Day 5: Leh – Sham Valley – Leh

Day 5 was scheduled to be another lighter travel day sandwiched between 2 hectic long travels. Our first stop was the Spituk monastery. The beauty of the monastery lies in its proximity to the Leh airport. It is situated right beside the airport and offers excellent views of the aircraft landing and taking off from the runway. We managed to catch atleast 5-6 military aircrafts and a few passenger carriers using the runway to take off or land.

We then visited the Gurudwara Pathar Sahib. The place was very peaceful and one has to wrap their heads with a scarf/clothing before entering the place. They also serve tea and provide something to eat. We spent around 30 mins in that place before leaving to the Magnetic hill.

Magnetic hill, as people believe, is one of those unique phenomenons where if you park the car in neutral gear against the slope of the mountain, the car will start moving upwards against gravity. This is atleast in theory how it should happen, but the reality was quite different. We tried various things as suggested, nothing happened and finally moved on while questioning the authenticity of the claim.

We travelled on, on the same Leh Srinagar highway to stop at our last point of interest – The confluence of Indus Zanskar rivers famously called the Sangam. The view is pretty famous, used as poster in many of the Leh-Ladakh packages. You can clearly see the difference in color between the 2 rivers merging into one. There are many tour operators offering rafting in that area but we did not try that.

Our cab driver dropped us at a village called ‘Nimmoo’ where our lunch was arranged. After lunch, we made our journey back to stop at the ‘Hall of Fame’. Its a military museum highlighting the contributions of the Indian army in that region and they also screened a film on Operation Vijay.

We headed back to the hotel to reach by around 4 pm. Since we had some time left before the sunset and had some energy left in us, we took a walk to the market from our hotel, roamed around a bit in search of something useful to buy and made our way back to the hotel in time for dinner.