MUSTANG\MANANG

Mustang was, until recently, a Himaaya Kingdom forbidden to the foreigners. During the night they close the gates of its walled capital, the beautiful Lo Mustang, where there is a royal Palace. The King of Mustang hates the westerners.

magnificent Himalaya in the Kingdom of Mustang Near Lo Mustang I saw holes in the mountains and was told that there lived monks until their death, in meditation, Every day a small novice took some food for them thorough a hole in the hole where they were enclosed, and when after three days the same food was there, is was an unequivocal sign that the monk had died. Then they sealed the hole and opened a new one for another candidate to follow that way of life (or death). The vision of those holes was horrible and provoked in me a reaction of rebelliousness.

What's really great:

Milarepa in the Mountains of Mustang. Painting by Nikolai Roerich I returned to Kagbeni without consequences and could finish my trekking around the Annapurnas through the Thorung Pass. I was robbed by the Tibetans part of the 20 kilos of Chinese canned food and delicious biscuits that the Chinese army gave me. In the caravanserai of Lo Mustang I paid twice more than the locals for the momos, for the tea, for the tsampa, for the bed, etc. But anyway it was peanuts. I did not complain. I was conscious of the cheating but I did not argue and observed from their behaviour in order to learn more about the human nature.

Accommodations:

The first night I slept in a kind of caravanserai in Samar, where they gave me food, momos, cheese of yak and tsang, a very dense tea, like soup, that they prepare in a kind of quiver called domo. The next day I crossed Guili and Gami, and in the second night I found a Buddhist Tibetan monastery, near the beautiful Charan, where I made friendship with the young monks of the Gelugpa sect when I gave them a picture of the XIV Dalai Lama. Chortens were a kind of mark for the travellers which helped me. They show the way to the gonpas, or monasteries.