The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘The 21st century felt very far away indeed’
Deep in the Himalayas, a new lodge takes guests as far from their normal lives as it is possible to go. Annabel Heseltine checks in and chills out
Every morning at sunrise, a monk named Samting practises his puja on a remote mountain in the Nepali Himalayas. He performs three prostrations, touches his forehead to the altar cloth, then settles himself down cross-legged and starts to chant. One morning at 6am, I joined him.
It was just us, surrounded by 500-year-old frescoes – crumbling, cracked but bright in colour – in the shrine room of Khutsab Terenga, the oldest Nyingma Buddhist monastery in Lower Mustang. This sparse, grey plateau swept with the scent of juniper is the gateway to the Kingdom of Lo, which was a semi-autonomous state until Nepal became a federal republic in 2008. Westerners were allowed in only 30 years ago.
James Hilton’s Lost Horizon was a book I grew up with. Childhood curiosity rekindled, I was longing to visit this remote region, which contains eight of the 14 highest peaks in the world above 8,000 metres (26,000ft) but has so many other tales to tell. It is just 60 miles from the city of Pokhara, but adventurous travellers have to brave a 15-minute plane or helicopter flight or a nine-hour drive along a narrow, muddy track with a 300-metre (1,000ft) drop to in order to arrive at a place that seems more “Tibetan” than Tibet itself (which is less than 60 miles away, but has been occupied by China since 1959).
After meditating for an hour, Samting leapt up. “Today is an auspicious day, when we honour our ancient legacy,” he said, pointing to a footprint in stone beside the altar left here by Guru Rinpoche. The scowling “second Buddha” passed this way in the eighth century, vanquishing demons and cementing Buddhism in Tibet. Just at that moment, the notion of a 21st century felt very far away indeed.
And that’s just how the team at Shinta Mani Mustang, which opened here last summer, wanted me to feel. Every day, I would jump into chapters of living history accompanied by Sagrit, my personal guide from the hotel. We followed in Guru Rinpoche’s footsteps, treading ancient spice routes, exploring Tibetan communities, sitting in dark meditation caves, walking through scented pine forests, or just chatting with pilgrims on their way to the Vishnu temple of Muktinath.
Bill Bensley, the compelling design genius who zip-wires his guests over a waterfall into his Cambodian lodge, Shinta Mani Wild, was invited by explorer and hotelier Jason Friedman (one of a trio of men whose vision created Shinta Mani Mustang) and Namgyal Sherpa, the hotel’s owner, to bring sympathetic, sustainable luxury to the Nepali Himalayas. Everything that could be was repurposed, even the low stone building, originally a 100-room hotel designed by Nepali architect Prabal Thapa. Now it is state-of-the-art, with 29 richly carpeted bedrooms, sheets flown in from Thailand, blankets made in Kashmir (and also sold in Hermès) and floor-to-ceiling windows. Imposing close up, it is nevertheless but a speck on a magnificent landscape gleaming across a valley cut by the Kali Gandaki river, fast, wild and milky grey.
Anywhere along that riverbed, you might find a black ammonite pushed up from sea level by the Indian and Eurasian plates crashing together. There is a huge one in the sleek black bar, from where you can look out over the silvery slopes of the sacred Niligiri mountain.
Indeed, everything inside the walls tells a tale of the outside, from the yak’s tails feathering the bamboo seat where I wrote under a landscape painting by artist Robert Powell, to the soothing pink Himalayan salt bricks beside my bathtub and the staggered paving that slows the pace and my thoughts. Even the protective colours of orange, white and black – daubed on to stacked pebbles and painted in stripes down the side of the puja room – have been chosen by Bensley for a reason.
“On the way to the Vishnu temple of Muktinath you will see three Bodhisattva buddhas painted in these colours, which symbolise the trinity of gifts for good meditation practice,” explained the doctor, Tsewang Gyurme Gurung, when I met him for my health check-up. “The walls have to be repainted every time it rains, signalling the impermanence of life.”
Amchi Tsewang Gyurme Gurung is an 11th-generation doctor of traditional Tibetan medicine who leads the wellness centre at Shinta Mani. He felt my pulse in order to read my health. (This is no gimmick: at 10,000ft, altitude sickness is taken seriously around here.) Shinta Mani is attracting a different kind of visitor; not just young trekkers and climbers but those drawn to stay for a while, to explore a kind of Shangri-La, a utopian lamasery.
I had spent two days acclimatising at the Newari-style Dwarika’s hotel in Kathmandu, followed by some gentle hiking at Tiger Mountain Pokhara Lodge high above the busy town of Pokhara, gateway to the Himalayas. The plantation-style building, opened by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1998, near where the then Prince Charles camped on his private 1981 trek, has just celebrated its 25th anniversary. It was, until the arrival of Shinta Mani last year, Nepal’s leading mountain destination, welcoming royals, conservationists and writers.
Today, co-owner Marcus Cotton is happy to accept a new role, welcoming adventurers before and after their visits to the high Himalayas. He recognises the benefits of the arrival of a new highend hotel for a Nepal keen to banish its reputation as a $10-a-day budget paradise for travellers.
Marpha, an hour’s walk from Shinta Mani, is a typical Tibetan village draped with fluttering prayer flags. The clean, white roofs are piled with gnarled wood and hung protectively with brightly painted animal skulls. Stone irrigation channels built by Shinta Mani are one of its contributions to improving local life.
But on the day I visited, the village was almost empty. After a Thakali curry cooked by Kamala Lalchan, the owner of the Apple Paradise Teahouse, who also owns a farm and runs a women’s co-operative, I found out why. Outside, prayer wheels were rattling clockwise, flipped by men shouldering a shrouded stretcher. “They are burying an important man,” explained Sagrit, my Shinta Mani Mustang guide.
The next day, we hiked – there was no road – into Lubra, a village founded in the 12th century. Here, 14 families living in rammed-earth houses practise the animistic Bon religion, elements of which are 18,000 years old, predating Buddhism. The story of an 800-year-old walnut tree planted by its founder, the great Bon Lama Tashi Gyalzen, is vividly re-enacted in paintings on the wall of a small temple overlooked by hundreds of sky caves.
High above the track, these have been honed out of curious serpentine cliffs for more than a millennium. The tension between the beautiful but ruthless mountains surrounding us and the brave and profound spirituality of the “mountain” people living here was brought home to me again and again on my visit. It was humbling and challenging; there was absolutely nothing here which reminded me of my own “real” life – not praying with an amchi, talking to a lama or in my meeting with the former king of Lo at the end of my stay in Nepal.
Over tea at his home within a monastery created by his great-uncle, he told me of his son’s marriage last July.
“I wanted to hold his wedding to a Nepali princess in Kathmandu, but the people came to me and asked me to hold it in Mustang in the old way,” he said. “So we put her on a horse.”
He showed me a photograph that showed him escorting his son’s bride, wearing a huge silk hat trimmed in fur. Behind them, set out on an almost lunar landscape, dressed in brocade and wearing khatas (white ceremonial scarves) were 200 men on horseback. It was a wedding day like no other, in the land of lost horizons.