Mustang in Nepal – Part 2
Monday, 24 November 2025In Mustang in Nepal – Part 1 – I followed the Kali Gandaki north to Lo Manthang, now I’m there …
▲ In the centre of Lo Manthang the 1448 Jampa Gompa has amazing outer passages around the inner core and upstairs is pretty damn impressive as well. This big gompa is the oldest in Lo Manthang with some wonderful thankas on the wall and a big Maitreya Buddha image. Looking out over the town from the room it’s interesting the juxtaposition of those traditional roof-edge wood piles with today’s solar panels and TV satellite dishes.
▲ We were visiting Lo Manthang for the annual Yartung Festival – ‘with incredible costumes, parades and horse events’ – which was cancelled at the last minute due to the death of an important monk. The opportunity to gallop horses is hard to resist for the citizens of Mustang, however, so horse races still went on, up and down a road just outside the city walls.
▲ Clearly form counts for as much as speed, these judges conferred and took notes after every rider passed by. The winner, we saw him proudly walking back afterwards, gets a lakh of Nepalese rupees – 100,000 NPR, about US$750, the runner up takes away 50,000 NPR.
◄ Could you drive your Tesla up to Lo Manthang? If it can manage the roads, looks like you could.
▲ A masked dance performance at the Choedhe Gompa in Lo Manthang. Backed by four cymbal players, one drummer and two big farting pipes, there are three masked dancers, then six dancers with drums and six again without. All very exciting and great for our photographers.
▲ We drove north from Lo Manthang towards Nyamdok, the last settlement before the border with China. I was surprised how little traffic there was from China, I had the impression that opening up the road would lead to a flood of Chinese heading south into Mustang. We turned off the road and crossed this river to reach Chosser with its three monasteries.
▲ The Sija Jhong Cave Monastery was an opportunity to clamber inside and explore the various levels of the empty monastery. It’s energetic work climbing ladders and crawling from one constrained cave to another. And dusty.
◄ North of Chosser we turned off the road and drove to a nomad encampment which was in fact surprisingly close to the nearest settlement, as goats were brough in to be milked. All the goats are herded into one enclosure, then the female goats are brought out – how the two sexes are separated I have no idea – and those female goats are then herded into a second enclosure. The woman running this show then proceeds to tie them up with a rope around their neck, alternately facing one direction and another. They accept this process with complete placidity, it’s almost as if they’re lining up to be constrained in this back-and-forth lineup. I think it ends when she runs out of rope with about 30 or 40 goats tied together and the remaining dozen or so loitering around to watch the process.
▲ I guess they needed to be milked, so it’s a relief when it happens and if they have to be tied up first, then that’s the way it is.
▲ Then they’re milked, she works down one side, her male assistant down the other. You clearly don’t get a lot of milk out of a goat, it goes into small pails.
▲ Looking back on Lo Manthang as we climbed away from the capital to head back south to Jomsom. In the 1990s Lo Manthang was totally contained within the old city walls. There has been a great deal of building activity outside those walls in the past 30 years. It’s also remarkable how much greener it is outside the city, old photographs show Lo Manthang surrounded by barren grounds, now there are lots of trees.
▲ Heading back south to Jomsom we drove through Gheling with a chorten decorated with these wonderful elephant bas reliefs. I remembered them from my 2011 Mustang trip.
At the end of our Mustang travels we spent the night in Jomsom and flew out to Pokhara the next morning. Flying out of Jomsom is always a fraught affair, the weather is very changeable and it’s only in the morning that flights can arrive and depart. On my 2011 Mustang trip we’d also intended to fly from Jomsom, but the weather had been overcast and there had been no flights for several days. Many of us had pressing travel requirements and we decided to head back to Pokhara by road. It was a trip from hell, slow going, diversions, flooded rivers, at one point we had to abandon our bus, wade across a river and find another bus on the other side. We eventually had to stop for the night, near Tatopani and the place we stayed certainly wasn’t up to 2025’s standards! In the morning the weather had cleared and flights were operating, we should have waited in Jomsom.
In 2025, despite threats that the weather was closing in, our Summit Air L410 UVP-E20, a Czech Republic aircraft, came in, disembarked passengers and their baggage, loaded all of us and our bags on board and was taxiing out to the runway seven to eight minutes after arriving. Michael O’Leary of Ryanair in Europe, famed for turning flight around as quickly as possible, would have been impressed. You can’t afford to waste time at Jomsom when the weather could change at any moment.
▲ Did the group enjoy their Mustang photographic trip? I think the faces on the Jomsom-Pokhara flight answer that question.
