Himachal Pradesh is the most visited hill state in India and one of the least explored. The two places that absorb most of the traffic, Shimla and Manali, sit at the accessible end of a state that extends for hundreds of kilometres into the high Himalaya. Most travellers arrive, declare Himachal done, and leave without having seen it.
Spiti Valley
The Spiti river runs through a cold desert at around four thousand metres, flanked by mountains so dry and eroded that the landscape looks extraterrestrial. Key Monastery, built in the tenth century on a conical hill above the river, is the most photographed thing in the valley and not the most interesting. The villages of Langza, Komic and Demul sit higher still, connected by roads that may or may not be passable depending on the year.
Spiti is the only place in India where you can consistently find ancient Buddhist murals in monastery walls, intact, unphotographed, and you can sit next to them in silence. Pin Valley National Park holds the snow leopard in numbers that make winter sightings a real rather than theoretical possibility.
Kinnaur
The road from Shimla to Spiti runs through Kinnaur, which most people treat as a transit. It should not be. The Hindustan Tibet Highway cuts along cliffs above the Sutlej river in a way that has no comparison in India, and the apple orchards in the Sangla valley in September are a specific and underrated kind of beautiful.
Kalpa sits across the valley from the Kinnaur Kailash range. The view from the monastery above the town at dawn, with the snow peaks turning colour, is the kind of thing that gets remembered clearly years later.
Dharamshala and Bir Billing
McLeod Ganj above Dharamshala has been the home of the Tibetan government in exile since 1960 and carries a specific atmosphere that comes from being both a place of refuge and a centre of serious religious study. The library of Tibetan Works and Archives holds manuscripts that exist nowhere else.
Bir Billing, about seventy kilometres away, is the paragliding capital of Asia and the site of the World Paragliding Championship. The landing field at Bir and the launch site at Billing are separated by about fourteen kilometres of altitude, and the thermals on a good day allow flights of several hours.
What nobody tells you
Spiti requires an Inner Line Permit for some sections and the roads through Rohtang Pass close for winter, typically by mid to late October. The window is June to mid October, and it gets shorter in a heavy snow year.
Altitude sickness at four thousand metres is not theoretical. The standard advice applies: ascend slowly, do not fly directly to altitude, and carry medication. Spiti is not a place to be cavalier about this.
And the distance from Shimla to Kaza, the main town in Spiti, is around two hundred kilometres but takes eight to ten hours on the best days. The road is the experience and rushing it is the mistake.