Below is another video, also from our last day of riding on the Leh-Manali Highway traversing Rohtang Pass. This video  shows typical riding conditions in the Himalayas of northern India.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Rohtang Pass:
Rohtang Pass (Hindi: रोहतांग दर्रा) (Bhoti: Rohtang , lit: pile of corpses,^[1] due to people dying in bad weather trying to cross the pass) (altitude 3,978 m or 13,051 ft),^[2] is a high mountain pass on the eastern Pir Panjal Range of the Himalayas around 51 km (32 mi) from Manali. It connects the Kullu Valley with the Lahaul and Spiti Valleys of Himachal Pradesh, India.

Manali-Leh Highway, a part of NH 21, transverses Rohtang Pass.

 

The cheering/voices you hear is when I pass people on the road and they realize it’s a woman riding the motorcycle.

Note that the people in the road are ROAD CREWS!  They are working these roads BY HAND!!! Unbelievable. I’m told they are mostly southern Indians, that come to work on the northern road crews in the summertime and they make about 1200 rupees per month (that’s about $22). They live at 12-17,000 feet elevation and live in camps that look like this (most often right alongside the road and subject to unholy amounts of dust):

 

In 2010 I rode the “Bolivian Road of Death”, and I confess, the entire  time I was riding Rohtang Pass (BOTH times), I was thinking how similar if was to the road which had the deadly moniker. I’ve got some other videos of when we hit the mud…thats when things got real interesting!

NOTE TO MOM: Note that I passed on the right this time? (The truck was parked.) This video is just for you 🙂