Jomsom

The town's name is usually traced to Dzong-Sampa, "new fort", and the settlement grew where the Kali Gandaki valley widens enough for fields and a crossing. The gorge, cut between the Dhaulagiri and Annapurna massifs, has carried trade between India and Tibet for centuries: salt and wool brought down from the Tibetan plateau, grain, sugar and cloth carried up from the Nepalese hills and the Indian plains. The Thakali people of the Thak Khola, the upper part of the gorge around Jomsom, Marpha and Tukuche, ran that traffic and grew prosperous on it, and the merchant houses of these villages date from those years.

The trade collapsed after 1959, when the border with Tibet was closed to the old caravans and cheap Indian sea salt reached the hills by road. Many Thakali families moved down to Pokhara, Butwal and Kathmandu, where they opened the hotels and restaurants that carried their cooking across the country. Jomsom kept its position because the government made it the administrative headquarters of Mustang district, and an airstrip on the valley floor tied it to Pokhara.

Trekking replaced trade. From the 1970s the Annapurna Circuit brought walkers down from the Thorong La into the town, and Hindu pilgrimage to Muktinath grew alongside it. The Annapurna Conservation Area was established over the whole valley in the 1980s. The biggest recent change has been the road: a jeep track pushed up the gorge from Beni and on towards Muktinath and Lo Manthang, which shortened journeys, lowered the price of goods and took much of the walking traffic off the valley floor.

Jomsom sits on a cultural boundary. South of it the valley is Thakali, a people whose religion blends Buddhist practice with Hindu observance and clan deities, and whose villages of whitewashed flat-roofed houses are laid out around paved lanes and irrigation channels. North of Kagbeni the culture is plainly Tibetan, and Lo, the old kingdom of Upper Mustang, keeps its own dialect and monasteries. Both traditions meet in the bazaar, along with Nepali-speaking officials, soldiers and shopkeepers from the hills.

Thakali social life has long run on rotating credit and labour associations among households, which financed trade and still underpin village affairs. Village assemblies, communal irrigation and collective work on trails and canals matter here more than in the lowlands, because the environment allows little slack. Houses are built to the same pattern — thick stone walls, a walled courtyard, and a flat roof stacked with firewood, which is both winter fuel and a display of a family's standing.

Ritual life follows the mountain calendar. Monastery festivals, Losar at the Tibetan new year and the late-summer Yartung horse festival are the fixed points, while the Hindu pilgrim season brings a different crowd up the same road to Muktinath. Visitors are expected to walk clockwise around chortens and mani walls, to remove shoes in temples and to ask before photographing people at prayer.

Jomsom is a small town, the centre of Gharpajhong rural municipality, whose population was under 4,000 at the last census, but as the district headquarters it holds offices, a hospital, a bank, secondary schools and a police and army presence that serve a much larger area of Mustang. The population swells in the trekking and pilgrimage seasons and thins in winter, when many families move down to Pokhara or Kathmandu, where they often keep a second home and a business.

The economy runs on three things: lodging and food for trekkers and pilgrims, government employment, and apples. Orchards in Marpha and neighbouring villages supply fruit, juice, jam and brandy that are sold the length of the valley, and buckwheat, barley, potatoes and vegetables are grown on irrigated terraces. Remittances from relatives abroad support many households, as they do across Nepal.

The day is organised around the wind. Flights, jeep departures and much of the heavy work happen in the still hours after dawn; by late morning the gorge is blowing hard and the street quiets. Water comes from glacier-fed channels, electricity from small hydropower on the side streams, and almost everything else arrives by jeep. Current concerns are the ones the road brought: dust and erosion, competition from villages newly reachable by vehicle, the drying of springs, and how far the valley should change to keep visitors coming.

Jomsom is the home ground of Thakali cooking, the best-known regional cuisine in Nepal. The Thakali set is a carefully composed daal bhaat: rice or dhido, a thick porridge of buckwheat or barley flour, served with black lentil daal, seasonal greens, potatoes cooked with local spices, a sharp pickle, and usually mutton, or dried meat, with generous refills. It is eaten from compartmented brass or steel plates and is on every lodge menu in the valley.

Buckwheat is the crop that defines the high fields, and it appears as pancakes, bread and dhido. Dried meat, sukuti, is fried with chilli and onion; thukpa, a noodle soup, and momo dumplings come from the Tibetan side of the culture, along with butter tea salted rather than sweetened. Yak and its cross-breeds provide cheese and curd higher up the valley.

Apples are the town's other signature. Marpha's orchards produce fresh fruit in autumn and, year round, dried rings, jam, cider vinegar, juice and the apple brandy that lodges pour in the evening. Sea buckthorn from the riverbanks is pressed into a sharp orange juice sold as a local speciality, and raksi, the distilled grain spirit made throughout Nepal, is served warm in winter.