The valley of glaciers close to Kathmandu — Tamang villages, yak cheese at Kyanjin Gompa, and a full Himalayan panorama without the Everest Base Camp crowds
The Langtang Valley is a Himalayan trekking destination in Rasuwa district of northern Nepal — at the head of the Trisuli River valley, 32km south of the Tibetan border, accessible from Syabrubesi (the trailhead) via 3–5 days of walking. The Langtang National Park (established 1976) was Nepal's first Himalayan national park; the valley contains a series of Tamang Buddhist villages (the Tamang people — ethnically and linguistically Tibetan, culturally closer to Tibet than to the Hindu lowlands of Nepal) in a landscape of pine and rhododendron forest giving way to high-altitude meadows (kharka)…
The Langtang Valley was settled by Tamang people (of Tibetan origin, their language a Tibetic language closely related to Tibetan, their religion a Nyingma school Buddhism mixed with pre-Buddhist Bon elements) at some point in the medieval period — oral tradition says the founders were Tibetan hunters who followed a deer into the valley. The valley remained outside the effective administrative reach of the Kathmandu Prithvi Narayan Shah state and later the Rana regime; the Tamang were heavily taxed as 'border people' during the Rana period, required to provide corvée labour for the administra…