Manali to Leh

The highway runs 480km and crosses five passes, two of them above 5,000m. It is one of the great drives and it is also genuinely demanding — you spend three nights above 3,200m and one of them in a tent at 4,290m.

Six days rather than four, because the extra day at Jispa is the difference between remembering the Gata Loops and remembering a headache. That day is the whole reason this itinerary is shaped the way it is.

The five passes

Worth seeing written down before you commit to the road, because the numbers are the trip.

The fifth is Nakee La, between Sarchu and Pang, at the top of the Gata Loops. Published figures for it vary by nearly two hundred metres and we have not been able to settle which is right, so we would rather not put a number on it than put the wrong one — it sits below 5,000m on every reading.

Rohtang is now usually bypassed through the Atal Tunnel, which removes an hour and a half and the least interesting climb of the five. The others are the road. Tanglang La is the high point of the whole journey and comes on the last day, by which time you have been acclimatising for the better part of a week — which is the correct order and not an accident.

Where the road is actually hard

Not everywhere, and not where people expect. The run up to Jispa is ordinary mountain road. It gets serious in two places.

Jispa to Sarchu, over Baralacha La. Eighty kilometres and three to four hours. Stream crossings fed by glacier melt, gravel, and loose surface on the approach to the pass. In early season this is the stretch that decides whether the highway is genuinely open or merely officially open.

Sarchu to Pang, over Lachulung La. Ninety kilometres and the toughest part of the highway — unpaved patches across the high plains that the Border Roads Organisation repairs continuously and which the weather undoes just as steadily. The Gata Loops, twenty-one hairpins stacked up a hillside, are on this section.

From Pang to Leh the road is mostly good tarmac now, including over Tanglang La itself, and the descent into the Indus valley is straightforward.

Sarchu, and the night that matters

Sarchu is a tented camp at around 4,290m and it is the single hardest night of the trip. There is no village, no hospital and no mobile signal, and 4,290m is high enough that a proportion of people sleep badly there whatever they have done to prepare.

This is precisely what the rest day at Jispa buys. Arriving at Sarchu after two nights at 3,200m is a different experience from arriving there on your second day out of Manali, and the people who struggle on this route are almost always the ones who compressed it.

If someone is genuinely unwell at Sarchu, the answer is the same as it is everywhere else on this road: lose height, immediately. We would rather drive back down towards Jispa at ten at night than find out how it develops.

Season

Roughly mid-May to mid-October, and both ends move with the snow. The Border Roads Organisation clears from both directions and announces a connection date — in 2026 that was 12 May — but a connected road is not the same as a comfortable one, and the passes above 5,000m usually settle down a couple of weeks later. Late June to early September is the reliable middle of the window.

We do not book this route at the edges of the season without telling you plainly that it may not run, and we would rather move you to the Spiti circuit than gamble a week on Baralacha.