Kathmandu Travel Guide | The Valley, the Trek and the Baggage Rule

The valley is better than the city

Kathmandu the city is a lot: dense, dusty, loud, and in the dry season the air is genuinely poor. Visitors arrive expecting mountain serenity and find a working South Asian capital in a bowl.

Kathmandu the valley is a different proposition, and it is the reason to give this place three days rather than one.

Within an hour of the centre sit two other medieval royal cities, Bhaktapur and Patan, each with its own Durbar Square, each the seat of a separate kingdom that spent centuries competing with the other two by building things. Three rival courts, three sets of palaces and temples, all within a valley you can cross in a morning. There is nothing else quite like it in Asia, and most trekkers walk straight past it on the way to the mountain. Ask us about a Nepal itinerary.

The three Durbar Squares

Bhaktapur is the one to give a full day, and if you only do one, do this. It is the best preserved of the three, largely traffic-free inside the old walls, and it is a functioning medieval city rather than a preserved one: potters working in the pottery square, woodcarving that is genuinely the finest in Nepal, and a five-tiered pagoda that will stop you where you stand. Stay the night if you can. The town after the day visitors leave is an experience most people never have.

Patan, across the river from Kathmandu and effectively part of the urban area now, has the densest and arguably the loveliest Durbar Square of the three, a superb museum in an old palace, and a courtyard-based old town where you can be lost and calm at the same time. It is also where we would suggest staying if you are not outfitting a trek.

Kathmandu's own Durbar Square is the busiest and the most damaged. The earthquake did real harm here and restoration is ongoing and will be for years. It is still worth an afternoon, particularly for the Kumari Ghar, home of the living goddess, a young girl selected as an incarnation who appears at a window.

Boudhanath and Pashupatinath

Two enormous religious sites, twenty minutes apart, and they could not be more different.

Boudhanath is one of the largest stupas anywhere, a white dome the size of a football ground with painted eyes on top, surrounded by a ring of monasteries and shops and cafes. At dusk, hundreds of people walk clockwise around it, spinning prayer wheels, in a slow current that has been running for centuries. It is the calmest crowded place you will ever stand in. Go at last light, order something on a rooftop, and watch the circling.

Pashupatinath is a Hindu temple complex on the Bagmati river and it is where cremations happen, openly, on ghats beside the water, every day. This is not a spectacle arranged for anyone. Families are grieving. Non-Hindus cannot enter the main temple and can view the ghats from across the river. Go quietly, do not photograph the families, and understand that you are a guest at something private happening in public. It is one of the most affecting places in South Asia and the most requiring of manners.

Swayambhunath, the hilltop stupa with monkeys and a long staircase, gives you the valley from above and is best early.

If you are trekking, read this bit twice

Two rules, and they cause more ruined Nepal trips between them than everything else combined.

Rule one: never book the mountain flight for the day you arrive, or the day before you leave.

Flights to Lukla, the airstrip for the Everest region, are weather-dependent in a way Australians have no reference point for. They are cancelled and delayed regularly, sometimes for days at a stretch, and the backlog compounds. This is not unusual or a failure; it is normal. So you build for it: at least one night in Kathmandu before the mountain flight, and several buffer days between coming off the trail and your international flight home. Trekkers who leave a single day of margin are the ones we get calls from.

Rule two: your trekking baggage limit is not your airline baggage limit.

Your international ticket to Kathmandu will allow you 30kg or more, particularly in a premium cabin. The flight onward to Lukla allows around 10kg plus a small carry-on, and it is enforced, because the aircraft are small and the runway is famously short and sloped.

Almost every first-time trekker arrives with far too much. The fix is standard practice: your Kathmandu hotel stores the excess while you are on the mountain, at no real cost and with no fuss, because they do it every day of the season. Pack knowing you will split the bag rather than discovering it at the domestic terminal at six in the morning.

Both of these are the sort of thing that never appears on a flight search and always appears in the debrief. Our flights to Nepal page goes through the international side, and the Sydney to Kathmandu page covers the routings.

You cannot see Everest from Kathmandu

Worth saying plainly, because it disappoints people every week.

Kathmandu sits in a valley at moderate altitude with hills all around it. On a clear morning, from the valley rim or from a rooftop in the right season, you can see snow peaks. You cannot see Everest, which is a long way east and behind a great deal of other mountain.

What does exist is the mountain flight: an early morning scenic flight along the Himalaya, roughly an hour, with everyone getting a window seat by rotation and Everest visible from the aircraft. It is weather-dependent, it is frequently postponed, and when it goes it is genuinely one of the great hours in travel. Book it for early in your stay so there are days left to try again.

The other option is a hill town. Nagarkot on the valley rim, or Dhulikhel, both give you a Himalayan dawn without a trek, and both are an easy drive.

Eating, and the thing you will not expect

Dal bhat is the national meal and the engine of the country: rice, lentil soup, a vegetable curry, a pickle, and refills of everything until you stop. Trekkers eat it twice a day for a fortnight and do not tire of it, which is a genuine surprise and the reason for the phrase "dal bhat power, twenty-four hour" that you will hear on every trail.

Momos are the national obsession: dumplings, steamed or fried, buffalo or vegetable, with a tomato and chilli dip. Eat them constantly.

Newari food, the cuisine of the valley's own people, is the thing to seek out and the thing almost no visitor tries. It is spicier, stranger and more interesting than standard Nepali fare, it involves cuts of buffalo you may prefer not to identify, and a Newari meal in Patan is the best food experience available in this valley.

The seasons are unusually decisive here

October and November are the season. Post-monsoon air, the clearest mountain views of the year, stable weather, and the main trekking window. It is also the busiest and the most expensive, and it is worth every bit of it.

March to May is the second season: warmer, hazier, less reliable views, but the rhododendron forests are in flower and the trails are marginally quieter.

June to September is the monsoon. The mountains are behind cloud, the trails are wet, the leeches are real, and the flights are unreliable. The valley is green and cheap. It is not the trip you are imagining.

December to February is cold and often beautifully clear, the high passes close, and the lower treks are entirely doable for anyone who can handle a genuinely cold morning.

Getting here always involves a stop, and the carriers serving Kathmandu from each hub change more often than on almost any route we book, so we confirm what is genuinely flying on your dates rather than repeating a schedule from memory. The airport is small, the arrival hour matters, and if you are trekking, the whole itinerary needs the buffers described above built in from the start. That is a conversation rather than a search box. Get a free Nepal quote.