At one the next morning, and for the first time on the journey, we stopped to sleep. A small concrete and mud compound, with equally rampant dogs and bedbugs was our first taste - or more accurately smell - of Tibet on the journey. The heavy smoke of a yak dung stove, with its welcome heat and faint orange glow had a particularly homely feel after so long in the back of a truck.

Stopping for water in the highest reaches of what becomes the Indus. As ever, telegraph poles race between the horizons.

The morning of the fourth day was virtually preceded by our drivers raring to set off once again. After four hours driving - around 8.30am - we found ourselves once again awaiting repairs, this time beside a river, in a landscape of wide valleys and hills. A landscape we were fast coming oblivious to.

Around km830 there was another small and uneventful checkpost.

We spent much of the day driving around Banggong Co [lake], part of a long straggling body of water, stretching across the border almost to Leh. A small fishing boat moored outside a building was enough to kindle the drivers attention, and we were left sunbathing, incognito at this most unlikely of 'resorts', while they backtracked to what must be one of the highest fish restaurants in the world!

Leaving the lake early evening, we passed the old Tibetan town of Rutog, near which was another checkpost. That night we stopped about four hours from Ali, sleeping in the cool dry air, under a bewildering array of stars.

The fifth and final day dawned early as ever. The final few hours were uneventful until suddenly, through the slits in the canvas that had been our eyes for much of the past week, the sights and sounds of a city flooded in! We'd finally arrived at Ali. The trucks swung into a courtyard, and in the space of a bewildering couple of minutes, we parted - them with their Yuan, us with our rucksacks - ready to go forth and find a bed to collapse on.