Himachal in a fortnight

Most people who write to us with two weeks want to know whether they can fit everything in. The answer is that Himachal has two halves that do not join conveniently, and a fortnight is the length at which joining them stops being a forced march and becomes the best trip in the state.

This is that trip. It starts in the Kangra valley at fifteen hundred metres and finishes in Manali, and in between it crosses from the wet, green, forested western end of Himachal to the high desert on the Tibetan side of the main range, entirely by road.

The one thing this itinerary is actually built around

Not the sights. The rate of ascent.

Kaza is at 3,650m and you cross Kunzum La at 4,551m to leave it. Your body needs days at intermediate heights to make the red cells that make those numbers comfortable, and there is no substitute for time — no drug, no fitness, no amount of wanting it.

So the sequence is Shimla at about 2,200m, Sarahan, Sangla at 2,700m, Kalpa at 2,960m, Nako, Tabo, then Kaza. Each night is a modest step on the one before, and by the time you reach 3,650m you have been working up to it for the better part of a week.

The alternative, which half the operators in the state sell, is to drive in from Manali: 2,050m to 3,650m over one pass in about thirty hours. It works for some people. The ones it does not work for spend two days of a nine-day trip lying down.

What the fortnight buys that nine days does not

Our Spiti route is nine days and it is the same country. What it is not is the same trip.

Nine days starts at Dharamshala and drives, and every day has a destination. The fortnight has four days in it with nothing much scheduled — the second Kangra day, the Shimla day, the Kalpa afternoon, the second day at Kaza — and those are the days people describe afterwards.

It also fits two whole regions in that the shorter route has to skip: the Baspa valley, which Spiti never sees, and the Kangra start, which is where you get over the flight.

Fourteen days in one car, honestly

You will be in the same vehicle with the same driver for a fortnight, and that is worth thinking about before you book rather than on day nine.

The driving is real: three days over seven hours, four over five, and the Batal stretch between Chandratal and Gramphu is not a road so much as a route across a riverbed. Nobody should be doing this in a hurry and nobody should be doing it with a schedule that has no give in it.

What makes it work is that the driver is the same person throughout. He knows by day four who gets carsick, who wants to stop for photographs, who needs the window shut. That continuity is most of what a private car is for on a trip this length, and it is why we do not hand you over at Shimla to somebody else’s vehicle the way a cheaper version of this would.

When we would tell you to come, and when not

June, and then again from the start of September to the middle of October. Those are the windows when the Sutlej road, Kunzum and the Batal stretch are all reliably open at the same time and the weather is settled at both ends.

July and August are the exception we make for Spiti and do not make for this. Spiti itself is a rain shadow and is dry and open through both; the problem is that this route spends five of its fourteen days on the outer ranges, which is exactly where the monsoon concentrates. The Sutlej gorge takes rockfall, the Mandi–Pandoh stretch is the least reliable road in the state, and a fortnight that loses two days to a blocked hillside stops being the trip you booked. If those are the only weeks you have, take our nine-day Spiti route instead — it is a shorter thing to reschedule.

Late October is possible and gets steadily less so. Kunzum closes with the first serious snow and after that there is no way out to the west, which turns the itinerary into an eighteen-hundred-kilometre retreat back down the Sutlej. We would rather move your dates.