MARGAO, Sept. 6 -- KARSTEN MIRANDA

Somewhere above 19,000 feet, where the air thins to little more than half of what the lungs are used to and the road itself turns to gravel and switchbacks clinging to bare rock, two riders from Goa pushed their motorcycles to the roof of the motorable world.

Nolan Fernandes and Venson Da Silva of Team Wild Riders, Goa, have returned from a 1,500-km-plus circuit through Ladakh, threading their Royal Enfield Himalayan 450s through a landscape that alternates between stark, lunar desolation and impossible bursts of colour.

The route unspooled like a greatest-hits tour of the Himalaya's extremes: out of Leh and up to Khardung La, down into the pale golden dunes of Nubra Valley, on to the remote, Balti-sp...