Grand Himalayan Circuit

Yes. Every permit the Grand Himalayan Circuit needs is arranged and included in the package price — a Protected Area Permit for foreign passport holders, an Inner Line Permit for Indian nationals, plus environmental fees. You send us passport and visa copies; we process them at the Leh magistrate's office. One thing a permit cannot do: Chushul, Tsaga La and Umling La are inside a restricted border zone closed to foreign nationals outright, so no PAP is issued for them at any price. If you hold a foreign passport we re-plan those days and confirm the replacement in writing before you pay a deposit.

Yes. We publish the full Grand Himalayan Circuit route as a free GPX 1.1 file covering 1,500 km, split into 6 separate tracks — one per riding day — with 24 named waypoints for every pass, fuel stop and overnight halt. Every track point carries an elevation value, so the climb profile is real rather than flat. The road geometry comes from OpenStreetMap and the elevation from SRTM terrain data. It opens in Garmin, Komoot, OsmAnd, Ride with GPS and Gaia. Download it from the route map section of this page by entering your email address.

Not all of it. Chushul, Tsaga La and Umling La lie inside a restricted border zone that India keeps closed to foreign passport holders, including NRI and OCI cardholders. No Protected Area Permit is issued for those sectors, so any operator offering them to an overseas rider is selling a ride that ends at an army checkpost. What is open to you on a Protected Area Permit: Nubra Valley, Pangong Tso, Tso Moriri and Hanle. Hanle carries conditions — a minimum of two foreign nationals on one permit, a stay in a registered Astro-stay, and printed copies for every checkpost — and we handle all of it as a registered Leh agency. We re-plan the affected days for foreign riders and confirm the replacement route in writing before any deposit is taken. If riding a published itinerary in full matters more to you than this particular pass, our Zanskar expeditions cross no restricted sector at all — the 10-day Leh to Leh Zanskar Circuit via Shinku La, the 10-day Manali to Leh via Zanskar & Shinku La, the 9-day Leh to Srinagar via Zanskar & the Suru Valley are all open to a foreign passport end to end, with nothing substituted.

Yes, every guided expedition is accompanied by a professional Ladakhi tour leader and an experienced local mechanic to handle any high-altitude breakdowns.