Customer Reviews

East of Lo Monthang

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Peter Matthiessen teams up with the great photography of Thomas Laird to provide a thrilling coffee table style journal to one of the magical kingdoms of our planet. The photos are truly incredible, and Peter's descriptive writing portrays the life of an ancient kingdom on the Tibetan plateau of Nepal. Dancing on the Edge of an Endangered Planet

This book is the "Classic" photo book of Mustang and Lo Monthang. Most of us will never get there (tourism is severely limited, and the hike in is difficult at best) to see it ourselves. This book takes us on a journey to a place that is also a step way back in time (no electricity, phones, etc throughout most of the country). Highly recommended for look at a "country within a country" (Mustang is within Nepal), that most don't even know exists.

Wondeful account of early visit to this unusal area. Great photos. I was very pleased to find this out of circulation voluime.

A coffee-table photographic book detailing the authors' trip to Upper Mustang and Lo Manthang in May 1992. There are over 156 photos, 68 a full page or larger. The front cover is Lo Manthang.

The authors travel from Jomsom to Kagheni, with an interesting description of the ghost eaters, and then up the Kali Gandaki River route, where they visit a remote gompa and meet the nomads who live in the area. The monks and local people tell stories of the mehti (Yeti), but no sightings or evidence is found. Snow leopards do exist and kill some of the animals. They then visit Lo Manthang and attend the Tiji Festival. We see the people harvesting, attend a wedding, and meet the King and his wife, Tashi Tenzing, the abbot of Chodi Gompa, and the local Tibetan medicine man.

Matthiessen describes Lo Manthang: "With its twenty-foot high surrounding wall and its sentinel turrets at each corner, with its prayer flags and white central palace and red temples, Lo Monthang seems formidable and enormous by comparison to the other isolated settlements we have passed through, yet this medieval town on its remote desert plateau is thought to have just one hundred and eighty households, and les than one thousand inhabitants, and one could circumambulate the city walls four times in an hour, as King Jigme Palbar Bista, on his royal constitutional, is said to do at sunrise every morning."

Matthiessen desribes the Tiji Festival: "The costumes and masks, the twelve-foot horns, the gold cups of wheat, the butter cakes, the snow peaks and wind and dust and sun, the mehti, snow leopard, snow pigeons, saligrams, the dying glacier and the desert ruins, the drunks and rajas and foreigners, the dogs and yaks. Tantra!"

The photos are excellent, especially those of the Tiji Festival, Lo Manthnag from overhead, and inside the temples. The writing is wonderfully descriptive, especially of the Tiji Festival.