Muktinath Tour

We travel to Pokhara, either by air in twenty-five minutes or by road in six to seven hours. Pokhara is at 800m on Phewa Lake with the Annapurnas directly above it, and the afternoon is free - a boat on the lake, or the walk along Lakeside in the evening. The Jomsom flight leaves at first light because the wind in the Kali Gandaki builds through the morning, so an early night is worth having. This day also serves a practical purpose: it puts you at 800m rather than straight from Kathmandu to 3,710m, which matters more than people expect.

The flight to Jomsom takes twenty minutes and goes up the Kali Gandaki gorge between Dhaulagiri and Annapurna, both over eight thousand metres, with the valley floor at less than three - the deepest gorge in the world by that measure. Jomsom is at 2,720m and the landscape is trans-Himalayan: bare, bright and windswept, in the rain shadow behind the main range. We continue by jeep through Kagbeni and up to Muktinath at 3,710m. The temple is sacred to Hindus as Mukti Narayan and to Buddhists as Chumig Gyatsa, and pilgrims come from across South Asia to bathe under the 108 stone spouts that ring the courtyard, running with water straight off the mountain. Behind the Jwala Mai shrine a natural gas flame burns over water, which is why the site was held sacred long before either temple stood here. We pace the day for the altitude and stay the night nearby.

Down the valley with the whole day to do it in. We stop at Kagbeni, a medieval mud-brick village at the confluence of two rivers, with a red gompa above it, irrigation channels running under the lanes and a checkpost marking the edge of the restricted area of Upper Mustang - it is worth an hour on foot. Further down, Marpha is whitewashed, flat-roofed and paved, set among apple orchards, and is known throughout Nepal for its apples and apple brandy; it is also one of the tidiest villages in the country. Along the way the Kali Gandaki riverbed is the place where shaligram are found - black ammonite fossils, sacred to Vishnu, and evidence that this valley was once a seabed. We reach Jomsom in the afternoon.

The flight out of Jomsom goes early, before the valley wind gets up, and takes twenty minutes back down to Pokhara. Delays are common and occasional cancellations happen, which is why we never schedule an international connection for the same evening. From Pokhara we continue to Kathmandu by air or by road, arriving in the afternoon or the evening depending on which. If the Jomsom flight is grounded there is a road alternative to Pokhara, which is long but reliable.