THE QUIET BEYOND: CHASING A DREAM TO A WALLED CITY IN NEPAL

Inspirational author Rose Lane

Some journeys start with a boarding pass, and others begin with a daydream. For writer Rose Lane, the seed of adventure was a postcard, a grainy image of Mustang, Nepal, pinned to her office corkboard.

“I bought it during our first trip to Nepal,” she says, “and when I got home, I pinned it to the corkboard so I would keep thinking about it.”

It was less a souvenir, more a talisman — a reminder of something almost mythical. She felt compelled to chase the dream.

The walled city of Lo Manthang wasn’t easy to get to. Remote, expensive, physically demanding, the sort of place that separates the mildly curious from the truly obsessed.

“At that time it felt like a fantasy,” Lane admits. “I mean, it was far from anywhere, difficult to get to, expensive, and how was my feeble body going to make it?”

For most people, that’s where the dream ends. For Lane, it was where it started. She set a Google Alert, hoping for any mention of this mysterious kingdom.

“If it did ping, it was usually an ad for trekking,” she laughs. Lo Manthang wasn’t the kind of place you could casually scroll through on Instagram or watch in a travel documentary.

You either went, or it remained a blank space on the map of your imagination.

She was often asked why she wanted to see it so badly, and her answer wasn’t the usual checklist of wanderlust clichés.

“Most people say they wouldn’t bother going through such an uncomfortable journey to see anything,” she says.

“I feel as though if there’s no effort involved, it’s probably not worth it.”

She wasn’t interested in guided tours or travel bubbles. “Many people are happy with a fully organised guided tour; I can think of nothing worse.”

So what was it about Lo Manthang? Maybe the allure of the unknown. “The words ‘walled, mediaeval city’ are part of it,” she says.

“That and the fact that this extraordinary place was so little documented.” For Lane, the pull wasn’t just geographical; it was almost spiritual.

She describes the place as “truly unique… the only walled city built in the Middle Ages that is still lived in in the same way as when it was built, by descendant generations.”

Until recently, it even had its own royal family, with villagers still working the King’s land.

Here,

Tibetan Buddhism isn’t an accessory or aesthetic; it’s an integral part of everyday life.

“Religion was as much a part of life as it was in the West during the Middle Ages,” Lane says. Lo Manthang, it seems, isn’t merely a location; it’s a living echo of a world that’s quietly fading.

That sense of urgency deepened as modernity began to creep closer.

A year before her trip, ABC’s Foreign Correspondent aired an episode called "The Road," documenting the new highway being built through Mustang towards the Tibetan border.

Lane realised the clock was ticking. “Now I knew I had to get there as soon as possible, before it disappeared forever.”

What followed became the backbone of her new book, Last Tibetan Kingdom.

This reflective travel memoir captures the strange tension between endurance and enchantment, between a place caught in time and a traveller determined to reach it before the world did.

For Lane, Mustang wasn’t about conquering a mountain or chasing a photo op. It was about earning an encounter.

“I wouldn’t climb Mt Everest, but others risk their lives to do it,” she writes.

“I like a challenge that’s not totally beyond my ability, and I think doing so to see something truly unique is worth it.”

In an age of overexposed travel content and algorithm-fed destinations, her story feels like a quiet act of rebellion.

Lo Manthang might now be more accessible than ever, but The Quiet Beyond reminds us that the real journey, the one that changes you, starts long before you arrive.

Sometimes it begins with nothing more than a postcard and the stubborn idea that effort makes beauty mean more.

Last Tibetan Kingdom is available wherever you buy your books, as well as Ingram Spark, Amazon.com, and Draft2Digital.