Mustang Tour

We travel to Pokhara, either on the twenty-five minute flight or by road in six to seven hours along the Trishuli and Marsyangdi. Pokhara sits at 800m beside Phewa Lake with Machhapuchhre almost 7,000m directly above it, which is a closer relationship between a town and a big mountain than anywhere else in Nepal. The afternoon is free at Lakeside - a boat across to the Tal Barahi temple on its island, or simply the walk along the lake road in the evening. An early night is worth having: the Jomsom flight goes at first light because the wind in the Kali Gandaki gorge builds through the morning and the aircraft cannot fly into it.

The flight to Jomsom is short and genuinely dramatic, twenty minutes up the Kali Gandaki gorge between Dhaulagiri and Annapurna - the deepest gorge in the world measured from the peaks on either side - landing at 2,720m on an airstrip in the valley floor. Jomsom is the district headquarters and the change in landscape from Pokhara is total: you have flown through the Himalaya into the rain shadow behind them, and everything is bare ochre rock, wind and enormous sky. We drive on to Kagbeni, a medieval mud-brick village at the confluence of the Kali Gandaki and the Jhong Khola, with a red gompa above it, irrigation channels running through the lanes and a checkpost that marks the gateway to Upper Mustang. The afternoon is for walking round the village and starting to acclimatise.

Up to Muktinath at 3,710m and back, a drive of about an hour each way on a road that climbs steeply out of the valley. The temple complex is one of very few places sacred to Hindus and Buddhists alike - Vishnu as Mukti Narayan to one, Chumig Gyatsa to the other - and pilgrims come here from across South Asia. They bathe under 108 stone spouts running with water straight off the mountain, in a courtyard set among poplars, and behind the Jwala Mai shrine a natural gas flame burns over water, which is the reason the site was held sacred in the first place. Nilgiri and Dhaulagiri stand across the valley. We keep the pace slow because 3,710m is real altitude, and return to Kagbeni for the night.

The full day north into Upper Mustang by jeep, and the point at which the restricted-area permit earns itself. The road climbs through Chele, Samar and Ghami, crossing passes above 3,800m, past cliffs riddled with man-made caves cut into the rock face - thousands of them, some more than two thousand years old, and still not fully explained. The colours are extraordinary: ochre, grey, red and white bands in the eroded cliffs, with almost no vegetation and villages appearing as sudden green patches wherever there is irrigation. It is a long day, seven or eight hours with stops, and it ends at Lo Manthang, the walled capital of the old kingdom of Lo, at 3,840m.

A full day in and around Lo Manthang. The walled city is small - a few hundred metres across - and entirely enclosed, with the former royal palace at its centre and three major monasteries: Jampa Lhakhang, with its fifteenth-century mandalas; Thubchen, a vast assembly hall; and Chodey. The wall paintings in Jampa and Thubchen have been restored over the past two decades and are among the most important surviving examples of their kind anywhere. In the afternoon we drive north to Chhoser to see the Jhong cave complex, five storeys of chambers cut into a cliff and connected by ladders, and the Nyphu cave monastery beside it. Mustang kept its own royal line into living memory, and it shows.

The long drive back down the valley to Jomsom, retracing the route through Ghami, Samar and Chele with the light coming from the other direction, which changes the cliffs completely. We stop at Marpha, a whitewashed Thakali village of flat-roofed houses and paved lanes set among apple orchards, known throughout Nepal for its apples and its brandy - both are worth stopping for. Marpha is also one of the tidiest and most attractive villages in the country, with the water channels running under the paving. We reach Jomsom in the late afternoon and stay the night there.

The flight out of Jomsom leaves early, before the valley wind gets up, and drops back down the gorge to Pokhara in twenty minutes. There is usually a wait at the airstrip and occasionally a delay of a day if the weather closes in, which is why we do not schedule an international connection for the same evening. From Pokhara we continue to Kathmandu by air or road. If there is time in Pokhara before the onward leg, the lake is ten minutes from the airport.