I wake breathless in Leh; at 3,500m above sea-level this is extraordinary. If we were in the Alps we would be in the Aiguille de Midi at the top of the highest ski life, looking out across a vast waste of snowy mountain peaks. Mont Blanc is only a thousand metres higher than this!

Upon rising we walk around the crowded and bustling town. Leh is in India but has a trace of Tibetan calm about it. At a bookshop I buy Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a novel written after the First World War about a young Indian boy at the time of the Buddha and his quest for spiritual enlightenment, a key theme in Buddhism.

Being the world’s worst shopper, with no intent to purchase anything and with a distaste for haggling I wander the bazaar aimlessly. However later in the day I walk through town to the Soma Gomta, or new monastery, in a quiet courtyard just off the main street. A hundred yards away is the Muslim mosque. The close proximity of these different religious establishments causes me to consider faith, and in particular, Buddhism. Of all the religious faiths, Buddhism is arguably the simplest. It requires no faith in a supreme God and is more a way of life than a religion. It is the most ancient, but in many ways the most modern and demands only good thoughts and an ambition to reach a state of nirvana.

It is easy to see where the aforementioned Tibetan calm comes from and in a place as vibrant as this it is most welcome.

The road to Leh winds up over the Photu La. At 4,093m above sea-level this is one of the highest roads in the world and unsuitable for ordinary traffic. Everything is completely dry, with undulating barren landscape, deserted and with an occasional view of a distant green slope nestling towards the bottom of a deep gorge by a fast flowing river. Indeed, now we come across the Indus River on the start of its long journey to the sea.

It is here that we cross the actual divide between Islam and Buddhism. It is a relief to enter a valley where the prayer flags fly and road-side chimes abound. We arrive at the Lekir Monastry. At last, after so many years reading about Buddhist monasteries it is a joy to enter my first, to sit beside two elderly monks chatting in a quiet and distinguished manner and to come across the young novice monks eating their simple lunch in the midday heat.

We move on and drive another two hours and exhausted, after a total of ten hours in the car, we arrive at one of the oldest monasteries in Ladakh, Acchi Choskor, founded in the eleventh century. The Temple is beautifully decorated and there is a giant figure of Maitreya. The place is dark and imperious but I go to one of the smaller temples where I sit alone. This is a wonderful experience. One feels an overwhelming sense of calm sat barefoot on the wooden floor in the quiet darkness.

We start our long twenty-hour car journey from Srinagar to Leh. We spend the night in Kargil, an unattractive, dry, high place where exhausted travellers stop for the night. The road it high, narrow, often just a dirt track and for me absolutely terrifying.

As I lay in bed at night, woken by the 4am cries of the Imam which by now I am accustomed to, my thoughts immediately turn to the usual depressing early morning doubts about what I am achieving. Then, perhaps encouraged by the chant, I suddenly get one of those unaccountable positive thoughts that I can achieve something by saying what I believe and that one’s job is worth doing.

Even here, in an unfamiliar, relatively desolate place, the power of a call to prayer, albeit from a religion not of my own, is strong enough to alter my outlook.

Kargil is located at 2,740m above sea level but tomorrow we shall climb even higher.

Today, a holy day for Muslims, we visited the Jama Masjid mosque. It is one of the most important in the Srinagar province and was built in 1400. The centre part of the mosque was busy with worshippers who squatted as they listened to a sermon. However, the side aisles were largely empty so I sat there and prayed, admiring the great wooden pillars which supported the roof, each one made from a single deodar tree, I later learnt.

Now sitting there, mesmerised by the chanting, almost alone in this great space, with its high roof and small latticed windows letting in a cool trace of light, I began to understand the power of Islam.

The day was hot and later we rested awhile in the Moghul gardens high above the city.

It is undeniably peaceful to live on a lake where only the splash of the paddle from canoes laden with produce disturbs the calm. Today we visited the Shalimar Bagh Gardens. Built in the seventeenth century by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir for his wife Nur Jahan, this is a garden of cool terraces with water channels leading the eye down the hillside.

I suppose that for Hindus and Muslims this is a vision of heaven. As I sat in the shade of the magnificent trees I was troubled by the thought that I might get bored spending eternity here. But that’s the problem with Heaven, we can’t imagine enjoying anything that lasts forever. Time must be suspended.

Winston Churchill explained the alternative view in an insightful way. “I will spend my first thousand years in Heaven painting.” A Benedictine monk put it a different way. To him Heaven is an everlasting, continuous Ah! where we encounter the divine.

Later in the day we had a long hot climb up the Shankaracharya Hill to a Hindu temple. It was built during Jahangir’s reign and is located on the site of on a much older, second century BC temple. I felt thoroughly exhausted when entering the temple but curiously un-replenished by the suffocating scale and smell of the place. So I looked at the Hindu pilgrims ringing the bell, entering barefoot and kneeling in prayer and was heartened by them.

I got my comeuppance tonight. I had thought the previous day how lovely it was to hear the chant of the Mullah over the water of the lake. But today was the feast to mark fifteen days before the start of Ramadan. The chants continued from the mosque without ceasing all night.

I have talked of Britain as the nation that forgot God. This is the opposite. This is the nation that never seems to think of anything else but God. What would happen if churches in Britain set up loudspeakers and wailed out the psalms all night? I can’t believe people would take it.

However, my youngest son, on arriving in India, had promptly fallen sick, so I prayed along with the chanting, then slept and woke again. I had already promised God that I would not hold anything against the well-known person who had upset me. I now made an even more difficult deal. If my son got better I would not hold the grudge in my heart. Later in the night I woke again and immediately had to banish the aforementioned grudge I had in my thoughts. This would be a difficult deal to keep.

We arrived on our houseboat in Srinagar on the Dal Lake. This is a wonderfully peaceful place. Motor-boats are banned and all one hears is the slap of the paddle against water from the small canoes as they are propelled past, carrying people and produce; the local men sit squat legged in the front and navigate everything skilfully.

The islands are man-made by gradually dropping earth and willow into the shallow lake, so everything is green, indeed verdant.

Kashmir is a Muslim state. As the evening sun fades the chants from the mosque echo over the lake. It is an enormously beautiful and spiritual moment. Try as hard as you like to avoid the sentiment in the West, Islam can seem at times ill at ease with the surroundings. Here it feels entirely right.

We start our sixteen-hour journey to Kashmir. The guide book tells us that “travellers not dissuaded by the ever present threat of violence or official warnings to stay away can expect to encounter extremes of beauty and friendliness and hard salesmanship in an economy which has been starved of tourist income for over twenty years.” But our daughters are there so we are going.

Travelling can be a stressful business at the best of times and today I worry about whether we’ll be on time for the plane and will we make our connection between airports in Delhi? When travelling my wife likes to take too much whereas I tend to take the minimum; all that is needed is enough clean clothes, a credit card and a passport.

I have this week been reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. There have been so many poor film adaptations of the book that one forgets its fresh and brisk easy reading style. For a traveller, Phileas Fogg is a great role model. He is completely imperturbable despite all the disasters on his journey which threaten to cost him his enormous bet. This laissez faire attitude is often an essential prerequisite for a traveller and in a wider context is also necessary to achieve happiness in one’s life.

Before we leave for Kashmir I go to Mass and think of today’s reading. “Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead to the other side while he would send the crowds away. After sending the crowds away he went by himself into the hills to pray” Matthew 14

I prefer this part of the passage to the more familiar later part of the chapter where Jesus walks on water. It is significant that he goes somewhere high-up and isolated to pray. It is easy to pray in the wilderness and significantly easier than when on board an aeroplane, when prayer’s calming influence is necessary, particularly with sixteen hours of travel to come. Mercifully, at least planes are free of mobile phones.