Drawn to Nepal’s mountainous northern region, Peta Carey wrestles with tourism guilt, vertical ascents, Buddhist rituals and the ultimate power of nature.
It’s all because of writer Peter Matthiessen. His bestseller The Snow Leopard was gifted to me when I was 17. I read it, devoured it, and imagined that one day, unlike Matthiessen (he only ever found the big cat’s pug marks), I would see hiun chituwa, the snow leopard. But I never did make it to Nepal, either because of a sliding-doors moment (Moscow over Kathmandu) or, more recently, when an expedition was thwarted by Covid.
Instead, as a young woman, I travelled to East Africa, making forays (and films) in various corners of the continent. There, it was Matthiessen’s The Tree Where Man was Born that said it all, the pages of the paperback well worn from thumbing through, from one succinct quote to another line of his magnificent prose.
But there is another of his beautiful books I’d held on to for decades: East of Lo Monthang: In the Land of Mustang, covering Matthiessen and photographer Tom Laird’s journey into Upper Mustang, a remote province of Nepal just before it was opened to westerners in 1992. The images from this book, plus Matthiessen’s prose, left an allure. So when a friend said she was going on an organised trek to Mustang and asked if I would I like to join her, it was Matthiessen I said yes to – I would follow his trail.
I wouldn’t be overrunning the area. A not insignificant trekking fee would be paid.
It’s more than 30 years since Matthiessen and Laird’s expedition; much can change in just a few years, of course. I felt a pang of compromise booking a flight half-way across the world – the carbon footprint-guilt, as it transpired, was prescient – and becoming what I often resent in my own home town of Tāhuna/Queenstown: just another gawping and ogling tourist. I convinced myself my visit last September would be different: I’d bring employment to a few folk, and besides, I wouldn’t be overrunning the area, refusing to go anywhere near the tourism crunch of Everest base camp. And anyway, this part of Upper Mustang was restricted; a not insignificant trekking fee (US$500) would be paid.
This was, in fact, the only restriction. Only the wealthy, then, or those like me, who choose to spend whatever they have and venture beyond. Still wealthy, I admit, certainly by Nepalese standards.
Some readers might recall I have reported on the possibility of imposing a fee on foreign tourists visiting Milford Sound/Piopiotahi, or restricting daily numbers there. My Mustang trip would provide an interesting test of the viability of such a scheme. Who could afford it and how much were they prepared to pay? Who would choose to shun the snow-clad high peaks of the Khumbu Valley and instead pay money to see high, arid landscapes verging on bleak and windswept? Or to indulge in remote Tibetan Buddhist culture? Did the scheme succeed in controlling tourism numbers?
Zigzag scar
Remote? The first loss of innocence, or rather, expectation, was that now there is a road from the slender airport at Jomsom – though beset by gale-force winds after 10.30am (it’s a vortex between mountain ranges) – all the way to Upper Mustang. Admittedly, there are sections where only an experienced driver can negotiate the rubble, changing down to the lowest gear. But where once there were only trekking trails for people and horses, squadrons of jeeps now send up clouds of dust, and the road cuts a zigzag scar across the most magnificent of mountainsides. Bridges span rivers and gorges, power lines threaded alongside. The road goes all the way through to Tibet – er, China – made with funding from the Chinese. Some trekkers doggedly walk the road or the trekking trails alongside; we drove – our trek would begin near Lo Monthang (now Manthang).
The topography either side of the road is astounding, the vertical metres adding up quickly – too quickly (altitude sickness is fast setting in).
As we finally arrive at the historic enclave of Lo Manthang we experience the second loss of innocence. Laird’s beautiful images of the walled city – monastery and royal palace within – are now eclipsed, the construction of guest houses and souvenir shops around the perimeter (where was that original wall now?) exponential in the years since the road went through. Shops have vodka and whisky in the windows alongside Chinese thermos flasks and the ubiquitous blue and white ceramic bowls.
Along this road are, of course, a handful of fellow tourists: Australians (not many Kiwis), Asians, Europeans and Israelis, all stern-faced in the seats of each jeep, possibly (and understandably) terrified. It’s steep country. We pause at shrines where prayers are inscribed on mani stone walls – the walls are the longest and oldest in Nepal, Matthiessen noted.
Even at Lo Manthang, tourists are relatively few. A group of students from New Delhi pose for selfies in front of what was the Royal Palace. The only resident here now is the mastiff, a thick-maned canine continuing to guard, menacingly, whatever remains.
Laird photographed the Tiji Festival – the centuries-old regional cultural celebration held every May – in Lo Manthang. Having lived and breathed Nepal since his first visit in the 1970s, he had special entry to palaces and monasteries and with his long lens seemed to soar like a bird above the walled city and survey the extraordinary spectacle of the festival. Our guide, the ever intuitive Samde Sherpa, suggests the Buddhist event now has its challenges, not least the number of tourists trying for the ideal Instagram post in the midst of the ritual.
Wandering through the village to its outskirts, however, I am relieved to see the women winnowing the fields of barley just as Laird had photographed them, the bags of grain loaded on the backs of resigned ponies. One small tick for what had remained the same (admittedly, a combine-harvesting tractor was hidden in the background).
Tectonic forces
Finally, with a sigh of relief, we begin the trek, the steep trail up to 4500m expertly negotiated by our porters, sherpas and the horsemen with small, sure-footed and clever ponies. The landscape here is utterly spectacular in all its topographical glory – once buried beneath the ocean, uplifted in successive millennia of tectonic forces, glaciated, eroded and uplifted again. A geologist’s dreamscape. Here, there are no roads, no jeeps, no tourists; only the nomads whistling their herd of goats and sheep into the protected stone-walled enclaves every night – the snow leopard a seemingly invisible but very real threat.
Even our horsemen call the horses close in every night, hobbling them by the tents. A few of us rise before dawn, scanning the side of the river in case we might see hiun chituwa after all.
Instead, we gawp at the many sky caves. Laird photographed monks still in retreat, high in the cliffs. Now, the sky caves are empty. Only Suzan, our sous chef and a natural rock climber, manages to claw his way to the top level. And more amazingly, down again. He says there are human bones up there, a burial cave, perhaps.
You gaze up at these potted gaps in the cliffs and marvel. How did the monks even get there? Fifty feet, 50m, up and up, caves first gouged by rain, perhaps, then enlarged, connected; a maze of tunnels and rooms. It’s said that the monks retreated to hide in the decades before the 1990s – a tumultuous time of warring factions and geopolitics involving China, the US and Tibetan so-called rebels, the Khampas, played out around the terraced fields of buckwheat and barley.
You gaze up at these potted gaps in the cliffs and marvel. How did the monks even get there?
From the high passes, one can gaze to the border with Tibet, the Chinese observation towers reminding of an omnipresent threat.
Well away from any road, this New Zealander, used to carrying all I need on my back in our mountains, finds the phenomenon of organised trekking confronting. Those poor ponies or porters carry tents that are simply too big, as well as sleeping mats and piles of deck chairs. Ram Rei, our cook, produces feasts of delicious food, more than we need, all served at a tented dinner table, for goodness sake. I want to say we can sit on our backsides, we can gaze at ngā maunga, we can cope with so much less.
A cup of black tea is kindly brought to each tent at 6am, Sherpa Tendi’s smile as endearing as the warm cuppa, and each day begins. Wandering up rivers, gorges, over passes, noting the alpine flowers and Himalayan griffon vultures, in awe of the ponies with huge loads on their backs, this sea-level dweller is grateful to carry only 7kg and keep breathing, keep walking up.
Away from the road, we see no one. No other foreign tourist. The US$500 fee had “worked”, so it seemed. But then, the logistics of getting into Upper Mustang are daunting – two flights from Kathmandu, both weather dependent.
Or perhaps it is due to the tenacity and vision of our guide, Samde Sherpa, who tells us later that fewer than 1% of tourists to Mustang take the less-trodden path away from the road and tea houses. But he has scouted the route and knows the ponies could handle the steep trails.
Fitness is a major limiter. At least two of the group choose to leave by Jeep at the next town. Their inability to climb a hill at altitude is a greater barrier than the fee.
Rude awakening
But then, sanctimonious as I felt, there was yet another factor that would affect us all, that would be the ultimate decider on access. Samde Sherpa delivers the bad news early one morning in the small village of Yara. Rain is forecast, unseasonal rain; a weather event that has put the nation of Nepal on alert. The horsemen, Gambal (usually the ebullient comedian) and his younger brother Sankar, mutter gravely as they saddle up the ponies.
Although we bipeds could cross the next river gorge by suspension bridge, the ponies would have to cross the river. If it were in flood, we could lose a pony. Equally, on the steep trails, if the clay and stone turned to thick mud, the ponies could lose their footing and risk slipping off a cliff.
We would have to short-circuit our trek – sadly, the best few days were still ahead of us – and try simply to get out. One day walking in the rain, increasingly torrential, back to the main road and village; the next day a number of hours by Jeep (once the village tractor had pulled the Jeeps out of the first landslide); and finally, a halt. No further. We look down the Kali Gandaki river valley and see those roads, bridges, telecommuncations, all gone. Landslides came from above, the river carved out giant gulches from below.
As the sun reappears on our final day, we set off again, Shanks’s pony and real ponies able to navigate across the top of the landslides as Jeeps and their tourist passengers sit waiting on the impossible: for one grader to clear the hundreds of liquefaction-like slips of mud; to resurrect a navigable road before scheduled flights back to first-world countries.
Fees, tourism limits – I can’t help but note that nature often has the final word. And the time-tested ways of old – those beloved ponies – were the more dependable way out.
Elsewhere in Nepal, whole villages were wiped off hillsides, buses subsumed, the death toll mounting beyond 300. The media reported “unseasonal”, yet another “one in one hundred year event”.
It wasn’t only here, of course. Although Nepal barely made international headlines, weather events in August and September struck the US, the Sahara Desert, and soon there were similar scenes of flooding, landslides and road blocks even back in Aotearoa. That carbon footprint – of mine and so many millions of others – had added up. Back in Wi-Fi range, a friend sent me an image of an avalanche on the Milford Rd – more of nature limiting where we can but hope to wander.
Back safely to Jomsom, then Kathmandu and home, I’m grateful for having been permitted a small glimpse into the world of Upper Mustang, one that my wallet and lungs appeared to permit. But in the end, it was nature that was the ultimate arbiter of where we can venture on this increasingly fragile planet.
Peta Carey is a Tāhuna/Queenstown-based writer and documentary-maker.
