An easy route to Upper Mustang — the forbidden land of Tibetan culture

When I was a child, my father, a farmer in south-west Scotland, lent a friend his JCB to help build the foundations for a temple at Kagyu Samye Ling — a Tibetan Buddhist centre founded in the late 1960s in the damp hills north of Lockerbie. I remember our visits well: the pagoda golds glinting in the mizzle, the monks’ carmine robes, the prayer flags and the pine trees along the River Esk.

Something about those encounters must have stuck, including conversations about Tibetan Buddhist settlements in the Himalayas, with one place more evocative than the rest: the Kingdom of Lo, now known as Upper Mustang in Nepal, tucked between the Annapurna massif and the Chinese border. Upper Mustang is about the same size as the English county of Dorset, but like most childish notions, it has always existed as something far larger in my head.

It’s notoriously awkward to reach, with the main town of Lo Manthang located at 3,800 metres. You need time to acclimatise, and the mountain weather is capricious. In 2012, when construction was completed on the first motorable road built through this remote territory linking China to lowland Nepal, there were concerns the new connectivity would damage Upper Mustang’s Tibetan culture. Adventure travellers declared the beginning of the end of its quasi-mythical allure.

Yet the region still remains tinted by its longstanding reputation as a kind of forbidden land. In the 1960s and early ’70s, Upper Mustang was the base for a CIA-funded Tibetan guerrilla campaign to push against the Chinese intervention in Tibet.

With the geopolitical tension, access to Upper Mustang was restricted for foreigners until 1992, when a new era of controlled tourism was introduced. Then Nepal tumbled into civil war, from 1996 to 2006. Even now you need to sign in and out of the region with Nepali authorities, while a restricted area permit for international travellers costs $500 for 10 days.

I’ve tried to get here before, and failed, which is why I’ve taken the easy route: I’ve joined a small group tour led by Geographic Expeditions, a San Francisco-based adventure travel company that’s been working in Nepal and Tibet for 40 years.

It’s wrangled various cultural experts, including Vassi Koutsaftis, a Greek-American guide who first visited Upper Mustang with the company in 1998; Yangchen Dolker Gurung, a Mustang-born, American-educated academic working in development and cultural conservation; and Dawa Dhondup, a Tibetan painter who also helps take care of Lo Manthang’s royal palace (until 2008 when Nepal declared itself a republic, Upper Mustang was presided over by one of the last Himalayan kings, Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista, who died in 2016).

All three have an association with the San Francisco-based American Himalayan Foundation, which since 1996 has been restoring Upper Mustang’s Tibetan monasteries under various foreign conservators, including the Italian artist Luigi Fieni, and the British conservation architect John Sanday, who worked with the World Monuments Fund in Cambodia. Next year, the AHF is due to complete its $3.9mn commitment to restore and protect key monuments and Mustang’s Buddhist art, which includes conservation of the region’s most significant 15th-century wall paintings.

In 2023, the AHF also intends to cede long-term responsibility for the project to a local team of AHF-trained painters — formerly farmers, and mostly women.

We fly in from the east, after four nights acclimating at 2,500 metres in a lodge not far from Mount Everest, in the Solukhumbu. The transfer day starts early to get ahead of the dreaded Mustang wind, which picks up late morning and funnels through one of the deepest gorges in the world. The narrow alley is scarred by tumbling landslides. Roiling waterfalls fall into the chasm.

The Kali Gandaki River pulses below us in veins of glacial milky blues. In the dry months of winter, this riverbed used to function as a highway for Tibetan salt traders. Now the main trade route through this tight muddle of mountains — tourists included — is via the highway, and the short airstrip at Jomsom, which is the trekking capital of Lower Mustang. This is where we wait for security clearance to take the 15-minute helicopter transfer north to Lo Manthang.

The profound difference between Lower and Upper Mustang is revealed from the air. It starts to show around Kagbeni, the border between the two regions, marked by the reddish cube of the Kag Chode Thupten Samphel Ling Monastery. There are no more trees. The road carves up the east side of the river, then crosses to the west, the route’s cliffside edges like clay sculpted with a palette knife. Soft rocks are tipped with holy chortens. Rock faces are honeycombed with caves.

The further north we fly, the more the landscape expands. Sometimes the slopes fold into blackened clefts — a wrinkled land, wincing with exposure. Then up ahead, an ashen plain, and beyond that, a distant rim of peaks — Tibet — under a sky so blue, the salt-white moon looks like a cartoon. We curl in towards a lozenge of bronze fields watered by a bend in the river. The poplar groves form a ring around Lo Manthang, a town of about 200 households, which in Tibetan translates as “The Plain of Aspiration”.

The shift in air; the blooming marigolds and cosmos; the starry nights from my bedroom window — this is what I’ll remember about the Royal Mustang Resort, rather than the dismal chow mein. I love it. A new hotel built five years ago in the flat-roofed Tibetan style of Lo Manthang’s traditional fortress architecture, it’s owned and run by the last king’s grandson, who eases me past a Tibetan mastiff at the hotel’s gate when I go out to explore the town.

The sun falls slantwise through the carless alleys. A woman in Tibetan dress pushes a cow through a street, one hand on the animal’s rump, the other hand fingering a string of prayer beads. A young man in a tight denim jacket and matching trousers swaggers out of the shadows. With his hustler’s gait and cowboy hat, I mark him out as the local big gun, but when we squeeze past each other, I’m ashamed: he walks with a solemn murmur, turning a copper prayer wheel in his hand.

I strike up a conversation with Sonam Gurung, a 46-year-old trader. As a child he’d travel with his father to the busy town of Pokhara a hundred-odd kilometres to the south. They used yaks, horses and mules on a journey that took 15 days. Gurung likes the road. We’re just like you, he says; everyone wants a more comfortable life. But the future isn’t clear.

The international border hasn’t reopened to trading since the pandemic — Gurung used to get 50 per cent of his goods from China — while the old ways in Upper Mustang have nearly faded altogether. Pema Rigzin, 21, is a six-generation yak herder. He says the road has rendered yaks useless, except for meat and milk. “If my father had someone who would buy our whole stock, he’d sell everything and start a new business,” says Rigzin. Each day, I walk back to the hotel past Horsepower Motors — a garage beyond the city walls that is fixing a steady stream of motorbikes.

We visit Nyiphu, “the Cave of the Union of the Sun and the Moon”, which clings to cliffs about an hour’s drive north of Lo Manthang. Ten monks in scarlet-crested hats are performing a puja. They’re deep in prayer, accompanied by cymbals, drums, conch horns, and silver-encrusted trumpets.

At a picnic beside a stream, Koutsaftis explains how when he first came to Upper Mustang, the state of the region’s religious art was desperate; it was difficult to discern the images blackened by the soot from butter lamps. Numerous religious sites were damaged by damp, and cracks from earthquakes. I’d read about how at Jampa Lhakhang — the so-called “Mandala Temple” — one of the Buddha’s faces was scraped off by a traditional doctor, who mixed the paint into medicines.

It’s only by making comparisons between the faint outlines of lost deities, and the minuscule expressions of those figures that have been retrieved with restoration, that I realise how significant the scale and ambition of the AHF’s work.

At Thubchen Lhakhang in Lo Manthang, which is one of the biggest monastic assembly halls in Mustang, the detail is mesmerising — the gold, red and jade bracelets belonging to a Bodhisattva, the galloping archers, the gold linings that edge a drift of clouds. Yangchen Dolker Gurung explains the murals’ symbolism as she stands in a shaft of sun; it floods the gloom with a pool of light.

In the same prayer hall, Dawa Dhondup introduces me to a group of local painters he has been overseeing since 2018, some of whom have been working on the restoration for 20 years. With brushes comprising no more than a few strands of animal hair, I watch them evoke the eye of a mythical bird, the scornful frown of a protecting deity, the stir of wind in a tree. The more curious I become, the more Dhondup reveals.

“I’m just a wanderer, a piece of paper,” he says. He is originally from Tibet, and has been painting since aged 13.

I peel off from the group to have tea with him in the private prayer room of the four-storied royal palace in Lo Manthang. He explains how he started working under Fieni in 2011, and the moral and spiritual gravitas of trying to resurrect the shape and meaning of a lost image.

“There have been some situations we just couldn’t decide — either the technique or the picture,” says Dhondup. “I couldn’t be sure of what to do. But when I was sleeping, I could see it, like a vision. It happened about five or six times. Sometimes with too much thinking, you lose the feeling. But when you dream, it becomes clear.”

He unscrolls some of the thangkas he has painted in his spare time, protected by thin skeins of tissue paper. One painting stands out in particular. It depicts Vajrapani, the powerful “holder of a thunderbolt”, depicted in a brilliant blue.

He describes the seven pigments he uses to create a single shade, although sometimes he needs more.

“The western style is by measurement and analysis. Our style is different; we work by instinct.”

I can’t take my eyes off the thangka. It’s a work of deep personal and spiritual conviction, and different to his gift that glows anonymously in the mandalas and the Bodhisattva’s fingernails, the horses and the sea monsters that hold my attention on the walls of the monasteries. Unlike the murals, the thangka carries his signature.

I watch him roll it back into the tissue paper. He closes up the prayer room, leaving a butter lamp to keep vigil in front of the late king’s altar, the light glancing off the walls like confetti shaved from gold. The next day it rains. We get stuck for three nights, locked in by swollen rivers and dramatic landslides.

The celestial blue of Mustang’s sky disappears; the contours of distant Tibet are no longer visible under the weight of fog. Until the weather breaks, the gorge is impassable, by road or air. From my hotel window, I’m unable to see a thing, not even the faint shadow of a mountain. I think of the thangka, and the painter dreaming. I think of the precise stroke of his brush, of the artist recomposing his purpose — seeing clearly, in what appears extinguished.

Sophy Roberts travelled as a guest of Geographic Expeditions (geoex.com). The 11-night small group AHF-focused tour combining the Solukhumbu with Upper Mustang costs from $11,975 per person (based on double occupancy), and will be repeated in April and October in 2023

A big opening for 2023

As remote as Mustang might be, it currently finds itself at the centre of much buzz and anticipation in the luxury travel industry thanks to the imminent arrival of a high-end brand from Cambodia. Moksha Mustang, an existing hotel located just above the Jomsom airstrip in Lower Mustang closed last month and will reopen in May 2023 as the 29-suite Shinta Mani Mustang — A Bensley Collection.

The hotel is being redesigned by Bill Bensley, the American-born architect and designer responsible for numerous luxury resorts worldwide for brands including Capella, Four Seasons and Rosewood, as well as the Mustang hotel’s two Cambodian stablemates, Shinta Mani Angkor in Siem Reap and Shinta Mani Wild in the Cardamom Mountains.

The existing structure won’t change much, with lots of floor-to-ceiling glass making the most of its location facing the snowy peak of Nilgiri. The interior scheme is set to be more colourful, and the service (including guided excursions, from trekking to cycling) more polished, which accounts for an ambitious rise in room rates.

Travellers making a longer trip that includes both the Upper and Lower Mustang regions on one tour, might find it a restful place to acclimatise — and enjoy some very fine starlit views. But if you only stayed here, and didn’t head into Upper Mustang for a deeper immersion, you’d be missing the whole point of coming this far in the first place.

Double rooms start at $1,700 per night all inclusive; mustang-shintamani.com

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