We are passing through the Spiti valley en route to Kaza, a small village-town on the second leg of the Raid. Grand canyons, low lying valleys, enormous gravel mountains overshadowed by taller, far flung ones of their ilk and fat building-size boulders getting their daily tan. There are a hundred different shades of brown, from khaki to hot chocolate, the sky is a cobalt blue, there are frozen streaks of white - little streams caught unawares by the cold, and there is nobody around for hundreds of kilometres. It's a sparsely populated land and moreover, the rest of the competitors are far ahead of us amateurs who take their own sweet time to get from one place to the other. The Raid is an all Maruti affair, with JK Tyres providing most of the rubber around.
Raids are long distance motorsport events run on extremely hostile terrain.
Unlike rallies, where everybody goes hell for leather in short, fast bursts, what counts most in a raid is endurance, both of man and machine. The legs or sections to be traversed are restricted to one a day and this is divided into competitive and transport sections, most of which run into hundreds of kilometres. Participants can generally take it easy in the transport stages which usually have more of tarmac, but competitive sections are unbelievably tough and inevitable car killers. Now this is an okay definition but to really understand a raid, you have to go through it. For over six days, we did nothing but drive and navigate.