Near the Top of Asia, the Kingdom of Lo (Part 7, Heading South)

Heading south out of Lo Manthang

Dear readers, we have walked to the remote capital of Lo Manthang in Nepal's Kingdom of Lo and ridden horses to the monastery of Nyiphu near the Tibetan border. But autumn was approaching, and it was time to head south and, eventually, home. 

Leaving Lo Manthang, we walked south through a rather desolate and bleak landscape. Imagine the winter here at 3,800 m elevation. For our trek south, we followed the eastern route which approximately follows the Kali Gandhi River. We crossed a couple of passes exceeding 3,900 m elevation, but it was not hard walking, and we had been at that altitude for over a week.

Modern steel girder bridge at Charang

Charang (Tsarang)

Long day in the saddle, Charang

Charang (or Tsarang), at 3550 m is the first town south of Lo Manthang. We stayed in the Kailash Hotel, a rustic but clean place. Note from the photographs above that we still had magnificent weather, with nights just a bit below freezing. It was October 14, so winter would be here soon.

A ruined palace, once the home of the Raja of Mustang, strategically overlooks the town.

Dhargyeling Monastery, Charang

The Dhargyeling Monastery in Charang, possibly over 500 years old, is a treasury of statuary, painting, and sacred scrolls. How do these pigments survive the brutal cycling from cold to hot?

Ghami

In another day, we reached the village of Ghami, where we had stayed a week before. From here on heading south, we retraced our steps along the Kali Gandhi River. 

Main Street, Syanboche

Packing up at the Dhaulagiri, Syanboche

Our next night was in Syanboche (also Syangbochen? approx. 3,800 m), really little more than a dirt street between some houses. 

Sure-footed walking near Chungsi

Samar

At the Annapurna, Samar

Samar was a rather well developed town, just a short distance above Chele and the crossing of the Kali Gandaki. North of town, the road passed through some treacherous terrain of landslides and rotten rock. We saw road crews trying to cut the road across some cliff-faces. We learned later that in the following winter, parts of the road were swept away in landslides. Our horses were more sure-footed than we were.

The next day, we walked across the river and stayed again in the big town of Kagbeni, which I described in Pat 2 of this series (click the link).

Jomson

Oh, oh, traffic, electricity, stores, lights - after another day's walk south from Kagbeni, we reached Jomson, the main commercial town of southern Mustang. Jomson has many hotels as well stores, a health center, and an airport. This was a major stop on the Annapurna circuit, so it has received tourist traffic for decades.

Jomson was the last stop for most of our group. They returned to Kathmandu by air. Within about a week, brutal cold descended into Central Asia, and many Mustang villagers had to head south abruptly. 

I opted to continue south on foot and walk down the fantastic valley of the Kali Gandaki. The river cuts the deepest canyon in the world between the 8,000-m peaks of Dhaulagiri and Annapurna. This amazing 4-day walk carries your through several biologic zones as the elevation drops and the temperature goes up. You are in high altitude desert at Jomson and semi-tropical rainforest at Tatopani. I wrote about this canyon walk in 2017. Highly recommended!

This ends one of my best hiking trips ever. I hope you enjoyed riding (walking) along. 

Near the Top of Asia, the Kingdom of Lo (Part 6, Nyiphu Monastery)

 

Waypoints from a Garmin Geko GPS receiver. Mystique is the guesthouse in Lo-Manthang. Maps made with ESRI ArcGIS software

North of Lo-Manthang, the terrain looks dry, wild, and forbidding. But humans have inhabited this area for at least 2500 years, indicating there was sufficient water for agriculture and animal husbandry. The cliffs around the valley are riddled with caves, some of which were used for human occupation hundreds of years ago. Many were tombs and contain religious relics dating back to the origins of Tibetan Buddhism.

 

Chhoser is a small town in the valley north of Lo-Manthang. I think this is where we bought tickets to visit the monastery. In the photograph above, note the rock walls made of rounded river rock. I assume this is one way that the villagers cleared the land to make it suitable for some agriculture (barley?) or grazing. You see similar rock walls in New England, where settlers in the 1600s and 1700s cleared rocks from the land and used walls as a disposal method.

The  Nyiphug Namdrol Norbuling Monastery is north of the town of Chhoser and is partly built into the mountain. We rented horses for the 8 km. trip north out of Lo-Manthang. Our Sherpa guides walked, but we wimpy lowlanders opted for the bumpy luxury transportation.

Ancient books wrapped in silk

Modern notebooks at a study table

Buddha backed by a modern commercial decorative cloth (or tablecloth?)

The rooms built into the rock are decorated like many gompas, with colorful fabrics, a sitting Buddha, candles, some electric lights, and a variety of offerings donated by pilgrims. Fascinating.

 

Monks occupied some of these caves in solitary meditation, sometimes spending months or years alone. Other caves shielded families in the past during warfare. I am not sure how they handled water supply. Some caves contained tombs dating back thousands of years. A 2017 Public Broadcast System (PBS) NOVA program described an expedition to investigate Secrets of the Sky Tombs. We were able to climb up to some of the caves, which have passageways and platforms that are semi-safe for tourists.

 

View from a cave above Nyiphug Gompa

This is a very special place. And the remoteness and culture will be profoundly changed when the road is complete down the Kali Gandaki. Already, the road to China means Chinese trade goods come in from the north. What happens when mass market tourism comes via bus? As David Ways wrote in 2019:

For trekkers the dreaded road from Pokhara to Lo Manthang to Tibet is not yet as bad as some people make out (it only exists in small sections and is completely off-road). However, once it is finished and the trading route to China is fully open there’s little doubt the Kingdom of Lo will disappear into folklore and package tours much like the Annapurna Circuit of 10 years ago.

Returning to Lo-Manthang

As of 2011, Lo was still a magical place, a time capsule of tradition and a way of life little changed over the decades. I am glad I visited this remote part of the world. When the COVID crisis is finally under control, consider a trip to the Kingdom of Lo. 

These are digital images from a Panasonic G1 digital camera. This was Panasonic's first micro four thirds (µ4/3) camera and was very refined for a version 1 product.

Near the Top of Asia, the Kingdom of Lo (Part 5; Lo Manthang)

 Lo Manthang is the largest town in remote north central Nepal, near the border with Tibet. According to Wikipedia,

Lo Manthang was the walled capital of the Kingdom of Lo from its founding in 1380 by Ame Pal who oversaw construction of the city wall and many of the still-standing structures. After the Shahs of Gorkha forged Nepal out of numerous petty kingdoms in the 18th century, Lo became a dependency but kept its hereditary rulers. This arrangement continued as long as Nepal remained a kingdom, until the country was declared a republic in 2008 and Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista (c.1933–2016) was stripped of his title. His protector King Gyanendra suffered the same fate, however the raja or gyelpo of Mustang was 25th in a direct line of rulers dating back to 1380 AD. 

Crossette (1996) provides some of the cultural and mid-20th century background to Lo: 

Until the unification of Nepal by Gorkha kings in the eighteenth century, most Tibetan borderlands were not really a part of the country. Psychologically, many pockets still are not. The kingdom of Mustang, nearly 150 rugged miles from Kathmandu in a protuberance thrusting into Tibet, was one of them until Nepal opened the territory to develop­ment and  trekking.  In upper Mustang, the Buddhist kingdom of Lo, with its walled capital, Lo Manthang, broke free of Tibet in the fourteenth century, reached its height about a hundred years later on the strength and income of trade with Tibet, and enjoyed an independent existence for nearly four hundred years. During that time temples and a few palaces were built in what was called Mustang Bhot - Tibetan Mus­tang. "Bhot," ''Bhotia," "Bhutia,'' and other variations of the word often mean Tibetan to South Asians in the same way "Hellenistic" meant not quite Greek but within the influence of the Greek world. The word, probably a variation of ''Bot," originally meant Tibet in the Tibetan language. 

Although the kings of Mustang had lost all their residual powers and the formal use of titles in the 1950s, Mustang was a wild card as late as the 1960s, when Nepal was unable to do much to stop a Tibetan exile guerilla force based there with what is widely assumed to be substantial help from the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The guerrillas, known in Nepal as Khampas because most were from the Kham region of eastern Tibet, obviously never stood much of a chance against the Chinese army in Lhasa, but they could serve as an annoyance to Beijing. Tibetan exiles in the Indian hill town of Darjeeling told me, with linger­ing bitterness, that American enthusiasm for their cause ended as sud­denly as it had begun when President Richard M. Nixon recognized the Chinese Communist regime. Some Tibetans went on fighting until the mid-1970s, when Nepal sent soldiers to wipe out the bases of the rebel­lion. About the same time, the royal government of King Mahendra introduced some development to Mustang, which had lost its Tibetan trade.

Lo-Manthang city map (only a bit not in scale)

Rooftops of Lo-Manthang

After walking for days northward through Mustang, Lo-Manthang seemed like the big city. We saw jeeps and motor bikes, some street lighting, stores, cows, horses, and guest houses. We even saw some satellite dishes, and the guest houses had wi-fi. Note the traditional wood sticks placed along the roof parapets. 

Winter preparation, Lo-Manthang, Nepal

Passageway supported by ancient timbers

The motorbikes have an interesting trade connection. As of 2011, the road south through the valley of the Kali Gandaki towards Jomson was not complete. We saw workers constructing sections of the road and learned that during the following winter, rock slides and avalanches destroyed some of their work. However, the Chinese had built a road north from Lo-Manthang to the border with Tibet. Therefore, most of the goods we saw in the small shops, such as packaged foods, cosmetics, candies, and propane bottles, came from China. We learned that several times during the year, Chinese traders held a fair at the border to which Nepalese buyers could visit without visas. That is where the Nepalese bought inexpensive motorbikes, petrol, spare parts, and who knows what else.

But change was ongoing already. As early as the early-1990s, Crosette (1996) describes the trip taken by a Nepali writer, Manjushree Thapa (1992), to Mustang:

She described the king's palace in Lo Manthang, with linoleum on the floors and men who drank themselves into nightly stupors while rolling dice. But she also wrote of the piety and devotion of people who had maintained their Buddhist temples and monasteries undisturbed by poli­tics over centuries. She sat down for tea with monks eating Chinese candy brought back from Tibet, where temples are once again open to them. One of their lamas made regular trips to Tibetan gompas, they said, where he was much in demand to say prayers, In return he brought back butter for the butter lamps of impoverished Lo Manthang. It was an interesting trade-off: the wisdom and piety of an unbroken Tibetan Buddhist tradition for the biscuits, sweets, and butter of soldier-rich, monk-poor Tibet. Tibetan gompas aren't alone in looking toward Lo for a rare cultural purity, Thapa wrote. With the barriers to outsiders coming down, Mustang, like Bhutan, will draw a special breed of tour­ist. "Because it promises a Tibetan culture more pristine than in Chi­nese-occupied Tibet, Lo is the darling of discoverers, adventurers and Tibetophiles," she said. But the outside world is alien, no matter what its motive for coming to Mustang. And outside influences were already making a mark before tourism began, as more people from this hidden kingdom traveled beyond its mountain walls.

Being a former royal capital, Lo_Manthang was full of ancient chortens. 

The raja's Royal Palace is a complicated, five-story structure built around 1400. Imagine the passageways and semi-forgotten chambers. There was probably a cistern to save rainwater. Does it have indoor plumbing now? Several large Tibetan mastiffs sat on an open porch and growled at everyone and everything.

The king signing a book. Note the magnificent furniture.

Dorky tourists with the King of Lo

Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista (Nepali:जिग्मे दोर्जे पलवर विष्ट) (1930-2016) was the unofficial King of Mustang (Mustang Rājā) between 1964 and 2008, when Nepal abolished the Monarchy. The King continued to live in the Palace, and local residents throughout Mustang continued to respect him and his opinions on cultural and administrative matters. We learned that he lived in the palace for the summer but spent winters in Kathmandu and Los Angeles. The raja died in Kathmandu at age of 86. His only son died at age 8, and the current heir to the throne lives in California, married to a Bhutanese princess. 

The school (read the sign for the full name) is supported by the American Himalayan Foundation. It is is a modern building and has electricity. 

Example of street lighting. 

I cannot remember how many nights we stayed in Lo_Manthang, either 3 or 4, making this a fascinating  cultural experience. GO before this remote part of the world changes forever!

References

Crossette, Barbara, 1996. So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, Vantage Books, 320 p.

Thapa, Manjushree, 1992. Mustang Bhot in Fragments, Himal Books (Kathmandu), 139 p.

Photography

These are all digital files from a Panasonic G-1 digital camera. I may have posted too many pictures, but this is a fascinating site off the normal tourist route. 

Cover of So Close to Heaven

The Phoenician Saline di Trapani e Paceco, Sicily

Trapani salt pans from the town of Erice (Èrici)

Sicily is one of these impossibly fascinating places to visit. The topography is dramatic, the people are friendly, the food is sublime, and the culture is an amazing interplay of Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Norman, Arab, and Italian influences. How could you not love an exploration of the culture and food? 

The Phoenecians settled in the coastal areas centuries before Roman domination. Among their developments are the famous and still-operating salt pans, the Saline di Trapani e Paceco, on the west coast of Sicily.

Kurlanski (2002) describes the salt pans:

South of Trapani along the coast, earthen dikes begin to appear and a few stone windmills. The dikes mark off ponds, some of which hold turquoise water, some pink. The stone towers of windmills stick out from these orderly pastel ponds. The saltworks are built out along the coast until towards the south, deep leafy green fields take over, which are the vineyards of Marsala wine. This is one of the oldest salt-making sites in the world - the one started by the Phoenicians to cure their tuna catch, and after the destruction of Carthage, continued by the Romans. When the Muslims were in Sicily from 800 to 1000, they wrote of the windmills of Trapani.

Early in the year (in winter), the workers open sluice gates to let sea water flood the shallow ponds. As the summer develops, the sun evaporates the water. Workers flush the brine into different ponds, allowing the brine to become successively more saline. 

By summer's end, the workers expose the salt that has precipitated to the bottom of the pans and then pile it in multi-ton piles, letting it continue to dry. The tan shapes are roof tiles erected to keep out rainwater. We bought a half kilo of the salt at the museum gift shop.

This is one of the old windmills. From Kurlanski (2002):

The current windmills are based on a Turkish model that was adopted by the Spanish, who brought their windmills to Sicily and later to Holland. About the year 1500, windmills were built here by a man named Grignani to move brine through the ponds. His son was named Ettore, which is the name of these saltworks facing the isle of Mozia. 

I love visiting places like this, where the ghosts of centuries - millennia - remind you that people have lived, worked, thrived, built, warred, and recovered on this land. It opens your eyes and soul. Do visit Sicily, definitely. Spend weeks - months - there.

These are digital images from a Panasonic G1 µ4/3 camera with various lenses. I processed the Raw files with PhotoNinja software.

References

Duncan, P. 1994. Sicily: A Traveler's Guide. John Murray, 244 p.

Kurlansky, M., 2002. Salt, A World History. Penguin Books, 484 p. 

Elegant and Glorious Decay: Palermo, Italy

Palermo, Sicily's capital and main commercial city, is a delicious and haphazard hodgepodge of cathedrals, fountains, 1800s manor houses, palaces, early 20th century apartment blocks, trattorias, and ruins. "Like a smaller version of Rome, Palermo's centre is sprinkled with domes and dotted with pedimented façades of churches rising above the rooftops of surrounding palaces and houses." (Duncan 1994). The palaces and churches have some of the most exquisite stonework, statuary, and mosaics you will see anywhere on earth, a legacy of the talented Moorish artists who worked for the Catholic kings. Palermo is not a sterile archaeological site; it is a vibrant city, just a bit grungy and "earthy." It is off the normal American tourist route (not one of the top five after which the rest of Europe is totally ignored), but the residents are friendly, and it is a short flight from Rome. In my opinion, Palermo is a must-see destination, and I fully agree with Duncan (1994), "This is still one of the most fascinating cities in southern Italy."

We stayed at a bed and breakfast in an old apartment building. They did not heat much, but there was plenty of hot water, and the breakfast had fresh croissants and pastry.

The view from the balcony was pretty interesting. The scaffolding over the church in the distance is typical of Palermo - long-neglected maintenance of an art masterpiece. The narrow lanes likely follow the same paths that have been here since the Roman era.

The merchants below sell odd items from their tiny shops.

I love to check out the market in any city that I visit. The Vucceria Market is at the Via Maccheronai. "Nowhere in Palermo do memories of the old souks survive with such intensity; this was the most disorderly, ramshackle, and chaotic of places even in Arabic days. Merchants, hawkers, bootleggers, and artisans of every description still cluster here." (Duncan, 1994). Well, the day we toured it was rather quiet, but still a great visit. The bootleggers must have been at siesta.

 This is an old apartment block at the Via del Cassari.

Another somewhat rough apartment at the Via dei Candelai.

And some more apartments on the main thoroughfare, the Via Vittoria Emanuele (the name of a former king).

We were warned that these little tourist scooters are a bit dangerous, but probably no worse than a tuk-tuk in Kathmandu.

The side streets are pretty interesting. The gents on the pink Vespa were on the Via Simone di Bologna.

Do you need to move your 4-wheeler somewhere? Put it in your Vespa 3-wheeler.

Earlier, I mentioned the legacy of art to be found throughout Palermo. One example is the Capella Reale, the royal chapel, built by Roger II between 1132 and 1140. Roger and the Pope had some real issues, and Roger wanted to make his capital, Palermo, the equal of Rome in art and culture. The interior of the Capella is one of the most amazing architectural sights in Sicily because it is lavished with brilliant polychromatic mosaic tiles. The ceiling is Islamic-style wood with intricate decoration. Duncan (1994) states the craftsmanship is without parallel in the Islamic world even today. The language of the mosaics is mostly Byzantine, but much of the decoration is Islamic, a legacy of the hybid nature of Sicily's Norman Kingdom in the 1100s.

Next, for a totally different type of art, this is the Fontana Pretoria, designed in 1544 by Francisco Camilliani and and Michelangelo Naccherino. The Piazzo Pretoria is also known as the Piazza della Vergogna (the "Place of Shame") because the forty nude statues (ladies and gents) look at each other most shamelessly. When it opened, the local residents were shocked, mortified. The statues were so realistic. They were anatomically correct. And they had no trousers. Actually, this fountain would still not be tolerated in most American cities, but we are known for hypocritical prudishness. Anyway, 450 years later, the fantastic statues and fountain are part of Palermo's art heritage.

An office building facing the Piazzo Pretoria.

The food is absolutely divine. Find a local place, guess at what is on the menu or the chalkboard, and dig in. This was the Trattoria Ferro Di Cavallo. Locally-sourced ingredients? Ha, Sicilians have always done it.

Ask a Sicilian beauty to share a bottle of grappa.

I took these photographs with a Panasonic G1 digital camera and processed the RAW files with DxO Filmpack 3 to simulate Tri-X film. Next time, I will take real Tri-X. Film is having a revival for its non-digital look.

References

Duncan, P. 1994. Sicily, A Traveller's Guide. John Murray Publishers, Ltd., 244p.