India: With one foot swathed in ancient traditions and the others striding into the entrepreneurial e-age, few countries on earth embrace diversity as passionately as India.

A trip to India is an all-out assault on the senses. You'll be traveling through heat and dust, sharing the roads - and sidewalks - with a swirl of bicycles, auto-rickshaws, sputtering motorcycles, tinsel-draped trucks, scurrying monkeys, snake charmers, beggars, camel carts, near-naked holy men and the occasional cow. Amidst the parade of people and animals, majestic sights emerge - the Taj Mahal, the Ganges, and the Himalayas.

Most travelers will find these difficulties to be well worth the rewards, however: India remains an incomparable travel experience.

Trekking in India still follows the pattern set by the early English explorers who ranged through these areas in the 1860s. It is possible to backpack these regions, but the altitude, and absence of even a rudimentary lodge system, make it quite different from teahouse trekking in Nepal. We travel with all our gear carried on Tibetan ponies, with a sirdar-the boss of our 'caravan', a cook, local guide and all our food supplies.

The captivating hugeness of high plains of Ladakh; the green lush valleys of Uttaranchal; the vertical gorges of Zanskar, but above all, a beacon drawing us back again and again, the smiling people and their timeless way of life.

Many of the trails are ancient trade and pilgrimage routes, and, especially in Ladakh and Zanskar, it really is a land of passes that locals have crossed for centuries.