Rainbow Mountain

I was hoping to use the great quote 'we went with low expectations and came back disappointed' (Maggie Smith referring to America in Exotic Marigold Hotel), but we were more than pleasantly surprised by Rainbow Mountain. This all stems from reports of the bad road and crazily Photoshoped pictures plastered over the tour company windows.

As it happened the road wasn't any worse than a normal gravel road (i.e. pretty bad) and we went up late morning so we didn't meet any of the tour buses haring down the narrow and steep-dropped road.

We set off at lunchtime and met hordes of people coming down, but by the time we had reached the top there were only a couple of people hanging around. Despite it being at 5,200 masl we charged up in an hour and a half, so we are obviously pretty acclimatised by now, although it was really due to the hail that was coming down.

Miraculously just as we reached the summit the sun came out and we got fantastic photos without loads of people in the foreground. We hung around until the weather turned again, and ended up being the last ones up there. An hour later we were back at Elvis, and we got down the horrible bit of road that evening to a lovely camp spot in the trees we had picked out on the way up.Read more