Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> Travel >> Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)

Today's Question
What's a good family outing in Glacier National Park? answer

I want to spend New Years cross-country skiing in the Rockies. Where should I go? answer

What do you suggest for a cheap winter trip to Baja, Mexico? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Online

Page:

Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)


	Lo Manthang, the ancient capital in 1992 (Thomas Laird)

II. THE LAND OF LO
ANY TRAVELER'S TALE OF MUSTANG BEGINS with the cruel and ubiquitous wind. One hundred and fifty million years ago, when there were not yet Himalayas to climb or die on, the air currents bouncing our little plane were a sea breeze, moderate or not, and these mountains lay darkly within the ocean floor, a chain of eggs from an underworld serpent, unimaginable in their greatness, and no one to imagine them anyway except the gods.

But in the expansive geologic minute, snow peaks thrust up through sea beds, and formed a virtually unbroken axis 1,500 miles long. Only in a few places do Asia's rivers breach this great dam. In one such spot, the Kali Gandaki River cuts a cosmic ax chop 18,000 feet between the Annapurnas and Dhaulagiri, and isobars of wind pinch through the chasm like an ocean current through a cut in a barrier reef. Planes leaving Pokhara for Jomsom, the chief city of Lower Mustang, leave shortly after sunrise or not at all; any later and thermals make the flight impossible.

To walk the same distance takes days, up and up out of the dripping, flowered forests into the Himalayan rain shadow, a land so barren and unforgiving that the Lobas themselves—the people of Mustang, called Lo in Tibetan—describe their own geography as the desiccated, bleached carcass of a horse, the wind trumpeting through its ribs on an endless heap of rocks.

Past Dhaulagiri's sinister icefall, through a charcoal ceiling of clouds, the twin-engine Otter begins its nauseating descent. We soon stand stunned,

The road out of town is lively, an Old West mix of animals and pilgrims, a toylike Chinese tractor, solitary dzos like shaggy Texas longhorns.

astounded, on Jomsom's airstrip, gaping at 23,166-foot Nilgiri, rocketing into the heavens, glazed with sunlight. Then, the cloud bank to the east shifts, revealing the back side of the Annapurnas and a cornice the size of a supertanker, hung on the crest of a frozen tidal wave. The miracle of the Himalayas is this: Every time you look, every second you look, you are seeing the mountains, trying to believe the mountains, for the first time. For once in your life, the newness is eternal.

For the sunny frontier town of Jomsom, so, apparently, is change. A construction crew tells us that the airport's paved apron, begun two Decembers before, will be completed in five days, allowing turboprops to land. Next, the government is building a road up the Kali Gandaki gorge from Pokhara, and eventually on to Lo Manthang, the ancient walled capital of Mustang, already connected by a graded road to the Tibetan border. The project has more than financial and engineering difficulties to overcome: The mule skinners who freight cargo and trekkers' gear up the old salt-trade routes have objected, and so have those who wince at the prospect of mass tourism in the kingdom of Lo, although last spring the Nepalese government was mulling the idea of lifting Upper Mustang's restricted status and lowering its $700 entrance fee. Even New Delhi has protested, gripped by a doomsday scenario of Chinese troops trucked across Mustang and down through the Himalayas to the Indian border.

But with or without a road, Jomsom thrives, its guest houses filled with windburned Germans and Australians and Israelis. As a destination, Jomsom is a way station for trekkers and pilgrims on the Annapurna Circuit and a staging area for expeditions like ours up to Lo Manthang, 50 miles and three centuries away. As a political entity, it is the seat for Mustang's elected governor, the liaison between Kathmandu and Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista, the 25th raja—or, as he is commonly called, king—of Mustang. As a cultural and ecological entity, Jomsom, and all of Mustang, is regulated by the Annapurna Conservation Area Project, a Nepalese NGO, funded by the royal family's King Mahendra Trust. ACAP's influence, as evidenced by signs prohibiting the use of plastic bags in Mustang, is a benign force to be reckoned with, a sort of Big Didi watching over the land and its creatures.

Beyond Jomsom, the Kali Gandaki is a thousand-lane highway rolled down between canyon walls, a slumbering monster undulating extravagantly across its Mississippi RiverÐsize plain. What we are about to do—ride horseback up the canyon—won't be possible in another month or two, when the monsoon wins its battle with the Himalayas and the Kali Gandaki turns furious, expanding to a hundred times its dry-season level and forcing travelers to the harrowing footpaths along the cliffs. Even now, on the eve of the rains, riders bound for Lo Manthang exit the canyon early, avoiding the overnight journey through the fabulous but virtually impassable upper gorge, but we are going through that as well.

Our horses cluster across the river, past the Jimi Hendrix Rooftop Restaurant, in the precious shade of a grove of neem trees. They are the king's horses, mind you—Laird has cut a deal—and have been brought down from Lo Manthang, where they have grazed and galloped all their horsey lives in agrarian bliss. The king's horseman, Mahendra, and his young assistant, Tomay, size us up: In addition to the seven of us, we have a guide, Ang Tsering, and his crew of Sherpas, and a liaison officer who attached himself to us in Pokhara, since it is illegal to journey into Upper Mustang or any restricted area without some variety of cop shambling along.

Of the queri, Laird and I are the only experienced riders; our grimacing wives, Jann and Cat, are overtly brave but secretly panicked. The liaison officer sits woodenly astride Mahendra's own white pony, and without fanfare or guidance Laird mounts a sturdy walnut-brown gelding. The remaining two horses are the biggest and the smallest of the herd, the most spirited and the most ridiculous: a large (by Tibetan standards) white prancing gelding named Jamling, and a round, puny (by petting zoo standards) chestnut mare with a graying face. I look over at our friend Mark, shorter than me and lighter by 40 pounds, and shrug. He sits atop the mare like a kid on a sawhorse, his legs almost scraping the ground.

The road out of town is lively, an Old West mix of animals, villagers, and pilgrims—horses and mule trains, goats and shepherds, solitary dzos like shaggy Texas longhorns, a toylike Chinese tractor hauling a wagon of laborers. The desolation is sobering, the lunar magnitude so unwelcoming that even the Maoists are giving Mustang a wide berth. After several rugged hours in the wind and rocks, our exhilaration is muffled but we're having a Class B sort of sore-assed fun, glancing up at the cliff and glad not to be on it.

So far the Kali Gandaki has remained mostly invisible, playing by itself in some other part of the neighborhood, but now it cuts a swath toward the eastern wall of the canyon; its hissing penetrates the drone of the wind, and we can smell its wet-stone iciness. Ever-vigilant Mahendra lopes across the rocks to stop me. The river here is too dangerous to cross; we have to go up. Well and good, but we are only a dozen feet above the rapids when he halts again, pointing ahead to where the canyon wall is raw and sagging, scooped out by recent landslides. "Go fast down this section," he says, eyes alarmingly wide, and before I know it he bolts over the slides and under the sickening, rotting overhangs in a crouch, like a soldier sprinting across Sniper Alley. Wow. There are many ways to kill yourself in the Himalayas, and here by God is one of them.

Again and again the path attenuates, and I find myself high on a cliffside, glued to Jamling, maneuvering along an 18-inch trail of crushed rock, the river slurupping the base of the wall hundreds of feet below. To the left I would be required to dismount into space. To the right I can dismount only by pushing my horse over the brink, where it would splatter like a watermelon on the rubble below. Jamling's hooves boot pebbles into the abyss.

Wind-blasted and parched, we arrive at the beautiful mud-and-stone village of Kagbeni, the last outpost before the restricted area of Upper Mustang, and enter the town's medieval warren of streets. At twilight, dandelions of light appear. Kagbeni has had electricity for a year, and a television flickers blue in the house below the tea room where we sprawl. Three foreigners, like us on the way up-canyon to Lo Manthang, share our inn for the night. The youngest guy is a rosy-cheeked Swede, full of enthusiasm and energy and charm, 21 years old.

"Why are you reading that book?" Laird asks him, pointing to his copy of Michel Peissel's Mustang, A Lost Tibetan Kingdom, the account of the French ethnologist's 1964 journey to Lo Manthang. It seems Laird's subtext here is, Why aren't you reading my book, you hatchling? "It's almost 40 years old! It's ancient history."

"Yes," says the kid, whose untested life is floating on the perfect answer, "but it makes you dream." Ah, Laird grins, falling back in love with the concept of youth, this 2001 model of his yearning, footloose boyhood self.

Page: