved slowly across the sand dunes two hundred metres away.

This is the thing about Ladakh. You cross a pass, come down the other side, and the world has completely changed.