Driving a standard Mini to the world's highest motorable road - the 18,000ft Khardung La pass in the Indian Himalayas, on the bitterly disputed border with Pakistan and China/Tibet was easily the most difficult, dangerous and stupid thing I've attempted in a car. This is an excerpt from the story which was syndicated to publications around the world.
The road out - our only road out - was quickly being eaten by the raging, flood-swollen river fifty feet below. The hillside into which it was built had partly collapsed, eroded by the torrent beneath, so the outer half of the road was now just a crust of blacktop with nothing to support it. The inner lane looked stable enough, for now, but the river's appetite wasn't waning and unless we got the cars past before the road fell in completely they'd be stuck between the resulting chasm and the dead-end in the other direction until a new road was built, and our plan to drive this Mini Cooper from Delhi to the top of the world would be dead on day three.
So what else could we do but take a deep and possibly final breath, floor the throttle and hope the river didn't choose that moment to swallow the rest of the road? The oddest thing about the experience is that looking back over our ten-day, 2000-mile journey, it doesn't really stand out as a danger highlight. Driving a road car to Khardung La, the Himalayan mountain pass that claims to be the highest motorable road in the world at 5602m, or 18,380 feet, or 782ft higher than Everest base camp, or half the cruising altitude of a passenger jet, was never going to be easy, but we didn't foresee all the varied and inventive ways in which this trip would try to kill us.
