The Markha Valley is a five- to seven-day walk through the cold desert of Ladakh, in the Indian Himalaya, and it has almost no bridges: you cross the river on your own legs, dozens of times. The Markha runs lowest overnight and swells through the afternoon as the sun works on the snowfields upstream, so the same ford can be knee-deep at eight and thigh-deep at four. That sets the shape of every day here. You start early, face upstream in the current with a pole planted or your arm through a neighbour's, and the hip belt of your pack comes undone first, so it can go if you go. Between the crossings the trail spends whole hours inside the canyon, walls close on both sides and the river filling the only flat ground. The rock is banded copper, rust and grey-purple, tilted and folded where the range was pushed up.
The beds are in the villages. A homestay is a stone house with a flat mud roof and doorframes low enough to duck under. Everything happens in the chansa, the kitchen that doubles as the living room, where a stove burning dried dung is the only heat in the building and your cup of salted butter tea is refilled the moment it drops. Guests sleep upstairs, up a notched wooden ladder. Above Markha village a whitewashed temple called Techa is glued to a cliff, a short steep scramble off the valley floor, and one monk keeps it at a time, each sent up from Hemis for a solitary year before handing over. The cliffs the path runs under hold snow leopards more densely than any ground yet measured, and in summer you will not see one; the tracks are all you get. The last night is at Nimaling, the highest and coldest camp of the walk, under the ice of Kang Yatse. The last morning goes over the Kongmaru La at 5,260 metres, where the prayer flags open onto the whole country you have walked, and the river is finally behind you.