Class of 2006

The 52 riders of the Himalayan Odyssey 2006 together for a group picture at More Plains, about 200 km short of Leh. The only riderless bike, second from right, is mine since I was taking the picture.

The route from Manali to Leh essentially follows the fabled Silk Road that made its way from Central Asia to India. The Silk "Road" is a misnomer, for actually it was many roads, many slender filaments originating in thousands of towns and cities all over eastern China. They threaded their way west, skirted the deserts of Turkestan, gradually coalescing into just a handful of trails hacked out of some of the world's most impenetrable mountains. If the bundles of precious silk survived crossing these formidable barriers--the Pamir, the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram, and the Himalayas-- they then descended to the Indian Subcontinent. Here the Silk Road swiftly multiplied again, spawning hundreds, then thousands of diverging tracks that brought Chinese goods to Persia, Arabia and Europe, then returned the treasures of those faraway lands to China.

Here's more info on Ladakh