Travel in Kathmandu Valley

Kathmandu is three cities, not one. The valley holds Kathmandu itself, Patan — also called Lalitpur, and the oldest of the three — and Bhaktapur. Our itineraries treat them as a single destination and work through them over two days.

The first day is the monuments. Kathmandu's Durbar Square holds the Hanuman Dhoka palace, the Taleju and Jagannath temples, the Kala Bhairava statue, and the Kasthamandap, said to have been built from the wood of a single tree; the Kumari Ghar, home of the Living Goddess, stands on the same square. Above the city, Swayambhunath — held to be 2,000 years old, and the oldest Buddhist stupa — looks out over the whole valley. The day then crosses to Patan for the Krishna Temple, the Golden Temple (Hiranya Varna Mahavihar), the Khumbeswar Temple, and the Mahaboudha, nicknamed the Temple of 1,000 Buddhas because every brick carries an engraved image of the Buddha.

The second day is religious practice rather than architecture. Boudhanath draws thousands of pilgrims a day — Tibetan monks in rust-coloured robes, prayer wheels turning, market stalls of yak butter, barley flour and ceremonial goods. Pashupatinath, dedicated to Shiva, stands on the Bagmati; only Hindus may enter, so the visit is made from the eastern bank, where worshippers perform centuries-old rituals of life, death and rebirth in plain view. The day closes in Bhaktapur, a museum of medieval art and architecture: pagodas and temples ringing the Fifty-Five Window Palace, and bazaars selling the pottery and weaving that are the town's main traditional trades. Four of the six trips run the valley exactly this way. The nine-day trip covers Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur but not Boudhanath or Pashupatinath; the eleven-day trekking trip covers Kathmandu, Boudhanath and Bhaktapur but not Patan or Pashupatinath.

Two itineraries carry on into the hills east of the city. Changu Narayan at 1,540 m, considered the oldest Hindu temple in Nepal, starts an easy two-hour walk on unpaved paths to Telkot and on to Nagarkot at 2,175 m, facing the snow peaks; the next day's walk through the villages around Nagarkot brings Dorje Lhakpa and Shishapangma into view. One of the two goes on to Dhulikhel, an old pagoda town away from the capital, with a two-hour climb to the Kali Temple. Elsewhere the pattern bends in smaller ways: one itinerary spends a night at Pharping, at the Naydo Monastery, where the 5 a.m. puja in the prayer hall is open to guests who want it; another drives straight from the airport up to Nagarkot, stopping at Bhaktapur on the way, and takes a rickshaw into the Kathmandu bazaars the next day.

Kathmandu bookends every route. All six trips fly in and out of here rather than passing through the middle. The shortest, nine days, pairs the valley with Chitwan and Pokhara. Longer ones add Nagarkot, Dhulikhel or Bandipur, and four of the six put a multi-day trek above Pokhara in between before returning to Kathmandu for a final night. If the jungle is part of the plan, note that Chitwan runs no jeep safaris in July, August and September — the rainy months — so those dates change what the wider trip can deliver.