Travelling Light: Travelling with your teenager

Vijay Verghese

I stood there breathless. She sashayed up, looked at me with beseeching eyes and moved on, the tinkling bells tracing her passage through the snow. My heart pounded. It was now or never. "Let's get back to 2,700 metres," I wheezed. My taxi driver nodded.

The shaggy yak lumbered away, her bells still jingling, and we sped down from the oxygen-starved Khardung La, a 5,600-metre-high pass that was the highlight of the "highest road in the world", en route to Leh. Upon reaching the capital of Ladakh, after a while, I was able to fill my lungs, modestly, and walk two metres to the washroom.

My teenage son, at that critical age when kids finally learn to string together a coherent sentence, seemed immune to the altitude. So we sallied forth and continued to bond - he with his MP3 player, and I with my bed. The testy road that snakes up through the mountain ranges of Ladakh in north India, is high and treacherous, but by no means the most dangerous road in the world.

That appellation goes to the tenuous groove along the Andes snaking from La Paz to the Amazon lowlands. This lifeline of Bolivian commerce plunges 3,350 metres, inscribing death-defying hairpin bends on a single lane road that accommodates two-way traffic. So hazardous are some stretches that locals stand guard at the bends to direct traffic and prevent cars from colliding and taking the shortest route down, vertically.

If you are so inclined, get in touch with Gravity Tours (www.GravityBolivia.com), who will rig you up with a bicycle and then shadow you down the 64-kilometre route. This is not just for professional mountain bikers. Inexperienced cyclists are welcome too. So how can you tell whether you're a suitable candidate for downhill gravity biking? Pull up your T-shirt, lift up your tummy overhang and let go. Did it drop? Well ...

Not too far from the remote Silk Road town of Xian, China, are the 72 jagged peaks of the 1,873-metre Mt Huashan (Flower Mountain). One of the five sacred Taoist mountains, and home to ancient schools of martial arts, this is an area of quiet contemplation and discipline - well appreciated by hollering tourists who pack the swaying cable cars. Purists favour a narrow, vertiginous path clinging to the sheer cliffs made up of planks and iron chains to hold on to.

If you don't fall off, the views at sunrise are stunning. This is equally true in Xian - behold factory roofs, belching buses and traffic jams. Presciently, the Qin emperor in 210 BC moved the population underground. The impassive terracotta warriors deliver their verdict in "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor".

Of course, if you prefer an adrenaline rush you might simply race across the Sham Chun River from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. Onlookers turn green with envy while would-be immigrants turn green navigating toxic waste and fish that have mutated into alien life forms. The illegal aliens end up in Stanley Prison and the alien fish, on restaurant tables.

If that doesn't leave your teenage kids breathless, throttle them.