TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM 99 CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT An alfresco lunch at Chhema Lake arranged by Shinta Mani Mustang; Nepalese embroidery on the Shinta Mani staff uniform; inside Shinta Mani’s bar; momo for lunch at Jhong Monastery. More Newspaper and Magazines Telegram Channel join Search https://t.me/Magazines_8890050582 (@Magazines_8890050582)
CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHT Buddhist monks at Jharkot Monastery; Namgyal Sherpa, whose family owns Mountain Lodges of Nepal; villagers in traditional dress perform a dance at Thame Lodge; stopping for lunch on the walk from Namche Bazaar to Thame. More Newspaper and Magazines Telegram Channel join Search https://t.me/Magazines_8890050582 (@Magazines_8890050582)
NEPAL Jomsom Kathmandu Mount Everest TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM 101 (Continued on page 103) café. Entering the town of Namche Bazaar, a former trading post set at an elevation of around 11,400 feet, felt like arriving at a Himalayan backpacker’s heaven: there were shops loaded with gear, Irish pubs, and cafés selling banana pancakes and microbrews. Especially during “Everest season”—a two-month window in April and May in which climbers flock to the mountain—the town is filled with travelers letting off steam, acclimating to the thin air, and waiting for the best moment to start their ascents. Every year, about 800 hopefuls and their support teams try to summit the famous peak. In addition, approximately 30,000 hike the Everest Base Camp Trail. About 80 miles long, this round-trip route begins at Lukla and reaches 17,598 feet at Base Camp; it takes most people about two weeks to complete. “Everyone rushes along the trail, pushing WHERE TO STAY Mountain Lodges of Nepal Namgyal Sherpa’s family organizes 11-day treks along new trail routes, including accommodations at the family’s renovated lodges (including Namche, Phakding, and Thame), meals, and a helicopter ride to the Kala Pattar viewpoint to take in Mount Everest. From $4,015 per person. Shinta Mani Mustang This 29-suite, all-inclusive retreat in the Mustang region of Nepal beckons upscale adventurers, with rates that include spa treatments and excursions to nearby villages. Doubles from $1,800, all-inclusive, five-night minimum. —SAMANTHA FALEWÉE themselves to be at the next place by a certain time, barely pausing to take in the villages they pass,” Namgyal said. “We want people to slow down, experience local culture, take in the beauty of the mountains.” The next day was the hardest for me; short of breath from the altitude, I walked slowly. But it was also by far the most spectacular stretch of the trail. Where other trekkers headed east toward Everest Base Camp, we went west in the direction of the village of Thame, for no other reason than that it was the road less traveled—and in Friedman and Namgyal’s opinion, exceptionally beautiful. They were right: the trail snaked along valleys backed by majestic peaks, passed the occasional yak munching on wildflowers and grass, crossed rushing rivers, and ran through tiny villages. We didn’t meet a single other traveler the entire time. After crossing a river gorge over a long hanging bridge and hiking up yet another steep slope, I rounded a bend to find a completely different kind of landscape. The open, rocky mountain terrain had been softened by rhododendron bushes and an icy blue stream, covered in some places by rolling fog. Passing through the whitewashed, pagoda-shaped town gate to Thame, I saw green fields crisscrossed by stone walls, with horses grazing within. Soon we reached the 18-room Thame Lodge. It had been a long day, so when we walked into the lounge, decorated with brightly painted murals, I collapsed on a sofa and sipped a warm mug of masala tea. That night in the dining room, local women performed a traditional welcome song and dance. Namgyal told me it was a shame that the lodge—one of his favorites—was almost always empty because so few travelers make it there. “This is the kind of place we want visitors to know about,” he said. A FTER A DAY OF REST in Thame, it was time for Namgyal and me to say goodbye to the group and head to Shinta Mani Mustang, his family’s sumptuous new hotel in the remote Nepalese Mustang region—once the Kingdom of Lo-Mustang—on the border with Tibet. To get there, we returned to Kathmandu by helicopter, took a flight to the city of Pokhara, in the central part of the country, then flew in another chopper to Jomsom village, the entry point to Upper Mustang. As we flew north, the landscape shifted from green to subtle hues of gray. Far below, I could see a narrow river winding through ILLUSTRATION BY BASHEL LUBARSKY a wide ravine. More Newspaper and Magazines Telegram Channel join Search https://t.me/Magazines_8890050582 (@Magazines_8890050582)
102 TRAVEL+LE ISURE | JULY 2024 (Colorado, continued from page 93) Content in this issue was produced with assistance from Aethos Corsica; Alpa Corse; A Pignata; Barlwyd Shepherds Huts at Plas Weunydd; Butterfield & Robinson; DirectMountain; Dominique Colonna; ESCA; Europe Active; The Felin Fach Griffin; fforest farm; Ford Motor Company; Grove of Narberth; Hôtel U Capu Biancu; Intrepid Travel; Kayak Lake Powell; Legendary Expeditions; Mango House Seychelles, LXR Hotels & Resorts; Mountain Lodges of Nepal; Panoramic Journeys; Pure Michigan; Ras Al Khaimah Tourism; Sequoia Lodge; Shinta Mani Mustang; Sitara Himalaya; and Wilderness River Adventures. many visitors book with commercial outfitters like OARS and Dinosaur River Expeditions. I joined a 10-raft flotilla—a private launch of land managers, tourism officials, and local entrepreneurs gathered to discuss the county’s transition to tourism over a three-day river run. Immersed in nature by day and sharing campsites and cooking duties by night, we became fast friends. Setting off on the Green River, we immediately entered a 2,000-foot-high chasm girded by Uinta quartzite, some of the oldest strata revealed by the river, known as the Gates of Lodore. Within the canyon, some of the rapids are gentle Class I or II or roly-poly Class III, but the aptly named Disaster Rapids were whoop-worthy Class IV, and nearby, we found a group of boaters working to dislodge their raft from a wall overhang where the waves had wedged it. On his seminal 1869 trip down the river to the Grand Canyon, explorer John Wesley Powell lost a vessel on this stretch, but the crew, according to park rangers, worked furiously to salvage its contents, which included a compelling keg of whiskey. Between riverside campsites shaded by juniper trees, we floated past muddomed nests of cliff swallows pasted onto rock overhangs, diving osprey, and bighorn sheep tiptoeing on the ledges overhead. Opposite Steamboat Rock, a 1,000-foot monolith around which the river flexes, a field filled with starburstshaped Rocky Mountain bee plants attracted scores of hummingbirds. A rare rain shower produced countless pop-up waterfalls spilling over the cliffs. On the second day, I rode in a boat piloted by Josh Veenstra, who, with his wife, Maegan, co-owns Good Vibes River Gear, a Craig start-up that outfits rafts with boat bags and camping accessories, many of them custom-sewn. Later, over Sierra Nevada pale ales, Josh explained that he learned to sew when he worked as an insulator mechanic at a local power plant, before a three-week trip on the Yampa and Green rivers led him to bet on the town’s transition and launch the business. “Craig is the last spot before the wild begins. You can get lost for weeks out here and not see another footprint,” he said, before breaking into a smile. “This is the last great place to have fun.” energy is evident at the 518 Wine Bar, which is filled with retro sofas and velvet drapes, and Prodigal Son’s Coffee House & Eatery, which sits across the street from the town’s Art Deco–era West Twin Cinema. Five years ago, Christian Dufresne, who co-owns Yampa Valley Brewing in nearby Hayden, opened a branch in Craig, right next door to the museum. “Craig had everything all these other places had, maybe minus a degree of investment,” he said, referring to more popular small towns in Colorado. Craig’s ready access to river rafting and mountain-biking trails has attracted new residents who have been priced out of Steamboat. “It bodes well for that transition to work-from-anywhere.” CINDY WRIGHT DOESN’T keep the money she charges for her daylong driving tours of the Sand Wash Basin, which include picnic lunches and snacks. Proceeds go to Wild Horse Warriors, which advocates for the health of the Sand Wash herd. We took her high-clearance Jeep Wrangler Rubicon on rugged roads strewn with sharp chert, a black quartz that shreds lesser tires. It didn’t take long for us to find our first family of horses, which had names— Frisky, Shelby, Faith, Rustler—mostly given by Wright and other avid horse watchers. We had to be quick with our cameras: the horses glanced up momentarily on arrival, then resumed browsing sagebrush, their metronome manes swatting at insects. Management of the horses is controversial. Without birth control, a herd can double in four years, Wright told me. In 2021, to allow the land to recover from overgrazing after four consecutive summers of drought, the Bureau of Land Management rounded up about 680 of the estimated 900 horses in the preserve for adoption or sale. On our safari drive, she stopped to show me stromatolites—rare, reeflike rocks that are evidence of 50 million-year-old lake beds—and palm trees petrified in ocher. We flushed killdeer birds from their nests and watched mountain bluebirds pause on top of greasewood bushes. On Lookout Mountain, the highest point in the reserve, we peered into neighboring Vermillion Basin, a 77,000-acre BLM-managed badlands of mineralhued hills and canyons. “A lot of emotional healing takes place here,” Wright said as we made our slow and steep descent back to Sand Wash. “Sage is cleansing in Native American culture, and we’ve been driving around breathing it all day.” I WAS ABOUT 50 MILES into those 120 miles of service-free County Road 318 when I reached the northern entrance to Dinosaur National Monument. Some 90 percent of visitors to the park, which straddles the ColoradoUtah border and is famed for its rich quarry of Jurassic-era dinosaur bones, enter from the Utah side. That leaves just 10 percent, or about 10,000 people a year, approaching it from the Colorado side, where the south-flowing Green River meets the westbound Yampa River, carving through 540 million-year-old layers of rock. The resulting Class II and III rapids send whitewater rafts pinballing off submerged boulders and plunging down spray-blasting swells. Running the rivers in Dinosaur is a popular multiday adventure that More Newspaper and Magazines Telegram Channel join Search https://t.me/Magazines_8890050582 (@Magazines_8890050582)
TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM 103 (Nepal, continued from page 101) Flanked by two mountain ranges—the Dhaulagiri and the Annapurna—the Kali Gandaki Gorge is a dramatically barren landscape that at times reaches down more than three miles. Millions of years ago, this arid land, now dotted with fossilized cephalopods, was an immense sea. We landed right in front of Shinta Mani and walked through a stone gate into the courtyard. At first glance the U-shaped, two-story property resembled one of the many Tibetan Buddhist monasteries we had seen on our trek. But inside, thanks to designer Bill Bensley’s creative eye, the lodge feels like a colorful, elegant palace. There are large public spaces appointed with a mix of regional antiques, lampshades with cascading yak-hair trim, pops of orange and yellow throughout, and landscape paintings from the mid-20th-century Australian artist Robert Powell, who lived and worked in Nepal for three decades. My room was kitted out with a leather-clad mini-bar and a woven tiger-print rug on the polished, blackpainted floor. A heavy blanket on the bed, embroidered with a parade of local animal species, was made of felt sourced from a Nepal-based workshop that supplies cashmere blankets to Hermès. But none of these riches could compete with the view of Nilgiri Himal, three major peaks of the Annapurna Massif, which glowed in the sun through my floor-to-ceiling window. Although tempted to pamper myself in the spa or spend all day reading in one of the deep couches in the lobby, I signed up for as many of the hotel’s guided adventures as possible. One afternoon Namgyal and I were driven 30 minutes to visit Marpha, a beautifully preserved village surrounded by apple orchards. Its narrow main avenue, paved with flagstones, is flanked by whitewashed traditional houses with mud roofs and stacks of firewood piled against their sides. (Lumber is still a sign of wealth in the region, because it’s so hard to come by.) The next day I hiked to an alpine lake, which glistened in the midday sun, to find a bottle of rosé chilling at its edge and a table set for lunch. On another, I did an hour-long drive north of Jomsom to visit religious sites, including Muktinath, a temple for Hindus and Buddhists where holy water spouts from 108 cow-head statues made of gold. These relics were evidence of Mustang’s gilded past. In the late 14th century, Tibetan warrior-king Amepal unified the land along the Kali Gandaki River into a new realm, the Kingdom of Lo-Mustang. The area was home to an important stretch of the Silk Road; as Buddhist scholars traveled its lengths and merchants traded Tibetan salt and wools, the area flourished and became a wealthy domain. (In Tibetan dialect, one of the translations of the word Mustang is “plains of desire.”) But in the late 18th century, the kingdom was absorbed into modernday Nepal as a principality. In the 1950s, when China invaded Tibet, the Nepal-Tibet border was fraught with tension and travel through the region was restricted. Mustang, caught in the middle, was suddenly cut off from the world—its Buddhist treasures and spiritual sites largely protected, but unseen. Because the region remains so remote, animistic practices and beliefs still thrive. On my last afternoon, I met Tsewang Gyurme Gurung, an 11th-generation traditional Tibetan medicine doctor who consults at Shinta Mani’s spa. A charismatic 38-year-old who could make much more money being jetted from one wellness center to another as a Tibetan health guru, he chooses to stay in his hometown of Jomsom, treating local villagers who sometimes pay him with eggs or buckwheat. “I have responsibilities,” he said. “I’m not just a doctor, I also farm and take care of the land.” It was Gurung’s relationship with Namgyal that convinced him to dedicate part of his time to the resort’s spa, consulting with guests and offering traditional treatments. My last dinner at Shinta Mani Mustang was a multicourse meal of more momo—one kind stuffed with mushrooms, one with chili pepper and locally made cheese, and, for dessert, one with chocolate. As we ate, Namgyal told me that, even as a Nepali, he’s often caught off guard by the beauty and wisdom he encounters in this region. By opening Shinta Mani and arranging trips like mine, Namgyal and his family are working toward a future in which upscale travelers come to this far-flung part of the country and help spark the local economy. But Namgyal is less focused on the one hotel than on bringing up the entire community. “It’s not just about reaching the top,” he said. “It’s about helping other people get there, too.” That evening, as I drank a local apple cider mixed with lemon juice and crushed ginger in front of the fire on the patio, I thought about Namgyal’s mother and her Everest summit. She undertook that trek in part to show Sherpas that their future could go beyond carrying travelers’ packs. I thought how proud she would be of Namgyal and the rest of his family. They’re showing the world how high Sherpas can climb, and taking a few lucky travelers along with them. Travel + Leisure (ISSN 0041-2007) July 2024, Vol. 54, No. 6, is published monthly, except for a combined issue in December/January, by TI Inc. Affluent Media Group, a subsidiary of Meredith Operations Corporation, Principal Office: 225 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281-1008, under license from Travel + Leisure Holdco, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 507.1.5.2.) Non-Postal and Military Facilities: Send address corrections to Travel + Leisure, PO Box 37508, Boone, IA 50037-0508. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement #40069223. BN #129480364RT. Copyright ©2024 Travel + Leisure Holdco, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Customer Service and Subscriptions For 24/7 service, please use our website: www.travelandleisure.com/myaccount. You can also call 800-888-8728 or write to Travel + Leisure, PO Box 37508, Boone, IA 50037-0508. 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104 TRAVEL+LE ISURE | JULY 2024 Your Best Shot “MY PARTNER AND I try to celebrate our anniversary with a trip every year. We had planned to visit Paris, but, because of COVID, decided to take a road trip to all of the Utah national parks instead. As a planner, this was the opposite of what I’m used to: we slept in my Jeep and brushed our teeth with bottled water. On this morning, I opened the door and stopped at the sight of the sun rising over Cathedral Valley. Then it hit me: we were supposed to be somewhere else, but this is so much more fun.” MEGAN RICE (@WHERETOMEG ON INSTAGRAM) SHOT WITH AN IPHONE 11 OCTOBER 2020 CAPITOL REEF NATIONAL PARK, Utah Send your best travel photos to [email protected], or post on Instagram using #tlbestshot, for the chance to be featured on this page. More Newspaper and Magazines Telegram Channel join Search https://t.me/Magazines_8890050582 (@Magazines_8890050582)
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