The high road: the Kingdom of Mustang
Isolated, remote and largely unexplored, the Nepalese Kingdom of Mustang is now open to pilgrims and tourists alike, writes Dinah Gardner. Pictures by Koon Ming Tang
As we rattle across the moonscape towards the lost Kingdom of Mustang, the jeep's rear window falls out. One of the passengers, a middle-aged Indian man, with a dusty holdall jammed between his knees and chest, kindly raises the alarm. We screech to a halt and begin weaving back up the track in reverse at a similar breakneck speed until we find the mislaid window. Miraculously, it is in one piece - which is more than can be said for my sanity.
Mustang is Nepal's "Tibet" - a remote and beautiful region of ice-topped Himalayan peaks, wind-carved black and red cliffs and rustic villages of stone, clay and timber. We are lurching up a new road, the teenage driver keeping time to the Hindi techno blasting from the jeep's speakers.
The road has changed the face of Mustang, previously only accessible by hardy trekkers, mule caravans or helicopter. Now, creaking trucks carrying supplies and white jeeps, like ours, ferrying Hindu devotees from Kathmandu and India ply the route from Jomsom (the district's capital) up to the border with China.
An hour-and-a-half later and we are in Muktinath - or, more accurately, the Wild West one-road town of Ranipauwa. A small one-monk monastery, a police post, what looks like a dental surgery, with a toothy smile for a sign, and more than a dozen guesthouses make up Ranipauwa. It is ringed by snow-capped peaks that are at their most magnificent in the morning, when the sky is clear and the dawn glow paints the summits butter yellow. The monster is Dhaulagiri, meaning "dazzling mountain", and, at 8,167 metres, it is the world's seventh highest.
For the Hindu devotees, though, the mountains are just icing on the cake. They've come for the Muktinath Temple - a small shrine to the god Vishnu. Here, men, like happy seals, strip down to their underwear, posing for photos in the temple's sacred shower, water droplets glistening off rounded bellies. Despite the temple's small size, it is very important for both Hindus and Buddhists.
At the equally tiny Jwalamai Temple (tended by 30 Buddhist nuns), behind an unprepossessing pile of stones, are the three eternal flames - one in soil, one in water and one in rock, as a hotel owner in town explains. "But the one in the rock's gone out," he adds. A Himalayan youth with almond eyes grabs a torch and points out the remaining flames, two licks of blue flickering a hand's span from a sheen of flowing water.