The Aksai Chin felt like the ultimate isolation. A desert from Ladakh to the Chang Tang of Northern Tibet, we were crossing a swathe of land where nothing lived. The altitude and dry air made the few colours incredibly vivid, and gave everything an even more surreal feeling.

Just as the railroad opened up the American West, the dust track of Route 219 eternally altered the Tibetan and Chinese far west, making accessible in days a region where travel was once measured by months and seasons.

The road along the western frontier stretches from dusty Yecheng – a town far beyond it’s heyday on the southern rim of the Taklamakan desert – to Lhatze, where it meets the more substantial Friendship Highway between the Himalayan capitals of Kathmandu and Lhasa. Built to assert Chinese control right to the crests of the Himalaya, the track – for it is never much more than that – winds for over 2000km through some of the starkest and most absolute landscape in the world. Peppered by occasional distance (km) marker posts and an endless string of telegraph poles, it crosses some of the worlds highest motorable passes (at least three exceeding 5000m, and one above 5400m), and winds across the Aksai Chin, an inhospitably bleak high-altitude desert, elevated above 5km.

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The unique massif of Kailas protruding through the morning mist. On this, the north east face from about 4km, the distinctive rock strata and pyramidal shape are clearly discerned.

Within the league of mountains, Everest and K2 are renown solely for their size; their sheer height above the distant seas. On a more spiritual level, many mountains are seen as sacred, bridging the gap between earth and heaven, even providing a suitable earthly abode for the gods. Modern Turkey abounds in peaks sacred to the pre-Turkish inhabitants: Olympus, home to the Hellenic gods, & Mount Arrat, sacred to the Armenians.
Further east, beyond the Himalaya, Gan Rinpoch or – to use the more popular Indian name – Mount Kailas, is a contemporary pilgrimage site to Buddhists, Hindus, Jains and Bön-Po. Pilgrims make the sacred yet arduous journey from across South and East Asia, to a mountainous region enduring in its isolation. A region devoid of airports, roads, hotels and most modern conveniences. A region beyond reach of the twentieth century.

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