Alone in the Himalayas: What 10,000 Kilometres on Foot Teach You About Danger, Kindness, and Stillness

The man who walked off the map

For nearly two decades, the most demanding terrain in Peter Van Geit's life was a Cisco project plan. He had come to India from Belgium in the late 1990s to build a software team, made Chennai his home for roughly twenty-five years, and climbed the ordinary ladder of a corporate career. Then, in 2017, he closed the laptop for good and walked into the mountains.3:12

Since then he has covered something like ten thousand kilometres of the Himalayas on foot, most of it alone and self-supported.8:32 This was not a mid-life leap into the unknown so much as a graduation. Years earlier he had founded the Chennai Trekking Club, a volunteer-run nonprofit that grew from a handful of weekend hikers into a community of around forty thousand.5:08 At fifty-two he still runs ultra distances, and he makes a quiet, contrarian claim: that endurance and mental stamina are not the property of the young, but skills that sharpen with the decades.6:04

What follows is not a highlight reel of a daredevil. It is closer to a method — a repeatable practice with a logic and a philosophy underneath it. And that practice quietly overturns three things most of us believe about the wilderness: what is actually dangerous out there, what kind of people you meet the further you go, and what all of it is finally for.

The discipline of going alone

The first surprise is how little it takes. His load is deliberately minimal — about four or five kilograms: a bivy sack, a small sleeping bag, a T-shirt and shorts. He rinses his clothes in the streams he passes.9:07 He navigates remote, often unmarked country largely solo, on month-long journeys, reading the land from old Survey of India topographic maps rather than a screen.3:45

The day has a shape, and the shape is the point. He is moving with the first light, around six or seven in the morning, and walks for roughly twelve hours, aiming to make camp near water before dark.10:00 Distance bends to the terrain: forty or fifty kilometres across open ground, as little as fifteen on steep or broken trail. He walks rather than runs because at altitude there is only about half the oxygen of sea level — the body cannot afford the debt.11:49 A day like that burns an estimated seven to eight thousand calories,12:28 which he replaces not from a supply chain but from whoever he meets: thick ghee-laden rotis and fresh goat-milk tea, handed over in mountain kitchens.12:35

The numbers can get vertiginous. On one four-month traverse of Uttarakhand he covered roughly two thousand kilometres with around 120,000 metres of cumulative ascent — a figure he likes to translate into a single image: “1.2 lakh vertical … like eighteen times the height of Mount Everest.”9:34 Taken literally the multiplier runs a little hot, but the comparison is his, and it lands the real lesson: the spectacular total is just the sum of a great many ordinary, disciplined days. Capacity here is built from routine, not from heroics.

The real hierarchy of danger

Ask most people what could kill you in the remote Himalayas and they reach for the dramatic answers: a bear, a fall, a stranger with bad intent. Van Geit's ranking is almost the inverse. The lethal variable, he says plainly, is the one we rarely picture.

“Your most potent enemy would be the weather.”Peter Van Geit · 22:04

Not people, not wildlife — weather.21:52 Snowstorms, rain, and wind arrive fast, and the cold is relentless. Days he hikes in shorts on body heat at around twenty degrees can collapse to minus ten or minus twenty at night; frost forms inside the tent. His sleeping bag is rated to roughly minus twelve to minus five, chosen for exactly that swing.24:53 Crucially, weather's reach grows with altitude, which is why he stays a trail-bound hiker rather than a peak-bagging mountaineer — the higher you push, the more exposed and unforgiving the same storm becomes.22:44

The survival rule is unglamorous and absolute: when the weather turns, descend fast to lower altitude and shelter in a rock overhang or cave for a day or two until it passes.23:01 Counterintuitively, he finds winter at altitude more stable than the volatile, turbulent summer.24:01 The second hazard is simply losing the trail — ending up off-route on ground that steepens until there is nowhere good to put a foot. He describes the worst of it without melodrama: “you feel the heartbeat in your throat as you hang like fifty metres above an almost vertical cliff.”8:06

For perspective on the cold itself, the show's host, Ranveer Allahbadia, offers a tourist's contrast: a thirty-minute night hike in Gulmarg's deep snow at around minus fourteen degrees that left snow over his tall boots and his foot numb.25:54 A single bracing half-hour — and a useful reminder of what living inside that temperature for months actually asks.

Crevasses and the math of solo risk

If the weather is the constant threat, the sharpest single hazard is geological. Above about 4,500 metres the route crosses glaciers — vast, ancient sheets of permanent ice, some of it around ten thousand years old, running up to twenty kilometres long and a kilometre wide.44:53 Fresh snow drifts over their cracks, hiding crevasses under fragile bridges. A roped party can afford a wrong step; whoever goes through is held by the line. Solo, the arithmetic changes completely.

“If you fall in a crevice there’s nobody to save you — nobody even knows you’re stuck.”Peter Van Geit · 44:18

Why the wild is gentler than the city

By his own reckoning, roughly half of what pulls him back is the landscape and the solitude. The other half is the people.13:12 Far past the last road, the electricity line, and the mobile signal live nomadic herding tribes — Bakarwals, Gujjars, and others — in mud houses, on a rhythm the cities forgot. And here is his second inversion of intuition.

“The more remote, the more humane and the more helpful they’ll be.”Peter Van Geit · 21:57

The further he gets from the metros, he says, the kinder the people and the safer the country.21:49 The hospitality can be disarming: hosts have repeatedly insisted he take the only bed in the house while they slept on the floor beside him.13:53 He draws a blunt contrast between that open-handedness and a city life organised around self-enrichment, money, and stress.13:59 Much of it runs without cash at all: the shepherds keep a barter economy, where a single sheep might trade for about five bags of rice.15:08 He gets by on basic Hindi for food and shelter, the rest carried by gesture and goodwill.14:46

These are not settled villagers but migratory families. Bakarwals — a large share of Kashmir's nomads — move as a whole household with their horses, the children often skipping school to inherit the herding trade.16:08 Each year they climb hundreds of kilometres from the plains to high summer meadows that open only as the snow line retreats above three thousand metres, then return by September as the snow comes back down.17:27 In Himachal's Chamba region, Gujjar homes are single-room mud-and-wood structures, half for the family and half for the animals — the livestock kept indoors at night against predators.39:25 The herding families are largely vegetarian, eating mutton only when a sheep dies of other causes.17:46 A season is a running ledger of loss and renewal: a herd may shed something like a tenth of its number to weather, terrain, stream crossings, and night predators, while a wave of new lambs is born — in one telling, around fifty lost from seven hundred and roughly two hundred born.18:07

The gentleness is not universal, and he does not pretend it is. In the Doda district of Jammu in 2022, an AK-47-armed local policeman stopped him and a bearded companion from Chennai; the moment the companion opened a backpack, the officer raised his gun. The standoff broke as quickly as it formed — and ended with the whole group hosted by the police commissioner's own family.19:32 It reads less as a counterexample than as the rule, dressed in a uniform: even suspicion, out here, tends to resolve into a shared meal.

The animals more afraid of you

The third inversion is about the creatures we cast as monsters. His encounters resolve, almost without exception, in the animal's retreat. With bears, his rule is to stay calm and hold his ground rather than run: a black bear in Uttarakhand simply moved off, and a large brown bear held a roughly thirty-second standoff before the moment passed.29:24 Snow leopards he has never once seen, though he is certain they have seen him — “a hundred snow leopards would have seen me.”32:16 Leopards take small goats, not grown adults, likely sizing up a person by sheer height and deciding against it.34:17

“We call them wild … but people are much more wild than the animals. We’re the most dangerous animal.”Peter Van Geit · 31:14

The label, he argues, is backwards. We call them wildlife because we have grown disconnected from the natural world — while it is humans who have exterminated most of the planet's biodiversity. By that measure the genuinely dangerous animal in the mountains is the one reading this sentence.30:58

Stillness at 5,000 metres

Strip away the kit lists and the danger rankings and a simpler question remains: why keep doing this, alone, year after year? His answer arrives at night. Camped at four or five thousand metres beside a fire, with no road, no signal, and nothing engineered by a human hand in sight, this self-described non-religious man describes a kind of cosmic connection — a raw energy he finds nowhere else.49:46

“It’s just you, the campfire and the Milky Way on top of you — you feel like some cosmic connection.”Peter Van Geit · 50:24

From that stillness comes a plain piece of advice, offered without a trace of mysticism: “Life is short … don’t focus too much on career and work until you’re old and it’s too late — take a break and explore.”49:50 And he keeps the door open for anyone who wants to test it: twice a year he runs an Alpine field boot camp out of Manali, teaching the unglamorous core skills — survival, map-reading, navigation — that turn a wish into a walk.51:09

The discipline, the cold, the probing pole on the glacier — in the end they are all in service of that one thing most people never reach: a quiet at the top of the world, and the unhurried sense that this is, after all, where a human being was always meant to stand.

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