On Higher Ground

Ladakh, in northern India, was once on the storied Silk Road. In the deep recesses of the Himalayas, it remains a point of cultural connection that few tourists get to witness.

- Mary Holland

Inside the splendid lobby of the Oberoi hotel in New Delhi, a porter relieves me of my bags. “Where are you coming from?,” he asks cheerily. “Ladakh,” I reply. He looks at me curiously. “Ladakh?” he repeats with surprise. “Nobody goes there!”

I think back to my first night in Ladakh, when I am curled up in a sleeping bag in my tent deep in the Himalayas, desperately trying to inhale the thin, frigid air. The will to breathe is there, but the oxygen is not. We are at an altitude of 4,511m in India’s northernmost region and the temperature outside is barely above zero. This is why nobody comes to Ladakh. It is not the India you think you know. Here, you won’t find tropical heat and tuk-tuks. Rather, colossal mountains, grassy plateaus, lonely lakes, whip-cold air and dizzyingly high altitude. “Ladakh is unique in that it’s more Central Asian than Indian,” says Behzad Larry, my guide. A trained historian who was born in central India to a Muslim mother and Parsi father, Larry is tall with bright chestnut-colored eyes and a thick beard. On his head, a wide-brimmed felt explorer’s hat. Larry, who launched adventure-travel operator Voygr Expeditions in 2013, has long been transfixed by this region. “We’re on this ancient global highway, which people have been passing through for millennia,” he says.