Kaza and the Spiti monasteries

Kaza is not beautiful. It is a small grid of concrete and corrugated iron on a gravel flat beside the river, it has the bank and the fuel pump and the hospital, and everybody passing through Spiti ends up here because there is nowhere else that has those things.

What makes it worth three nights is that everything else is within an hour of it. You do not move hotels to see Spiti. You come back to the same room each evening with a headache and eat something, which at this altitude is exactly the right way to organise a few days.

The first day is not a sightseeing day

At 3,650 metres, arriving and immediately driving up to Komic at four and a half thousand is how people ruin the rest of their week. If you have come in from the Manali side over Kunzum you have gained a great deal of height very fast and you should do nothing on the first afternoon beyond walking around the town slowly.

Coming in from Kinnaur over four days you will be in much better shape, which is the whole argument for that direction. Either way, the high villages are a second or third day activity, not a first.

Doing the monasteries properly

Key is fifteen kilometres out and the standard visit is an hour, which is enough to walk up through the tiers and come back down. It is better than that if you time it: get there for the morning prayers and you are in a working building rather than a photograph of one. There is a room with old thangkas and a kitchen with a cauldron nobody can quite explain the age of.

Kibber, seven kilometres on, is worth doing in the same trip. It is a proper village — houses that people live in, walls made of the same stone as the ground — and after the vertical drama of Key it is a useful correction. Spiti is mostly people getting on with things at four thousand metres.

The high loop

Langza, Komic and Hikkim make a half-day circuit from Kaza. The road is tarmac now for most of it and the gradients are gentler than they look on a map, but everything is above four thousand metres and you will feel every set of stairs.

Langza is the one to spend longest at. The fossil thing is real — this valley was under the Tethys sea and there are ammonites in the ground — but the children who appear the moment you park are selling them, and taking fossils out is exactly how a place runs out of them. Look, do not buy.

Komic and Hikkim are close together and both trade on a superlative. That is fine. The post office at Hikkim is a genuinely nice thing to do and the drive between them, along a bare ridge with the whole valley below, is the best twenty minutes of the loop.

What people miss

The Pin valley. It branches south from the main road below Kaza, it is greener than the rest of Spiti because it has a river doing something useful, and it ends in a national park with ibex and, in theory, snow leopard. Mudh is the last village and there are homestays.

It needs a day you probably have not budgeted. If you can find one, spend it here rather than adding a fourth monastery.

What only Kaza has

The fuel, the bank and the hospital are all here and almost nowhere else, which is the entire reason the valley is arranged around a town nobody would otherwise stop in. The pump is the highest retail outlet in the country and it does run dry, so fill up whichever way you are heading rather than on the way back.

The ATM is real and unreliable in the same way. The more useful thing to know is that Kaza has a mobile signal and most of the valley past it does not — this is where you send the messages you owe people, not somewhere further up.