Shinta Mani Mustang Opens in Nepal’s Kali Gandaki Valley
Bill Bensley's 29-suite lodge at Jomsom opened in 2023 as the first luxury hotel in Lower Mustang, with guided walks to villages and monasteries and a spa run by a doctor of Tibetan medicine.
Shinta Mani Mustang opened in August 2023 at Jomsom, in the Mustang district of northern Nepal. It has 29 suites and is the first luxury lodge in Lower Mustang, a high, dry valley behind the Annapurna range whose people are Tibetan Buddhist in culture.
The place
Mustang lies in the rain shadow of the Himalaya. The Kali Gandaki river cuts through it between Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, in one of the deepest valleys on earth. The landscape is bare and ochre-coloured, with whitewashed villages, apple orchards and monasteries that date back to the fourteenth century. The upper part of the district, the former kingdom of Lo, was closed to foreigners until 1992. Jomsom, at about 2,800 metres, is the main town of the lower valley. The lodge is in the village of Marpha, just outside it, and looks across to the peaks of Nilgiri.
The lodge
The owner is Sherpa Hospitality Group of Nepal. The building already existed as a hotel. The Bangkok designer Bill Bensley refitted it and reused material from the old structure. The suites have stone walls and windows that face the mountains, and are furnished with yak-hair textiles, carved wooden cabinets and copper boxes of Tibetan design. Lines of Sanskrit poetry are cut into the walls. The restaurant, Nilgiri, serves Nepali cooking, and the bar makes use of the apple brandy distilled in the next village.
Stays are sold on an inclusive basis that covers meals and daily excursions with a guide. These include walks to villages and monasteries, a hike to a sacred lake, and visits to the pilgrimage temple of Muktinath.
Tibetan medicine
The spa is led by Tsewang Gyurme Gurung, an amchi, or doctor of Tibetan medicine, of the eleventh generation in his family. He takes the pulse of guests and prescribes treatments and herbs. Tibetan medicine has become a subject of interest for mountain hotels elsewhere in the Himalaya, as with Songtsam’s Sowa Rigpa programmes in Yunnan and Tibet.
For travellers
Guests fly from Kathmandu to Pokhara and then take a twenty-minute flight up the gorge to Jomsom. The flights leave early in the morning, before the wind rises, and are often cancelled. The alternatives are a drive of about six hours on a rough road, or a helicopter. The best months are March to May and September to November.
The lodge is the second in the Bensley Collection, after Shinta Mani Wild in Cambodia. Our guide to Bill Bensley’s hotels in Asia sets it among his other work.
