Deep mountain country...

The villages get fewer, the air markedly thinner, the road progressively worse. Green surrenders to brown, emerald hills turn to brooding, barren cliffs. This is deep mountain country, where everything is under ration: food, petrol, life.

Stopover at Chango, a sleepy hamlet with the satellite phone booth the only reminder of the world we've left behind. Villagers huddle around the fire and ask us incurious questions, a small price to pay for the local brew that's being freely passed around.

A passing trucker announces that the road ahead is strewn with loose rocks in sections, a result of a landslip a few hours earlier. Sandhu and I exchange glances, look at the Santro parked outside like a silvery ghost, take another sip from the enamel cups and feel considerably better. Isn't this, in any case, what we'd come for… to confront our own, private fears?

Next morning, the Santro is put to its first real test: three kilometres of a nightmarish stretch of mud, loose boulders and running water. To the left, a fall of a few thousand feet; to the right, the stony, unyielding cliff faces.

Even as the car bumps along the makeshift road, stones come rolling down the mountainside. The window glass suddenly seems very fragile. Will the Santro's low ground clearance be up to it, we think? We do it a grave injustice. It doesn't let us down.

By evening, we've crossed the Pin valley, land of the Ibex and the mystical Snow Leopard, and enter monastery country. Buddha lives on. Having passed Tabo, we reach Kaza where, come January, the mercury drops to -39 degrees centigrade (or so the locals say). This lonely outpost, once a link for 19th century caravanserai, has another claim to fame. It's home to the world's highest retail outlet: an Indian Oil petrol pump with, believe it or not, pure unleaded petrol!

The road to Rohtang Pass is still open, though all the buses have stopped running since October 15. A chance rainshower next morning and it could snow, says Norbu the innkeeper impassively. Snow. End of road. End of journey. Anything can happen anytime in these parts, he adds helpfully.

For want of anything better to do than brood over logistics, we make friends with a month-old pup who's more spirited than the rest of the village dogs. He's black, looks like a cross between a sheepdog and a monkey and seems perpetually mentally challenged. Something tells us that if we take him with us, all will be well. We do.

After a night that almost freezes our minds, we drive on for the next leg. 150 kilometres of a treacherous, bonecracking dirt track, past Kibber monastery on the far bank of the foaming blue waters of the Spiti river. All around are brown, denuded, balding massifs shooting into the sky, sentinels to a time long forgotten. The silence is deafening.

Night halt at Losar. Then up four thousand precipitous feet to Kunzum La (4551 metres). There's a saying in the Spiti-Lahaul mountains. For every three kilometres of road that's been built, one man has lost his life. It's a sobering thought on a perfect autumn morning.

We've christened the pup 'Tibet', a mascot of free will who'll live with us in Mumbai. Should we ever get there. A circumambulation of the shrine at the desolate Kunzum pass, and then it's onward again.


ride on.... Downwind (continued)