3,000 Kilometres, Fourteen Passes, and an Empty Room

There is a specific smell that fills the courtyard when you are preparing a small four-wheel-drive for the high Himalayas. It is a mixture of WD-40, fresh gear oil, hot asphalt, and cardboard dust. For the last four days, that smell has followed me everywhere.

In less than forty-eight hours, I turn the key in my Suzuki Jimny and point the nose north toward Manali, Leh, and eventually Umling La at 19,024 feet. We are running Her Drive, a 14-day, 3,000-kilometre expedition co-led with the team at OverlandX. It is an all-women self-drive convoy, and I will be driving the support vehicle: carrying camera gear, tow straps, recovery kits, passenger seats, and whatever human reassurance is needed when the air turns thin and the road turns to loose river shale.

This will be the first time in my life that I have driven 3,000 kilometres continuously across fourteen straight days. I have driven long stretches of mountain road before, but never with this scale of sustained, unbroken responsibility. Fourteen days behind the steering wheel in high-altitude terrain is not simply a driving task; it is an endurance exercise in concentration. When the track narrows on a shelf road above the Indus or when you are negotiating the scree hairpins of Baralacha La, your mind cannot wander to unanswered messages or future business goals. You have to be completely glued to the five meters of gravel immediately in front of your front tyres.

I expect that concentration to change my mindset. Modern life trains us to scatter our attention across a dozen half-finished thoughts. Long-distance overland travel does the opposite: it forces an aggressive, inescapable simplicity. You care about tyre pressure, engine temperature, whether everyone in the convoy has acclimatized, and whether the sky is holding clear over the next pass. Everything else falls away.

Between torqueing suspension bolts and shopping for heavy merino wool base layers in the market, I have spent my evenings flipping through the Leh and Ladakh pages of an old Lonely Planet India volume. There is something grounding about reading physical books before an expedition. Maps on a phone screen give you coordinates and turn-by-turn navigation, but they do not tell you how the wind bites at Chang La at five in the evening, or why a village headman in Hanle watches the sky before letting his livestock out. You need historical context to look at a mountain pass as more than just an elevation number.

Yet the most complicated part of this departure is not happening in the garage. It is happening inside my apartment. This is the very first house I ever rented independently. It is the place where Before Maps transitioned from an abstract notebook sketch into an actual company. I spent nights pacing this living room at 2:00 AM, worrying about pricing, rewriting itineraries, and wondering whether anyone would care about the kind of travel we wanted to build.

Now, every wall is bare. Half the furniture is disassembled, and brown shipping boxes sit taped in the hallway. Because when this 3,000-kilometre expedition finishes and our convoy rolls back into Delhi two weeks from now, I will not be returning to collapse into a familiar home. I will have barely 48 hours to pack whatever remains, hand the keys back to the landlord, and vacate permanently. To leave for the most demanding journey of your year while knowing your home is dissolving behind you is a strange, unsettling feeling.

Perhaps that is the deeper lesson the road is offering before I have even started the engine. We cling to spaces and routines because they make us feel rooted. But the philosophy of Before Maps has always been that discovery begins when the certainty ends. For the next fourteen days, my home is not a concrete flat in Delhi; it is the cabin of a green Jimny, a passenger seat full of camera batteries, and the quiet camaraderie of a convoy heading toward the highest passes on earth.

The boxes are taped. The fluids are checked. The passes are waiting. See you on the other side of Umling La.