Ladakh

Leh town functions as Ladakh's practical capital regardless of Union Territory formalities — the only airport with regular commercial service, the district's Inner Line Permit office (required for the Nubra, Pangong and other border-adjacent circuits), the concentration of hotels and guesthouses, and the market where most Ladakh trips are provisioned. The old town below Leh Palace retains a genuine working character alongside its tourist infrastructure, and the palace itself, a smaller nine-storey echo of Lhasa's Potala built in the same era, is a straightforward half-day stop for travellers based in town for acclimatization days. Leh's practical role — permits, logistics, altitude adjustment — matters as much to a well-run Ladakh trip as any single sight in it.

Kargil town, roughly halfway along the Srinagar-Leh highway, is culturally and administratively distinct from Leh district — Muslim-majority, considerably less touristed, and carrying a recent history the 1999 Kargil War attached to the region: a conflict fought along the mountain ridgelines close to the town, now marked by the Kargil War Memorial at Dras, which functions as both a solemn heritage site and a stop most travellers on the Srinagar-Leh road pass whether or not they planned to. Dras itself, a short distance from Kargil, is regularly cited among the coldest inhabited places on Earth in winter — a fact worth knowing even for travellers passing through only in the open summer season, since it shapes why the road here closes so completely each winter.

Ladakh's overland access runs on two highways, and the choice between them (or flying instead) shapes an itinerary as much as any single stop does. The Srinagar-Leh highway approaches from Kashmir via Kargil, passing through the Zoji La pass — dramatic, but also the route's most weather-vulnerable section, closing first and reopening last each year. The Manali-Leh highway approaches from Himachal Pradesh over a string of high passes (Rohtang, Baralacha La, Tanglang La among them), a rougher, higher, more adventurous route that many overlanders treat as a destination in itself rather than a means of getting somewhere else. Both highways operate only for a few months a year — roughly May or June through October, snow-dependent — while flying into Leh works year-round, at the cost of skipping the acclimatization advantage a slower overland approach naturally builds in.

Turtuk, a Balti village near the Line of Control in the lower Nubra Valley, only opened to tourists in 2010, having been under Pakistani administration until the 1971 war shifted the border. It remains one of Ladakh's least-visited genuine destinations — apricot orchards, a village culture closer to Baltistan than to the Buddhist Leh valley, and a frontier atmosphere unlike anywhere else easily reachable from Leh. The village requires its own permit alongside the standard Nubra Inner Line Permit, and the extra distance beyond the main Nubra circuit's usual stops keeps visitor numbers genuinely low even in peak season.

Zanskar Valley, reached from Kargil district via the Pensi La pass in summer, is best known outside Ladakh for the winter Chadar trek across its frozen river — but the valley has a real summer identity independent of that ice walk. Padum, the valley's main settlement, anchors a landscape of remote gompas (Karsha and Phuktal among the most striking, the latter built into a cliff face and reachable only on foot) and villages that see a fraction of the Leh valley's tourist traffic. The Pensi La road access window is short and entirely weather-dependent, and Zanskar's remoteness — genuinely limited accommodation, patchy connectivity, longer distances between anything — makes it a destination for travellers with slack in their schedule rather than a quick add-on to a standard Leh-Nubra-Pangong circuit.