GoMissing Expeditions – Welcoming winters in Ladakh

Conventional wisdom would tell most of us to not visit Ladakh around the onset of winters. It gets to cold, places are not accessible, hotels are closed, etc etc etc.

But then again, the charm of surreal landscape, snow covered passes, hardly any tourists, and the pull of the mountains was too much to resist and a bunch of expeditions members and the GoMissing team decided to pack bags and get on a plane to Ladakh.

The beauty October in Ladakh is, that you won’t find any tourists there and flight tickets are quite cheap. And as the GoMissing philosophy goes, we do things slightly differently (and usually against conventional wisdom).

The flight to Leh crosses some of the highest peaks in the Himalayas and from the aircraft it just seems like you can reach out and grab some of the peaks and eat the snow right off them.

Flight to Leh

As the aircraft descended our grins got wider and wider till we couldn’t stretch any more, and frankly we did look quite silly with the huge grins across our faces. 7:30AM and the first thing to hit us was the temperature. It was quite chilly, and the smart ones that we are, our jackets were checked in!

Thats when we realized that part of the reason the huge grin was stuck on our faces was the temperature **grin**

The first day was going to be a rest day for acclimatization. When you fly to Ladakh, the body needs some bit of time to get used to the altitude and the thin air. It is advisable to do nothing and chill for the first day (when you fly). If you take the road from Manali to Leh or Srinagar to Leh, your body is quite well acclimatized by the time you reach Leh.

This was the perfect excuse for us to catch up on our sleep and we spent better part of the day acclimatizing… okay fine sleeping 😉

Over the next week, the plan was visit monasteries around Leh, head out to Nubra Valley for some trekking and monasteries, Pangong Tso Lake, and possibly to Alchi, Likir and Lamayuru.

Pictures from the first day…