Chhoser Cave

Locals call them the Sky Caves, and once you see them the name stops feeling like marketing. The cliff face above Chhoser village, a short jeep ride north of Lo Manthang, is riddled with thousands of hand-carved chambers stacked up to ten stories high — some barely large enough to crouch in, others opening into rooms with soot-blackened ceilings and traces of Buddhist murals still visible under centuries of dust. Archaeologists have found human remains, manuscripts, and painted wood dating back over two thousand years, and still can’t agree on whether the caves were used for burial, meditation retreat, defense, or all three at different points in Mustang’s history.

Climbing into the honeycomb

A local guide from Chhoser village unlocked the section that’s open to visitors and led Lia and me up a series of wooden ladders lashed together with rope, through chambers connected by holes barely wide enough to squeeze through. Some rooms had smoke-stained ceilings from butter lamps burned by monks in retreat centuries ago. Others were just empty stone boxes, silent in a way that felt deliberate. My headlamp kept catching handprints pressed into the clay walls — small ones, someone’s hands, from some year nobody can date precisely.

The village below

Chhoser itself is worth the detour on its own terms — a scattering of flat-roofed houses at the base of the cliff, a red gompa with a startlingly well-preserved 15th-century assembly hall, and fields of buckwheat that turn a deep rust color in early autumn. We ate lunch with the caretaker’s family, dal bhat with a Mustangi twist of dried yak cheese crumbled over the lentils, while their kids climbed the lower cave entrances like a jungle gym they’d known their whole lives, which, I realized, they had.

What stayed with me longest wasn’t the scale of the caves but the ordinariness of the village underneath them — kids playing, laundry drying, dinner cooking, all directly beneath one of the strangest unexplained architectural sites I’ve stood inside.

When to go: May through October, once the Jomsom–Lo Manthang jeep track is clear of snow and mud. A local permit and guide are required for cave access — arrange both through Lo Manthang or Chhoser village itself.