Markha ValleyZanskar ValleyManali - Leh Hway

Spiti Valley

Tour Operators, Resources & Links

Tour Operators:

If all this is whetting your appetite, but for whatever reason you don’t want to travel independently, then foreign cycle tour operators are just starting to run trips in this region. Popular routes are Manali-Leh with a dayride to the Khardung La, and the Lahaul, Spiti & Kinnaur loop. Raju Sharma, a lycra-clad Manali local, has been running tours here for years (www.magicmountainadventures.com), otherwise UK-based operators are the Cyclists’ Touring Club (www.ctc.org.uk), Exodus (www.exodus.co.uk) and Redspokes (www.redspokes.co.uk). A great new company specialising in the Indian Himalaya is Out There Biking (www.out-there-biking.com), whose website will have you sniffing samosas and hitching up a BOB trailer in no time.

Resources:

Both Lonely Planet and Footprint publish guidebooks to the Indian Himalaya. LP published Indian Himalaya in January 2000, and has more information for budget travellers than Fotprint's Indian Himalaya, which is slightly more recent (2001). Cycling is only mentioned in passing by both of them. Guides to trekking in the Indian Himalaya include LP’s Trekking in the Indian Himalaya, now in its 4th edition (Sept 2002) and Trailblazer’s excellent Trekking in Ladakh (3rd edition May 2004). Nest & Wings publish a whole series of trekking guides & maps, such as Trekking Map of Zanskar & Ladakh, A Ready Reckoner for Baspa, Kinnaur, Spiti & Lahaul Valleys and Guide to Kullu-Manali. All the information is aimed at middle-class Indian tourists and most of it is way out of date, but the maps are a useful for reference and the background history can be interesting. You can pick these up in Leh and Manali for 100-150rs.

The best of the road maps is the Nelles Verlag North India (1:1.5m) map, which is useful for route-planning, and has a larger-scale inset (1:650,000) of Ladakh & Zanskar which covers the entire Manali – Leh Hway. Lonely Planet’s India & Bangladesh Travel Atlas can be butchered for its Himalaya pages, though the cartography is over-simplified. India Survey maps of the Indian Himalaya are unavailable to the public, due to the close proximity of the Chinese and Pakistani borders. Other topographical maps include the American AMS 502 series at 1:200,000 (though quite a few sheets are out of print) and the TPC series of Air Charts (1:500,000), though both are out of date with no accurate road detail. Locally, the Himachal Pradesh Tourist Map (published by Nest & Wings) is not to scale nor particularly accurate, but it does list most villages, with altitudes and kilometer distances between towns. For Ladakh, Sonam Tsetan’s Trekking Map of Ladakh is by far the most accurate, though without any topographical detail. Leomann also publish a series of trekking maps in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, but with no road detail.

Olivier Follmi, a French photographer, has published several books about the Indian Himalaya, and Zanskar in particular. The Buddhist Himalayas and Where Heaven and Mountains Meet are particularly atmospheric, with stunning photographs and quite personal accounts of his last twenty years in the Indian Himalaya. Though it's set in Nepal, the film Himalaya will give you a very good idea of traditional life in this hostile, but beautiful, part of the world.

You can find most of the above at Stanfords Map & Travel Bookshop at 12-14 Long Acre, Covent Garden, London, 0207 836 1321. (www.stanfords.co.uk).

Links:

I found these websites really useful when I was planning my trip:

Sentient Entity. http://www.sentient-entity.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk Four British blokes riding the Manali-Leh Hway. Very useful cross-profile chart of the route. Loads of practical information.

"Bill & Bessie". http://www.arizonahandbook.com/India_H1.htm Lengthy and descriptive letters home from an American guy (Bessie is the bicycle) who rode from Leh over the Khardung La, west to Dha-Hanu and Padum, then south to Mandi via Spiti. Good photographs too.

Other websites on cycling in the Indian Himalaya include this Swiss bloke's Hike & Bike site: http://davinci.ethz.ch/kissner/heinz/ruegger/biking.html, and this British couple's recent ride in Lahaul, Spiti & Kinnaur: http://www.masterlyinactivity.com/spiti/intro.html

And not related to the Indian Himalaya at all, but still a good site: Ben Wylson's and his cousin's RTW trip for ITDG starting in April 2005: www.freewheelseast.co.uk

Manali-Leh