Reserve a guided Upper Mustang trip, fourteen nights on the Tibetan plateau

Upper Mustang is the part of Nepal that lies behind the mountains instead of in front of them. The Kali Gandaki has cut a trench between two summits over 26,000 feet standing about twenty two miles apart, and everything north of that trench sits in their rain shadow on the southern lip of the Tibetan plateau. To reserve a guided Upper Mustang trip you need a restricted-area permit, and that permit is never issued to a person walking on their own. It is issued to a party of two or more moving with a licensed Nepali guide, through a company registered to work north of Kagbeni.

That requirement is the whole reason this route sits where it does on the ladder rather than further along. Fourteen nights are held as one reservation. Somebody is standing in the arrivals hall in Kathmandu with your name written down, a guide walks with the party every walking day, a cook travels with a stove and cooks twice a day, and a horseman brings five animals for the bags. You carry a day sack and turn up.

Pine Gazette Bookings LLC is a booking office in New Orleans, LA, and it runs nothing. It owns no vehicle, no lodge room, no vessel and no aircraft, and it employs no guide. What it does is take your dates, put them to the company in Kathmandu that actually operates this route and holds the licence the permit is issued against, and hold the reservation in your name. Getting to Nepal is your own arrangement, and this office reserves no flight, on any leg, at any point in the itinerary.

Naming your dates and getting a number back on paper takes two to four working days here, because the permit is priced by the number of days the party is inside the restricted area and the operator counts them one at a time before it will quote. A month and a party size on +1 (504) 832-6194 or in a message to bookings@thepinegazette.com is enough to begin. When the trip is confirmed, the operating company invoices you itself, on its own paperwork and in its own name; no money of any kind changes hands in this office.

Ten inches of rain a year, and where it does not fall

The wall to the south is Dhaulagiri at 26,795 feet and Annapurna I at 26,545 feet, with the river running between them. Monsoon air pushing up from the Bay of Bengal is wrung out on the far side of that gap, so Lo Manthang takes roughly ten inches of rain in a year, most of it on eight or nine days. Pokhara, two days south by road, takes over 140 inches in the same twelve months. That single fact sets the season: July and August are dry walking weeks up here while the middle hills are shut under cloud, and the lodges stay open straight through both.

The ground looks nothing like the rest of the country. The cliffs are red, grey and ochre in bands, coloured by iron in the sediment, and they stand in fins and pillars where water has taken the soft layers out from between the hard ones. Trees exist only where somebody planted and watered them: poplar and willow in lines as windbreaks, apricot in the yards, every one of them inside an irrigated wall. Outside the walls there is grass at ankle height, gravel, and nothing above knee height for miles at a stretch.

The road up the gorge and the days on foot

The itinerary uses the road as far as the road is useful and stops there. Kathmandu to Pokhara is about 125 miles of paved highway and takes seven hours because of the ridges it has to climb over. Pokhara to the trailhead is the long one: nine hours of unsealed switchbacks in a jeep, gaining about 6,000 feet, the last three of those hours inside the gorge itself where the track runs on ledges above the water. From Kagbeni north, the party walks.

Walking days are five to seven hours, with roughly 1,800 feet of climbing and most of it handed straight back, because the route crosses side valleys rather than following a single one upstream. The high point is a pass at 13,160 feet on the fifth day, and three other days spend several hours above 12,000 feet. The wind sets the timetable more firmly than the gradient does. Air is drawn up the gorge from about eleven in the morning at twenty five to thirty miles an hour, so the crew wakes the party at half past five, breakfast is at six, and the day's walking is finished by early afternoon.

Lo Manthang, Chhoser and the four nights at the top of the valley

Lo Manthang stands at 12,500 feet inside a mud brick wall about twenty feet high with one gate in it. Around 150 houses sit inside that wall, packed side to side, with alleys wide enough for a loaded horse and very little more. The five storey house at the center belonged to the line that held this valley as a kingdom until 2008. Three assembly halls stand within a few minutes' walk of it, one of them holding clay figures close to twenty feet tall, lit by whatever comes through the door and by butter lamps.

The party has four nights up here and uses all of them. One day goes north to Chhoser, where a cliff face has been dug into forty four rooms on five floors, connected by ladders, with window slots cut for light rather than for looking out. Nobody has settled who cut them or when, and a good guide says exactly that rather than inventing a date. Another day goes east to Tsarang, where a fortress and an assembly hall stand on the lip of a gully about 200 feet deep, and the walk back crosses open ground where you will see nothing taller than a wall for two hours. If your dates fall in the right three days of May, the walled town holds its masked dances in the square; the operator knows those dates a year ahead and will tell you plainly whether yours line up or miss.

The permit, the crew and the paperwork behind the fourteen nights

The restricted-area permit is applied for in Kathmandu by the operating company, against its own licence, in your name, using details it asks you for several weeks ahead. It is checked at the post below Kagbeni on the way in and again on the way out, and the post keeps the party's names on file. The conservation area fee is separate and is paid at the same office on the same morning. Neither document is yours to chase. The operator obtains both as part of running the trip and both sit inside the figure quoted to you.

The crew is four people and they are with the party the whole way. The guide is licensed, speaks the local dialect as well as Nepali and English, and is the person who deals with lodge owners, checkposts and any change of plan on the ground. The cook and the kitchen assistant travel with the party, carry a stove and fuel, and put out dinner at seven in whichever kitchen they have been given. The horseman brings five animals; they take the duffels every day and take a walker as well on any stage where somebody has run out of legs. Nothing about that arrangement is optional on this rung, and it is a large part of why the figure sits where it does.

Send a month, a party size and the width of your window to +1 (504) 832-6194 or bookings@thepinegazette.com and the reservation can be started from that alone. If a message bounces, corrections@thepinegazette.com reaches the same two people. Pine Gazette Bookings LLC is at 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312, Metairie, Louisiana 70001, and the reply will come back in writing with the permit days counted and the figure held against your dates.