Journey 02 · Nepal
The Colour of Lo
Upper Mustang on foot
Published 11 Jul 2025 · Travelled 6–19 May 2025
- 8 moments
- 14 days
- 73 km
- Spring
- Nepal
- 35mm · f/8 · 1/500
- 28.8380° N, 83.7830° E
- Frame 04 of roll one
- Kagbeni
- 09:40
- 11°C, clear, wind not up yet
You walk up the Kali Gandaki and for a day it is a normal Himalayan valley, and then at Kagbeni it simply stops being one. Behind you, terraces and poplars. In front, four hundred kilometres of nothing with any water in it. The line between the two is about a hundred metres wide and you can stand on it.
02 · The permit, and the arithmetic of film
- 35mm · f/11 · 1/250
- 28.8800° N, 83.7900° E
- Frame 18 of roll four
- Above Chele
- 13:15
- 16°C, wind, dust
Almost none of this walk looks like the pictures people bring back from it. Most of it is this: a dirt track, a mule train coming the other way, and you standing off the downhill side because that is the rule and because the alternative is a long way down.
- 35mm · f/2.8 · 1/125
- 29.0300° N, 83.8800° E
- Frames 09 and 11 of roll seven
- 35mm · f/2.8 · 1/125
- 29.0300° N, 83.8800° E
- Frames 09 and 11 of roll seven
- Ghami
- 15:50
- 18°C, hot sun, cold shade
The mule trains come through the middle of the village because there is no other way through, and everybody steps into their own doorway and waits. I was standing in somebody's doorway myself when I turned round and found her there watching the same thing I was, from a metre away, having said nothing.
- 35mm · f/5.6 · 1/125
- 29.0700° N, 83.8900° E
- Frame 25 of roll nine
- Dhakmar
- 18:05
- 12°C, wind dropping with the light
The story is that the cliffs are red because of the blood of a demoness, and the geologists have another one, and standing under them at six in the evening you do not care which is true. This is the only place on the whole walk where I was glad not to be shooting black and white.
- 35mm · f/2 · 1/60
- 29.1830° N, 83.9580° E
- Frame 31 of roll eleven
- Lo Manthang
- 19:10
- 6°C, cold, still
One window, high up, a metre of soot on the ceiling, and about nine people in a room the size of my bathroom. She was making thukpa for all of us and being told by her mother-in-law that she was doing it wrong. I shot this wide open at a sixtieth and braced against the door frame and was fairly sure I had lost it.
- 35mm · f/8 · 1/500
- 29.2200° N, 83.9500° E
- Frame 14 of roll twelve
- Chhoser
- 11:30
- 15°C, clear, wind starting
Somebody dug several thousand chambers into a vertical sandstone face, on five levels, more than two thousand years ago, and nobody has satisfactorily explained why. You climb up inside on ladders. It smells of dust and pigeons. It is the strangest place I have ever put a camera.
- Above Ghami
- 16:20
- 14°C, wind, from behind for once
- Last frame
Going south you have the whole valley in front of you all day instead of behind you, which is a different walk on the same path. The wind was at my back for the first time in a fortnight. I had two frames left and I used one of them here and carried the other one home unexposed.
- 35mm · f/11 · 1/500
- 29.0000° N, 83.8500° E
- Frame 35 of roll thirteen
The route
8 stops
Journey completed
Fourteen days, eight stories
- Distance walked
- 178 km
- Frames exposed
- 468
- Rolls exposed
- 13
- Days the wind started before noon
- 14
- Highest pass
- 4,230 m
- Favourite moment
- The red cliffs at Dhakmar, about six in the evening
- Best food
- Thukpa in a kitchen at Lo Manthang with the whole family in it and one window
