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Note from Jonah: This is the continuation of a photo series from the Great Himalayan Mountain Range. The photos document a journey by car, foot, boat, plane and elephant from Tibet to Nepal. If you’re just joining now, here’s what you’ve missed:

1. Road trip on the Himalayan Shelf
2. Lhasa: City of Sunlight, City in the Sky
3. In Tibet, People’s Liberation Army (mostly) out of site, but not out of mind
4. Attn: Crayola — a new color for you — Tibetan Blue
5. Tibetan Cloudscapes
6. Tibetan Prayer Flags Littering Roof of the World
7. Should you pay for photos? The ethics of travel photography
8. 29 Minutes and 15 Seconds on Mount Everest
9. Desertification stretching from Inner Mongolia to Tibet
10. ‘The journey not the arrival matters’
11. Namaste and welcome to Nepal
12. Kathmandu: The greatest place on earth to get lost
13. Kathmandu: Full of mystery, culture, history — and trash
14. ‘A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles’
15. Who has the strongest necks in the world?
16. Hey hey, they’re some monkeys
17. After the Himalayan: The Terai
18. Watch where you step: Chitwan National Park
19. At the end of the road: Pokhara
20. Final Destination 8 (in 3D): The luckiest travelers in the world
21. Tibet to Nepal: ‘The Journey Not the Arrival Matters’

In the last post on Crayola’s new color, Tibetan Blue, I mentioned the unusual clouds on the Tibetan Plateau. In part, this was due to my timing of the trip. August is still part of the monsoon (rainy) season in the Himalaya and in many ways, its a stupid time to visit. On the other hand, you avoid lots of tourists and get to see fast moving menacing clouds.

Another advantage to visiting in the summer, is your ability to see what is normal buried in snow. In the high Himalayan, and regions around Mount Everest, the Tibetan landscape is extremely arid. Barely any growth is found on the ground, mountains and even by lakes. The undulating ground, combined with the strange cloud formations makes some landscapes look Martian.

The three photos above were all taken on an access road to Mount Everest … and by road, I mean there were parts which resembled something similar to an old gravel road, other parts feel like you are driving on the moon. The drive is a very bumpy 4 hours from the access point on the Friendship Highway to Rongphu Monastery, the world’s highest Buddhist Temple where you can begin the hike to Everest Base Camp.

Throughout this trip, it rained everyday for at least some period. However, when in the Himalayan, the mountains usually created small microclimates where it would be raining continually in some areas and not at all in others.

Other times, you could see rain clouds move around like cartoons across an enormous valley. This made for some very interesting landscapes (also some very uninteresting landscapes that you won’t see here). Since these are all centered around clouds, I dub these type of photos “cloudscapes.”

The last post in this series is a photo essay all shown from the backseat (driver side) of different modes of transportation. You’ll see a lot of these cloudscapes there as well. The Tibet portion of this journey was made by car. If you notice in the pictures above, there are some fairly concrete rain clouds on the horizons. You might ask, what happens when you get there?

There are very few roads in Tibet, so you don’t have too many choices about how to get places. The nature of the landscape means mountain passes can go up far past 20,000 feet in elevation and it is inevitable you’ll be in the clouds. One of my favorite moments in this process is the point where you are half in the cloud and half out.

The shots above shows the view coming into Karola Pass at 15,700 feet, which climbs between two massive mountains, Nozing Khangsa 23,700 feet and Ralung 20,460 feet. The clouds hold there place well enough that its almost like walking through an enormous curtain on rigged to a mountain.

Check back next week, for images from Mount Everest and a collection of prayer flag photos.