On my third morning in Kaza, I tried to sit up in bed and realised I could not. Not in a dramatic way. Just slowly. Like the body had decided it was not done with the night.
I had reached Kaza on the back of a rented Royal Enfield two days earlier, after a long, windy, very dusty crossing of Kunzum Pass at 4,590 metres. I had wanted to feel like a person in a motorbike advertisement. I felt instead like a person who had inhaled half the Spiti dust storm. By the time I had checked into the homestay (eight hundred rupees a night, a Spitian family with a son who was studying for his Class 10 boards), the headache had started.
I told myself it was the dust. It was not the dust. It was the altitude. Kaza is at 3,800 metres, and I, a Bangalore software guy turned travel writer, had spent the last two years mostly at sea level except for occasional Coorg weekends.
So on Day 3, while my carefully written itinerary said "Komic, Hikkim, Langza day," I did not move from bed until four pm. I drank two litres of water. I took a Diamox tablet I had brought from a Bangalore pharmacy. I slept. The Spitian family's son brought me a glass of warm salted tea around two pm without being asked. He said something in Spitian which I think was the equivalent of "you look terrible." I drank the tea. I slept again.
I tell you this because every Spiti article I read before I went mentioned altitude as a footnote. "Carry Diamox, drink water." Tick the boxes. What nobody said was: a day might happen where you cannot do the thing in your plan, and the only correct response is to not do the thing in your plan.
The trip otherwise went well. Better than well. Here's the gist.
I started in Manali (flew Bangalore to Delhi to Bhuntar, then bus, then bike pickup). Crossed Atal Tunnel at 8:30 am on Day 1, which means leaving Manali by 7. The tunnel is a bizarre experience, six minutes underground at fourteen thousand feet, you go in seeing rhododendrons and come out in a moonscape. Reached Batal mid-afternoon. The road from Batal to Chandratal is broken, and I mean the last fourteen kilometres took me two hours and one minor swear word per kilometre.
Chandratal is the high-altitude lake everyone photographs. I camped there in a fixed-tent for two and a half thousand rupees including dinner. No electricity after ten pm. No phone signal at all. I set an alarm for 5 am, walked alone to the lake by torchlight, and arrived just as the moon was setting and the first sun was hitting the eastern range. There was nobody else there. The water was completely still. I stood for fifteen minutes, did not photograph anything, and walked back. That single walk paid for the whole trip in advance, I think.
From Chandratal I crossed Kunzum, did the parikrama at the Kunzum Devi temple (even non-believers do it, the locals look at you funny if you don't), and reached Kaza by evening of Day 2.
Then the bed-day.
By Day 4 I was upright again. Did Key Monastery (the photo one, on the hill, the kind of place that looks Photoshopped even in person), Kibber, and then Langza with the big Buddha statue facing the mountains. Langza has a few homes where people sell sea fossils. Spiti was under the Tethys Sea three hundred million years ago, which I did not know, and the locals will tell you with the casual tone of people who have been telling tourists this for thirty years. The fossils are real. Buying them is now restricted by law. Look, do not buy.
Day 5 I skipped Komic and Hikkim. They are the famous "world's highest" village and post office. I was at 3,800m and still slightly fragile, and they are at 4,500m+. The trip is supposed to be enjoyable, not an endurance test. I rode to Tabo instead and dropped to 3,200m, which felt like a vacation. Tabo monastery is a thousand years old, the murals inside are some of the oldest in the Tibetan Buddhist world, and I sat through forty minutes of evening puja without understanding a word and started crying at one point. I am not a religious person. I do not know what was going on. The acoustics, maybe. The repetitive chant. The light coming through the small high windows on the wall painted with what is allegedly the original mineral pigment from a thousand years ago.
The Tabo evening was the second moment of the trip that paid for itself.
From Tabo, on Day 6, I rode down to Nako, a tiny village on the way to the Kinnaur side. Old couple ran the homestay. The apple harvest was on. We had homemade apple chutney with dinner. The next morning's tea was made with milk that came directly from their cow. The kind of breakfast you don't get in Bangalore even when you pay for it.
Day 7 was the long ride to Shimla. Kinnaur is green, easy, almost boring after Spiti's moonscape. I dropped the bike with the rental's Shimla partner for an extra four thousand rupees, took an overnight bus to Delhi, flew home from there.
The total cost, solo, was around thirty-eight thousand rupees for the seven days including the Bangalore-Bhuntar return flight, the bike rental, fuel, all stays, all food, and the bike-drop fee. If you do not want to bike, a Bolero with a driver runs around sixty to eighty thousand. We arrange both at the office for clients. The bike trip is for a specific kind of traveller. The Bolero trip lets families and couples see the same valley without the altitude-on-a-motorbike experience.
The things I would actually tell someone going for the first time:
Go Shimla-first, not Manali-first. The altitude gain is gentler. I went the other way and the Day-3-in-bed thing is partly my own fault for that. The Shimla side starts you at lower elevations and you climb gradually over four days.
Start Diamox the day before you reach Kaza, not after you've already got the headache. Consult your GP first. The dosage is small. The side effects (tingling fingers, more bathroom visits) are mild. The benefits are real.
Carry fifteen thousand rupees in cash. The Kaza ATM is unreliable. The homestays do not always have UPI. Petrol pumps in Tabo will accept cash and prefer it.
Do not try to do Komic and Hikkim if you are still feeling the altitude at Kaza. The "world's highest" thing is a tourist line. Tabo monastery beats those two for actual experience.
And the thing I should have said at the top: leave one day completely empty in your plan. You may need it for a bed-day. Or you may need it for a sunrise at Chandratal that takes longer than you expected because you cannot leave. Either way, the empty day is not wasted.
Spiti is one of those trips that you should do once, slowly, with respect for both the altitude and the people who live in it year round. The valley does not reward speed. It rewards the traveller who can sit on a homestay porch with a cup of salted tea and watch the light change on a mountain face for an hour, doing nothing, going nowhere.
That is most of what I did, in the end. It was enough.