If someone described Nubra Valley to you before you had ever seen it, you would probably not believe them. Sand dunes, real ones, the kind you find in a desert, surrounded on all sides by some of the highest mountain peaks in the world. A cold river cuts through the middle of it all. Double-humped Bactrian camels walking at sunset like they have all the time in the world. Apricot trees everywhere you look. And monastery bells ringing somewhere in the distance.

Nubra Valley tour package is built to give you the best of it, unhurried, well-paced, and full of the kind of moments that do not make it onto Instagram because they are too personal to reduce to a photograph.

We drive you over Khardung La Pass on Day 2, the high-altitude crossing that separates Leh from Nubra and which, at over 5,300 metres, is one of the most exhilarating drives you will ever take. The descent into the valley is a slow reveal: you go from frozen moonscape to green river valley over the course of a single road, and the transition is almost theatrical. Nubra simply appears.

Over the next three nights, you will explore Diskit Monastery with its enormous Maitreya Buddha statue watching over the valley, wander through the apricot orchards and village lanes of Sumur, take a Bactrian camel ride across the cold desert dunes at Hunder as the sun goes down, and, if you opt for the Turtuk extension, visit one of the most remote and beautiful villages in all of India, a place where Balti culture, language and food have survived untouched for centuries.

Nubra is not Leh. It does not have the same buzz or the rooftop cafes. What it has is space, vast open space, clean air, and a quietness that settles into your chest and stays there. You sleep under skies that most city-dwellers have never seen. You wake up to mountains so close they feel like they are in the room with you. And you leave the valley feeling like you have been somewhere genuinely far away, which, of course, you have.