I want to be honest with you about something.
I have trekked sections of the Annapurna Circuit before. I have passed through Manang as a waypoint, done the standard acclimatisation-day checklist — Gangapurna Lake, tick, Praken Gompa, tick, apple pie from the bakery near the main street, tick — and pushed on to Thorong La like everyone else. I thought I had seen Manang.
I had not seen Manang.
What I had done was walk through concentrations of living Buddhist heritage in the Himalayas and head straight for the elevator. The monasteries, the caves, the nunnery where practitioners disappear for four years in isolation. Yes, such places exist in isolation. I had walked right past all of it with my head straight, just thinking about my oxygen levels.
Photo: This is me meditating inside the Buddhist Monastery.
This time was different. We had seven days, no Thorong La to rush, and a plan to go slowly through Pisang, Ngawal, Braka, and Manang. This time with an intent to stop & observe. To sit inside Braka Monastery, which has been holding its walls together for approximately a thousand years. To climb to the cave where a hunter once pulled back his bow to shoot a meditating yogi but couldn't.
And, as it turned out, to stare directly into the eyes of a snow leopard on the cliff of Nagwal - just a few meters away. I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start from the beginning.
We left Pokhara early via the Lekhnath–Karputar Road, which winds north through the lower foothills before hitting the main Besisahar highway. The Turquoise Marsyangdi River appears somewhere around Khudi and stays along the trail. Sometimes visible, sometimes just audible.
Photo: Children watching the football match in Chame.
Besisahar is the gateway to the Annapurna region and the last place that feels entirely ordinary. We had lunch there: Dal Bhat. Obviously, there is no right & wrong time for Dal Bhat — and we changed from our private car into a 4WD for the road north. The 4WD is mandatory on this stretch. The road above Besisahar is technically there, but off-road.
The Marsyangdi runs down the gorge below as you climb. In the narrow sections, the road is carved directly into the cliff face, maybe a lane and a half wide, with the river far enough down that you don't want to think about it. On the way to Chame, we passed Chyamche waterfall and Octopus waterfall (the one that comes off the cliff directly onto the road and you drive through it, which nobody warns you about and which is extremely refreshing) further up, which fans across the rock face in eight separate streams. The valley opens and closes, opens again. Small settlements appear on terraces — potato fields, wooden houses, prayer flags above every roofline.
Photo: Children playing in the school of Chame.
Seven hours after leaving Pokhara, we arrived in Chame (3,490 m). It is the administrative headquarters of Manang district and the gateway to everything that comes next. Chame has a proper government office, an ATM (may or may not be working), several lodges, and the particular quality of mountain-town evenings where the cold comes in fast the moment the sun drops behind the ridge. We ate, we slept, and in the morning the real journey started.
The first full day of trekking begins in a pine forest alongside the Marsyangdi. The path moves between the riverbank and the cliff — at several points it is carved directly into the rock face, a metre wide, one hand touching the stone wall, the other emphatically not reaching out to the other side. It is not technically difficult. It does, however, concentrate the mind.
About two hours in, the valley opens into Bhartang.
Bhartang is home to one of the largest apple orchards in the Annapurna region, and in spring the whole hillside is in blossom — white and pale pink, with Himalayan cherry trees already blooming along the lower path in clouds of colour that start in March and carry through April. Behind the Lamjung Kailash peak behind us, the trails to Kapuche Glacier, the Kori Himal Trek, Sikles village, and Khumai-Korcha Hill trek all begin, three of the most accessible and rewarding shorter treks from Pokhara, and easy to miss if you don't know to look.
Photo: Bhartang is famous for its apple Orchards.
At a small roadside stand, a man in a fleece vest was selling fresh-pressed apple juice and, from a shelf behind him, small bottles of apple wine made at the distillery further up the trail. The wine is not trying to be French. It is trying to be apple wine at 2,800 metres, and it succeeds entirely at that. We had a glass each, nodded at the mountains, and continued.
Lunch was in Dhikurpokhari, a village with painted walls and a view that opens up enough to show Pisang Peak (6,091 m) ahead. The vegetable terraces were full of people planting potatoes. In spring, Manang farmers work with the same urgency as farmers everywhere — the growing window is short, and everyone knows it.
The trail split before Pisang. Take the upper trail. Always take the upper trail here. The lower route goes to Lower Pisang, which is fine. The upper trail takes you to Upper Pisang and to the Pisang Monastery on the ridge above the old village, which has an unobstructed view of Annapurna II (7,937 m) directly across the valley that made me stop walking mid-stride and just stand there for a while.
Photo: Pisang Monastery in Annapurna region.
The Pisang Monastery belongs to the Drukpa Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism - the same lineage that produced Milarepa, which becomes relevant later in this story. When we arrived, the compound was genuinely busy: a new Gompa inauguration was imminent, workers were moving materials, and a group of monks had come up from Swayambhunath in Kathmandu for the ceremony. One of them waved us into the prayer hall, where another monk was doing something complicated with a butter lamp arrangement and seemed entirely unsurprised by our arrival. We sat, we meditated (or tried to - I was still thinking about the wine), we left when the butter lamp ritual reached a stage that seemed to require concentration from everyone present.
Overnight: Upper Pisang (3,300 m)
Rule one of this route: take the higher trail out of Upper Pisang. Almost everyone takes the lower trail to avoid the extra climbing. This is a mistake they will regret when they see your photos later.
The higher trail climbs to Ghyaru, a small stone village at 3,670 m where the entire Annapurna range lines up along the southern wall of the valley - Annapurna II, III, IV, Gangapurna, Tilicho Peak— all at once, unobstructed.
Half an hour after the hike (a short detour to the left), we found the Green Lake, sitting in a shallow bowl between the ridge and the valley slope, cold, still, and genuinely green from the algae on the lake bed. Annapurna III (7,555 m) was floating upside down in the water. We were the only people there. We had been there maybe twenty minutes when the sky changed. The bright, clear morning went dark all of a sudden, and snow came down in large amounts. We stood at the lake's edge watching the whole Manang disappear under a white blanket of snow.
Photo: Green lake, Annapurna region.
We crossed a suspension bridge over a side stream and climbed through the high meadow toward Ghyaru. We meditated there for some time and had our lunch. Ghyaru is renowned for its stone houses . At Ngawal, the trail passes the junction where the route splits toward Nar-Phu Valley — one of Nepal's most rewarding restricted areas, a two-valley Tibetan Buddhist enclave that barely appears on maps from thirty years ago. The Nar village sits at 4,150 m, the Phu village at 4,080 m, and the cultural isolation of both is difficult to describe without sounding like you're exaggerating. (You're not.) If you want to extend this trek into Nar-Phu, the permits and logistics are arranged here.
For experienced adventurers wanting to venture beyond the traditional cultural circuit, the challenging Namun La Pass trek provides an incredible high-altitude crossing that connects the valley of Manang directly to the remote, traditional Gurung villages of the lower foothills.
After dropping packs at the guesthouse in Ngawal, we climbed to Guru Rinpoche Cave.
Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche) is the 8th-century Indian tantric master who brought Vajrayana Buddhism from the subcontinent into Tibet and across the Himalaya. According to Kagyu tradition, he meditated in hundreds of caves during his journeys north, and several are in Manang. This one sits on a cliff ledge above Ngawal, reached by a steep path that narrows considerably near the top. Inside, the cave is small and dark, with old thangka paintings on the walls and butter lamp offerings on a stone shelf. It doesn't announce itself. There's no signboard, no ticket counter, no audio guide telling you what to feel. It is just a cave where someone sat in practice for a very long time, about 1,300 years ago, and where people have been coming to do the same thing ever since.
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Photo: Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche) statue en route Cave.
I was climbing back down the path toward the cliff edge, maybe fifteen minutes above the village, when I saw it.
On the ridge to my right: grey, white-spotted, large, long-tailed, sitting completely still on a flat rock about five metres away. The snow leopard — what Himalayan herders and naturalists call the "Ghost of the Himalayas" — was looking directly at me.
I froze in the fresh snow. Literally.
It was a scary surprise - what an oxymoron.
We stayed motionless — both apparently waiting for the other to do something — for what felt like a long time but was probably four or five seconds. Then it turned, walked two steps, and disappeared into the snow on the other side of the ridge. As if it never existed. After the moment, there was only snow, just white.
I stood on the path for a while after that. I want to tell you I had some profound spiritual insight in that moment, something fitting for a trek that was supposed to be about Buddhist pilgrimage and meditation. Mostly I felt my heart hammering and my legs doing a small involuntary shake, and the complete inadequacy of my phone camera, which I had not managed to raise in time. Every emotion at once — happy, frightened, something that was basically disbelief, and underneath all of it a strange calm, like whatever happened next was fine.
We descended the 1,500-odd steps back to the village. I had Dal Bhat for dinner and told the story to everyone at the guesthouse. Nobody believed me until the guesthouse owner nodded slowly and said the cat had been seen near the cliff twice that month.
Overnight: Ngawal (3,657 m)
We took the lower trail from Ngawal to Braka because the upper trail had more snow than made sense to attempt. Even lower, the pine forest was muffled under fresh snowfall — the trees smaller and more widely spaced than they are lower in the valley, their branches loaded with ice, the path between them quiet except for birds moving in the canopy and the sound of small streams running under the snow. We slowed down considerably, less from the conditions than from the simple fact that walking through a silent, snow-covered forest at altitude does something to the quality of attention that is hard to manufacture elsewhere.
 en route Braka Village.webp)
Photo: Chortens (memorials) en route to Braka Village.
Small streams flowed underneath the snow, barely audible. Animals moved across the hillside looking for grass. For about two hours we forgot about every logistical concern we had brought with us from wherever we came from. If that sounds unlikely, go try it.
Lunch was in Munji, a small settlement where the trail flattens before the final approach to Braka. From there: Sher Gompa.
Most trekkers walk straight past Sher Gompa (Monastery) without realising what it is. From the outside it looks like a modest guesthouse, maybe a small meditation centre. It is, in fact, one of the most serious Kagyu Buddhist retreat institutions in the Annapurna region.
Under the guidance of the Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche — one of the most respected teachers in the Kagyu lineage, responsible for dozens of meditation centres worldwide — practitioners at Sher Gompa complete traditional four-year retreats studying the Six Yogas of Naropa. These are advanced Vajrayana practices that take years of foundational training to qualify for. During retreat, practitioners have zero contact with the outside world. No visitors. No social media. (One imagines the absence of phones alone is its own practice.) The retreat accepts 10–15 monks and nuns per cycle.
Photo: Furry cow in the snow.
When we arrived, two female monks from the previous batch were sitting outside. They invited us for tea without being asked. We accepted, sat down on low wooden benches in the courtyard, and spent an hour talking about what the retreat actually involves — the daily schedule, the practice structure, what "studying within themselves for four years" looks like in concrete terms. They were direct and good-humoured about it. One of them laughed when I asked if it was difficult. "Yes," she said, in a way that suggested this was a genuinely interesting question she had spent considerable time with herself.
The main monastery at Sher Gompa stays closed during active retreat periods, as it should. But the outer courtyard, the conversation, the tea — for a traveller curious about Buddhism at any level, an hour at Sher Gompa is more instructive than a shelf of books about it.
Then down to Braka.
Braka village is like walking into a century that nobody agreed to leave. The houses are old, flat-roofed, stacked against the hillside in layers, the stone walls dark with age and the narrow alleys between them smelling of pine incense and yak dung smoke. People move through the alleys at a pace that suggests they have nowhere to be and no particular hurry to get there. Everyone I passed looked, without any apparent effort, entirely comfortable.
Braka Monastery - also called Braga Gompa- sits on the slope above the village and has been there for approximately a thousand years. Originally it was built five storeys high. About 500 years ago, three storeys collapsed or were dismantled; what stands now is the remaining two. Inside the lower assembly hall, the walls hold hand-painted thangkas darkened by centuries of butter lamp smoke. The monastery houses complete sets of the Kangyur (the collected teachings of the Buddha, 108 volumes) and the Tengyur (2,000+ years of commentary by Indian masters, 225 volumes), both written out by hand in gold ink on traditional paper. There are hundreds of bronze statues of specific Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Kagyu lineage masters arranged in cases along the walls.
Photo: Glimpse inside the Braka Monastery of Braka village in Annapurna region.
The monastery is not a museum. Monks live here. The butter lamps are filled daily. The prayer sessions happen on schedule. The caretaker monk, an older man with a patient face and encyclopaedic knowledge of the building's history, will talk to you at length about all of this if you ask and seem genuinely interested. We asked. We seemed genuinely interested. We stayed considerably longer than planned.
Overnight: Braka (3,475 m)
Wake early. The snow had stopped overnight. The animals from the village were already up on the Milarepa grassland — yaks and dzokhyos moving slowly through the thin grass below the monastery, leaving tracks in the remaining snow. We had breakfast, packed lunch, and headed out.
Milarepa Cave sits at approximately 4,300 m, about 4–5 hours round trip from Braka, gaining roughly 800 metres of elevation. It is a legitimate acclimatisation hike and a legitimate pilgrimage site, and the fact that it's both simultaneously feels entirely right for this valley.
Photo: Shyakung Monastery below Milerepa Cave
The path crosses the Marsyangdi suspension bridge — the one decorated with more prayer flags than I have ever seen on a single bridge, running the entire span in both directions, some of them so old they've faded to the colour of the sky — then continues across the vast high pasture before the gradient steepens. We couldn't take the short, steep route (too much snow), so we took the jeep track instead. No vehicles were on it. The surface was negotiable. Thirty minutes up, a red fox came trotting down the slope toward us at a relaxed, domestic-cat pace, checked us without slowing, and continued down to the valley as if it had somewhere to be.
We followed a single set of footprints in the snow from the bottom of the ascent all the way to Shyakung Monastery, the small gompa just below the cave. We were, as far as we could tell, the only people on this trail. Whose footprints were these? We didn't find out until we reached the monastery and found a monk sitting inside, who had apparently walked up before dawn and settled in for the morning. He acknowledged our arrival with a nod and returned to what he was doing. We sat in a different corner and didn't disturb him.
Now. The story.
This is the story that most trekking blogs summarise in two lines but it deserves more.
In the 11th century, a man named Gompo Dorje was a hunter. A skilled one. He made his living killing animals in these mountains and saw nothing unusual in this. One day he was tracking a deer with his hunting dog through the high pasture above what is now Braka village when he heard singing from a cave on the cliff above. He approached and looked inside.
He saw a Yogi sitting in deep meditation, singing.
He saw the Deer he had been chasing sitting calmly beside the Yogi.
He saw his own hunting Dog sitting calmly on the other side of the Yogi.
Dorje, a practical man, concluded that sorcery was involved. He pulled back his bow to shoot the Yogi.
The bow malfunctioned.
He tried again.
The bow malfunctioned again.
Dorje stood there with his bow drawn and understood, in the slow way that real understanding arrives, that what he was looking at was not sorcery. He walked to the Yogi who was Jetsun Milarepa, Tibet's most beloved saint and poet, born 1052 CE in Gungthang, western Tibet, a man who had spent years in cave meditation after a young life that involved genuine black magic and the deaths of several relatives — and offered him the bow as a sign of surrender.
He gave up hunting that day. He became Milarepa's disciple. The lineage that descends from this moment, the Khyira Kagyu, or Hunter Kagyu. Named after him.
The bow, or what is believed to be the bow Dorje offered to Milarepa, still hangs on the rock face above the cave entrance. It is old, dark, mounted on a simple wooden frame against the cliff. You can stand under it and look at it. It is a strange feeling, standing under an object that has been there for nine centuries because someone put down his weapon and chose a different way of living.
The cave itself is small — maybe four metres across, a natural stone shelf serving as an altar, old painted panels, a photograph of Thrangu Rinpoche, butter lamps. The monk from Shyakung Monastery was somewhere behind us on the path by the time we left; we had the cave to ourselves for a while.
I want to be careful here about what I say, because bad travel writing turns every experience into a forced epiphany. I didn't have an epiphany. I sat in a small cold cave at 4,300 m. and thought about a hunter who once stood exactly where I was standing and couldn't shoot. That was enough.
Photo: That's me meditating inside the cave.
On the way down, in the Bhojpatra birch forest — these are the trees whose papery bark peels in translucent sheets and was used as writing material across the Himalaya for centuries, the very bark the ancient manuscripts in Braka Monastery were once written on — we found the monk again, walking slowly back down the path in front of us, an orange robe against white snow, completely unhurried.
Overnight: Braka (3,475 m)
The walk from Braka to Manang (3,519 m) takes 30–45 minutes on the flat path along the valley floor. After five days of relative quiet, Manang town feels like arriving in a city. It has proper restaurants, a bakery that makes credible apple pie, a mountaineering rescue centre that screens altitude sickness videos every afternoon (attendance recommended), and dozens of trekkers in various states of acclimatisation preparation, mostly heading for Thorong La or Tilicho Lake.
We were not rushing anywhere. This was, in its own way, deeply satisfying.
Gangapurna Lake is a 20-minute walk from the main bazaar, at the foot of the Gangapurna glacier fed directly by meltwater from the peak above (7,455 m). The water is genuinely turquoise — not "turquoise" in the travel-writing sense of "it was blue and I wanted a better word," but actually turquoise, the specific colour of glacial mineral suspension. The lake is cold, obviously. The glacier above it is visibly retreating. Older photographs show ice extending considerably lower than it does now. I mention this not to insert a paragraph about climate change into a travel blog, but because it's true and visible and worth knowing.
After lunch, we went looking for Milarepa Smriti Park.
Photo: Milarepa park at Manang.
I say "looking for" deliberately. The park sits above the main bazaar area and receives essentially no attention in travel writing about Manang — it barely exists as a web search result. What we found was a small public garden with carved stone panels displaying excerpts from Milarepa's Mila Grubum (the Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa — the collected teachings, stories, and spontaneous songs of the man whose cave we had visited the day before), a few benches, and a view of the valley that most trekkers walk straight past on their way to somewhere else. We sat there for an hour. Nobody else came.
In the evening, we hiked up to the Manang viewpoint on the ridge above town. The full width of the Marsyangdi valley was laid out below — the river as a silver thread in the valley floor, settlements on both banks, Annapurna II sitting directly south at 7,937 m in flat gold late-afternoon light. From the upper end of the viewpoint, you can see clear to the junction where the road heads toward Jomsom and eventually Upper Mustang — one of Nepal's great restricted area treks, now accessible under the new 2026 solo permit rules. The Lower Mustang route connects from the same highway south.
We watched the light go. We had dinner. It was a good day to have done nothing in particular.
Overnight: Manang (3,519 m)
The jeep from Manang to Besisahar takes 5–7 hours depending on road conditions. The road above Chame remains the road above Chame — still an intention more than an infrastructure, still scenic in the way that roads requiring total attention tend to be. From Besisahar, a private car runs to Pokhara in 3–4 hours.
The drive covers in reverse the elevation you gained over six days of walking. You go from high treeless pasture to subtropical river valley in the time it takes to listen to a few albums. By the time the Pokhara lakefront appears, it feels like a completely different country from where you started. In a sense it is.
I spent a considerable part of the drive thinking about what I would do differently. Slower in Braka — another full day there, maybe two. More time at Sher Gompa. The Tsum Valley extension, which branches off the Manaslu Circuit approach but shares the same Kagyu Buddhist cultural world as everything we had walked through. The Nar-Phu Valley trek, which goes north from just before Chame into terrain and culture that make Manang's trail feel urban by comparison.
But mostly I thought about the snow leopard, and the cave, and the monk walking down the path in his orange robe with nowhere to be. And a hunter, nine centuries ago, who stood at the mouth of a cave with his bow drawn and put it down.
How to get there: Pokhara to Besisahar by private car or shared bus (3–4 hours), then 4WD or shared jeep to Chame (3–4 more hours). The Chyamche waterfall section is normal. You will drive through it. It is fine.
Permits: Annapurna Conservation Area Permit (ACAP) - NPR 3,000 (~$23 USD). Available from North Nepal Trek. No restricted area permit needed unless you extend into Nar-Phu Valley. Luck for you, if you book Nar-Phu this time, trekking solo with a guide is possible from March 22, 2026.
When to go: October–November for the clearest skies and best mountain views. March–May for cherry blossoms at Bhartang, apple blossoms above Pisang, fewer crowds, and the last possibility of snow leopard sightings before the cats move higher. Winter (December–February) is cold (nights at Manang to -15°C) but delivers the best snow leopard probability and genuinely solitary monastery visits.
The snow question: Manang sits in a rain shadow. The valley gets significantly less precipitation than the rest of Nepal during the monsoon months. July and August are trekable with caveats. Below Pisang in June, you will encounter leeches. Above Pisang, you likely won't.
Accommodation and food: Tea houses at every point. Upper Pisang (3,300 m) has 5–8 lodges, Ngawal has 3–4, Braka has 4–5, Manang has 20+. Rooms run NPR 300–600 per night if you eat at the lodge. Dal bhat at altitude runs NPR 400–600 and comes with refills. The apple pie in Manang is genuinely good.
About the Author
Riccardo Pisano from Italy writes his Manang Cultural Trek experience with North Nepal Trek. He shares his surprising Snow Leopard encounter, meditating in the Monasteries & Caves, snowfall in Manang, and walking through the Pine forest of the Annapurna region.
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