Day 7

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We woke up early and one of Bashir's friends took us across the Lake, we caught an Autirickshaw and got to the bus station at 7.15am. The guys in charge strapped everyone's larger luggage on top of the bus, so we didn't have much on us. The bus was supposed to leave at 8am, and it only left 20 mins late! So we set off for Leh.

We stopped off at two places to eat on the way and it was becoming clear that the altitude was starting to effect most people on the bus. We started to get a bad headache, shortness of breath and a tight chest. But because we were on the bus, it slowly improved as we were travelling up the Himalayas at a steady speed.

The bus journey was going fine up until we reached a certain point in the mountains. We'd just passed famous Amarnath Cave Pilgrimage, in which Hindu's go to worship an ice formation in the cave - it's considered to be one of the holiest shrines in Hinduism. There were thousands of coloured tents pitched up around this cave and we'd read in the newspaper that 42 people had died of different types of altitude sickness and heart attacks. The ride had been a bit rocky but nothing compared to what we were about to experience. Nikki cried, that's how bad it was. As we travelled up higher, the path became more narrow and we were basically driving over huge holes in the mountain which made the bus rock from side to side over the edge which was around 5000m above sea level.

Once we passed that part, it was only a few hours until we reached Kargil, where we stopped over for the night. No one knew that the bus driver had no intention of giving anyone their luggage back for the night which was still on top of the bus. So off we went to find somewhere to stay, with nothing but our passports and money on us. It was getting dark and luckily a guy on our bus who'd stayed in Kargil before took us to a place and got us a good deal. The whole town was in the middle of a power cut that night, which was probably a blessing in disguise after we woke up and saw the state of the place haha.

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