The Climb Up: Gorakhpur to Leh | K2K Part 1

There is a particular quiet on a highway at 5 in the morning, before the trucks wake and the heat arrives. I have ridden out of Gorakhpur into that quiet more times than I can count, usually bound for Lucknow and back inside a week. This time I rode into it knowing I would not see home again for 53 days.

What follows is the first stretch of that ride, the long climb from the flat heat of the plains up to Leh: fourteen days, 2,294 km, and the slow change from an ordinary highway run into something else entirely. We left as three friends on three bikes and reached Leh as 5, having picked up two strangers along the way who simply did not want to ride alone. This is how the road took us up.

Out of the plains

The plains pass the way plains do, in long straight hours that run together. Lucknow came up on the first afternoon, familiar enough that I spent the evening with my laptop in a hostel instead of seeing any of it, 6 hours of work against a single hour of sleep. That ratio would hold for most of the 53 days.

The expressway the next morning was a first for me, and far less frightening in practice than I had made it in my head. It might have been a clean run if Aditya’s throttle had not started acting up, which cost us the better part of four hours at the Jawa showroom in Agra before we could pick up the Yamuna Expressway. 200km later we were in Greater Noida, where the work and the meetings were already waiting. Things nearly unravelled around Ghaziabad.

We went back to Jawa with the same fault and again came away with nothing, half a day gone. The evening was salvaged only loosely: I met a few of Aditya’s friends, met Pankaj for the first time, and we took a room at Vishal Mall where the costly rum turned out not to be worth it, then worked late and slept. Delhi would not let bikes onto its eastern expressway, so we threaded back through the city to find the highway out, lost Pankaj for an hour, and found him again at a petrol pump.

Lunch was at Panipat, good as far as I could tell, though I am no judge of that food. A hundred and fifty kilometres on, Chandigarh arrived with a gift: a Saturday, the first day with no client work and nothing of our own to do. We answered it with a great deal of food and the best sleep any of us had managed yet.

Kasol, and the mountains begin

Chandigarh earned a day of doing very little. We drifted out to Sukhna Lake and a few other corners I would not send anyone to, then to Decathlon, and from there, thirsty, to a McDonald’s where we spent more than five hundred rupees on food to wash down a two-hundred-and-sixty-rupee bottle of water. A small masterpiece of wasted money. We turned in early, because the mountains started the next day.

And they did, on what became one of the best days of the whole trip. We were fuelled and rolling by five, though Pankaj led us on a fifteen-kilometre loop through Chandigarh before we found the highway, and we ate breakfast at six somewhere along it. Then came Mandi, and the largest traffic jam I have ever seen, more than ten kilometres of stationary metal. Aditya and I threaded out of it; Pankaj did not, and lost an hour, so we left word to meet him at Bhuntar. The road that climbed from there was the kind you remember, broad and clean and built for a bike.

By the time we neared Kasol, Pankaj was almost out of fuel again and we topped up at Jari. I had not been back in some years, and there was something to riding into that old familiar place on my own bike this time. The room we had used before had changed beyond limit and now wanted 4,000 a night, so we took a different one at two. I cleared a little work and tried to sleep, then gave up and went out with Aditya to shoot time lapses across Kasol, eat an overpriced dinner to a soundtrack of old songs, and sit in a room whose view looked like something special. Plenty of photos, a few reels, and the day was gone.

We stayed a second day, mostly by accident. I was up an hour before the others, hunting a room for the next night and finding none, so we simply kept the one we had, a hotel we had stayed in three years earlier where yesterday’s two thousand two hundred quietly became fifteen hundred. Pankaj passed the day in the room, eating. I napped, then worked, and in the afternoon we walked a short stretch of the Chalal trek for slo-mos and timelapses and vlog footage, the good shots coming off Pankaj’s expensive phone. There was a banana shake on the way to the tent that was good for nothing. Back at the desk I moved the GoPro footage to the hard drive and worked again, and after a late dinner we sat with the laptops by the river clearing approvals. That part I genuinely love, even knowing it is for the money, the EMIs, and the next ride like this one.

Tosh in the heavy rain

The morning we left for Tosh started, like most, with approvals, plus a share of Aditya’s work that I cleared early. We oiled the chains, checked out of that beautiful corner of Kasol, and stopped for breakfast, where I ended up moving Pankaj’s badly parked bike myself after telling him not to leave it in the way. The traffic stacked up again before Manikaran, but two wheels let us slide up the left and get clear, and we stopped for pictures while the others closed the gap. On the steep climb to Tosh we passed two people fighting with an overheated Tata car from Rajasthan.

Tosh did not make it easy. There was nowhere to stay at first, and while Pankaj went off chasing a phone signal, the place we had parked demanded a 100 a bike and refused to write us a slip, which turned into a short standoff with the woman running it. We gave up and left the bikes in the official lot, which would do anything we wanted for 500 Then we climbed, on foot, to Paradise stay near the very top of the village, and arrived wrecked. They charged three hundred and fifty just to carry the bags up. For that view, the fifteen hundred a night was fair.

The internet was down, so we borrowed and recharged a SIM from the hotel, and after dinner I worked, made a few reels, and slept well in the cold and the rain. The one real casualty was the GoPro, which lagged, ate its own battery, and swallowed a lot of my footage, while Aditya’s was lost outright. We would have to film all of it again.

We did not ride at all the following day. I set the GoPro on a timelapse that wasted itself again, did some work, and then we abandoned the bikes for a walk to a Tosh waterfall, dropping the Kutla trek to the heavy rain. A group of five from Mumbai waited the weather out with us under the same camp, and it turned into an easy afternoon of talk and photographs they were taken with. Two dogs adopted us; we named one Vishal, and he ate our entire packet of biscuits.

Back at Paradise a timelapse finally came out the way I had wanted, better than I can put into words. The power, though, was gone for the day, so cooking and charging became a project, and the GoPro was dead for good. We ate after the evening meeting and turned in early, because Manali was the next morning and we wanted it fast

Manali, and a highway closed by a president

We bolted from Tosh without breakfast, five hundred rupees lighter for the parking, and took our first food near the power station, soup and a sandwich. I spent part of the morning hunting a Yamaha service center that did not seem to exist, not even in Bhuntar where the map swore it was. We missed the turn off the highway and paid for it with a slow grind through Kullu, and in Manali itself Aditya could not find the hostel he had used before. When we did, it was full, so we took a room next door at the Grand Welcome and sat out the rain. With no wifi or signal there, we shifted to the Kukoo hostel to work, and afterwards, restless, I walked into Old Manali and found it exactly as it had been two years earlier.

The evening ended at Cafe Kathmandu with Aditya, dinner and live music, and a cold I could feel coming on, so I took something for it and hoped to wake up well. I did not wake especially well, but the day had a closed road waiting anyway. Over breakfast, Pankaj’s friend worked out that everyone who had booked a room got dinner and breakfast free, which we had cheerfully paid for the night before. We packed the bikes and then learned the Leh to Manali highway was shut for a passing president, with two or three hours to lose.

We spent them at Hampta Pass, riding straight in until a guard turned us back to the gate for having no permit, then doing it properly and taking thirty-six of its forty blind hairpins before a view worth stopping for. On the way down I checked the clutch cable and found it fraying, though I trusted it to hold to Leh.

When the highway opened we fuelled and rode it to a lunch stop at Tandi, and that is where the group started to grow. A man named Himanshu Pandey was riding alone and seems like he did not want to go alone form here, so I told him to come with us, and he did. A little further on, at a photo stop, we collected Shri Krishna the same way. Three had quietly become five. We reached Sarchu by eight and slept in a tent in a cold that got into everything, and I went down for the night with a heavy head.

The bad roads to Leh

I had assumed the headache was mine alone, that the others had slept fine, until it turned out every one of us had the same one, which is how you learn what altitude does to a body. We rode by nine. The road gave out a few kilometres past Sarchu and stayed broken all the way to Pang, the worst surface of the trip laid under some of the best scenery on it. When a smooth stretch finally returned after a long spell of off-road, I got off and lay flat on the tarmac for a minute, just because I could.

It was a long day into Leh, and we reached it by six and checked into a hostel called DejaVu. The clutch cable had earned its warning: at the service it came off almost cut in two, and they fitted one borrowed from another bike. I was back by ten, worked late, and slept.

Leh, and the turn north

Leh let us breathe for a day. I did the laundry run with Himanshu and met a few people at the Royal Enfield showroom, a couple from Daman and Diu and a man named Chang from Singapore. We saw Leh Palace, old and worth the climb, which we had been warned shut at five but which stayed open until six for us, and we walked the whole of Mall Road going in and out of shops without buying anything.

One rider from the UK had sorted his permit entirely through an online shop. The night ran long, quick bike checks for Aditya and Pankaj, dinner, a stack of work, and sleep a little after 4am. Himanshu woke me at five as he was leaving for the ride to Hanle, Umling-La and I clawed back an hour, after seven before we packed and left at 10:30. The petrol pump had a queue long enough but after that I rode to an outpost 6km off instead, took a photocopy of the permit, and was moving again by noon.

I pushed hard and made Hunder by five, where the first hotel turned us away and we found another. The internet was down, so the work waited for morning, and the power held only until 11:00pm. Krishna and Aditya came back with a bottle of Old Monk for 1300 and we drank it over dinner, did a little work, and slept well. North of here the road ran out toward the border villages, and that was the next morning’s problem.

Next: Ladakh’s far north, Turtuk to Pangong (Days 15–17) →

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