The wind in Upper Mustang does not blow. It howls. It carries sand from the Tibetan plateau and drives it against the mud-brick walls of Lo Manthang, the walled capital of this former kingdom. I had walked for ten days to get here, starting from Jomsom at 2,700 meters and climbing through the Kali Gandaki Gorge, the deepest in the world, to the Tibetan plateau at 3,800 meters. Upper Mustang was closed to foreigners until 1992, and even now, it requires a special permit that costs five hundred dollars for ten days. The permit is expensive because the Nepalese government wants to limit visitors and preserve the region's unique culture. After ten days here, I understood why.
The Landscape of the Forbidden Kingdom
Upper Mustang is a high-altitude desert, technically part of Nepal but culturally and geographically Tibetan. The landscape is arid, eroded, and painted in shades of red, brown, and grey. Cliffs contain caves that have been used as meditation retreats for a thousand years. Villages are clusters of flat-roofed houses surrounded by fields of barley and buckwheat. The sky is enormous. At night, the stars are so bright and so numerous that the Milky Way casts a shadow. I camped near the village of Tsarang and woke at dawn to the sound of prayer flags snapping in the wind. The temperature had dropped to minus five degrees Celsius. My water bottle was frozen solid.
Lo Manthang: A City Frozen in Time
Lo Manthang is the capital of Upper Mustang, a walled city of about fifteen hundred people that was founded in the fourteenth century. The king, or raja, still lives in a palace inside the walls, though his role is now ceremonial. The city has four major temples, or gompas, filled with thangka paintings, statues, and ancient manuscripts. I visited the Jampa Lhakhang, which contains a massive clay statue of Maitreya, the future Buddha, that was built in the fifteenth century. A monk named Tenzin opened the temple for me and explained that the statue had been damaged in the 2015 earthquake and was still being repaired. 'We do not rush,' he said. 'The Buddha has waited five hundred years. He can wait a little longer.'
The People and Their Culture
The people of Upper Mustang are ethnically Tibetan and practice Tibetan Buddhism. They speak a dialect of Tibetan that is closer to the language of Lhasa than to the Nepali spoken in Kathmandu. Life here is hard. The growing season is short, the winters are brutal, and medical care is a three-day walk to Jomsom. Yet the people I met were consistently warm and welcoming. In the village of Ghami, a family invited me into their kitchen and served me butter tea and tsampa, roasted barley flour mixed into a paste. The butter tea was salty and rich, an acquired taste that I never fully acquired. But the gesture of hospitality was unmistakable.
Permits, Logistics, and Costs
The Upper Mustang Restricted Area Permit costs five hundred dollars for ten days, with an additional fifty dollars per day for extensions. You must also have an Annapurna Conservation Area Permit, which costs thirty dollars. The trek typically takes twelve to fourteen days, and you must hire a guide; independent trekking is not permitted. I paid a guide sixty dollars per day and a porter thirty dollars per day. Accommodation in teahouses costs five to ten dollars per night. Food is basic and expensive, because everything must be carried in by mule. A plate of dal bhat costs eight dollars. The total cost for fourteen days was three thousand two hundred dollars. It was the most expensive trek I have done in Nepal, and it was worth every dollar.
