The following was written to a relative going to Nepal for a short trip by my girlfriend Meredith.
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A Lonely Planet is most necessary, especially for a short trip. The other essential document you will need if you plan on doing anything outside of the city center (and you should) is the "Tourist Map of the Kathmandu Valley". It shows all the hiking trails andsmaller roads and villages and stuff.
RECOMMENDED ACTIVITIES and FOOD
There are a few things you absolutely have to do that are on the beaten tourist track, but are on there for a reason:
1. Pashupatinath Temple - Hindu temple complex where they do ritual cremations on the Bagmati River. You can watch the cremations but shouldn't take pictures, as there are real funerals taking place.
2. Boudanath Stupa - this is the main monument in the Tibetan part of town. Tibetan Buddhists will be "circumnambulating"the stupa (a prayer practice where they walk in one direction around it multiple times) and there are lots of touristy shops around the path to look in. Some of the best Tibetan restaurants are there with roof gardens and great views of the stupa, and it's nice to go around sunset if you can. The entire neighborhood (called "Bouda") is a Tibetan neighborhood and there are tons of smaller temples, monasteries and monuments scattered about. I think the Lonely Planet will list them, but if not there's a list and map painted on a wall at one end of the main stupa area. It's a great place to spend a day or a few hours wandering around.
3. Swayambunath (the monkey temple) - one of the most important Buddhist stupas in the city, and has monkeys running around freely on its grounds. You have to walk up a very steep, long set of stairs to get to it, and there are incredible 360 views of the city when you getup there. If you can't do stairs there is a way to take a taxi up to the top.
4. Kathmandu Durbar Square - the main temple/palace complex of the city. You will have to pay a fee to get in, and people will try to get you to hire them as "guides" to show you around. We did it once and it was fun, but not necessary. (Lauren thinks you should get a guide, just set the price beforehand, should be about 500 rupees) Check out the temples, the "Kumari" (a child goddess) house, and wander a bit around the neighborhood - this is a great place to just walk and get lost. In any direction is real Nepali urban fabric - not so touristy and with genuine shops and markets catering to nepali people. In one direction is a market that sells beautiful metal ware.
4. Bhaktapur - the Newari people are the original inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley, and this is their city, still almost perfectly preserved with all the architecture being from (I think) the 12th century or something like that. It's about 10 miles from Kathmandu,and will be about 2 hours on public transportation. In a taxi it might be about 1 hour. You should spend the day if you get a chance.
5. Patan Durbar Square - Like I said on the phone, "Kathmandu" is really made up of 2 cities - Kathmandu proper and Patan, which is continuous with Kathmandu but separated by the Bagmati river. Patan is the greatest - we lived there and it's just much more chill and less touristy, though there is a definite tourist presence. Patan has its own Durbar (palace) square, similar to the one in Kathmandu -Lauren and I think it's even more impressive. The neighborhood around it, likewise, is a maze of shops and smaller temples and monuments, great for wandering.
Lonely Planet has a fantastic walking tour for Patan Durbar square and neighborhood, and actually also one for Kathmandu Durbar square - definitely do those two when you are in those neighborhoods and any other of the walking tours in the book if you get a chance. They are generally very helpful and you see a lot of stuff that you otherwisewould have missed.
Since we lived in Patan we have lots of places that we love and could recommend, but not sure if they're appropriate for such a short trip -a lot of it is expat stuff. One thing you have to do if you go to Patan is eat at our favorite restaurant, Mustang Thakali Kitchen. There are no street names, so the best I can do in the way of directions is this: Get in a cab, and tell them to bring you to Namaste Supermarket in Pulchowk (pronounced Pool-choke). From Namaste you walk directly across the main road and down a smaller road that runs perpendicular to the main road, and after about 5-10 minutes the restaurant will be on your left. There is also a really good German bakery on that road, as well as a sort of health club where you canuse the pool, get a massage, sauna, etc. If you walk around the neighborhood, called Jhamsikhel, you'll find several businesses and venues catering to expats, there might be some good live music or something around so keep an eye out. That spot is about a 20 minutewalk from Patan Durbar Square, so you could make a day of it.
Anyway, at the restaurant you should order the Thali plate. This is the standard Nepali meal and comes with rice (or you can try Dhendo instead of rice, sort of a buckwheat paste indigenous to the Mustang region), a vegetable curry-thing or two, a spicy tomato condiment called achar, yogurt, a few slices of fresh cucumber and radish, and dal (lentil soup to pour on the rice). Also meat if you want it. This is our favorite place for Thali, but it is ubiquitous in the cityand throughout the country, and in all but the most touristy restaurants you get free refills ad infinitum. Try it everywhere, it is always a bit different and always delicious. Other tasty things to eat include bara - a newari pizza-like snack with egg or meat, roti thali-a thali with flatbread instead of rice, momo - nepali/tibetan dumplings, thenthuk - noodle soup, and newari snacks - small, tapas-like plates of different stuff.
THAMEL
Thamel is the tourist ghetto in Kathmandu, which is not to say that it isn't fun. Nightlife centers around this neighborhood and there are tons of shops and restaurants to try out. There's plenty of live music at night. There is a great spa there (a real one, many are brothels) to get massages, treatments, sauna, etc called Serendipity on Z Street. If you like spas it's the best. Another great place in Thamel is Thamel House, an upscale Newari restaurant, where our friend Susila's husband is a chef. They used to have a traditional Nepali dance show nightly. Other than that, Thamel is just a place to hang out and be a tourist. Eat, drink and be merry and so on.
Near Thamel is a neighborhood called Lazimpat, which is a cool spot with restaurants and nightclubs that both expats and more worldly Nepalis tend to hang out in. Do some research on the Google if you want to know if there's stuff happening over there.
BUSES and HIKES
Kathmandu Valley has a massive network of hiking trails, and in general you take a bus somewhere up near the rim of the valley, which is like a big bowl, and walk down, in some cases all the way back to the city. You mostly get the buses out into the valley at the main city bus area, Sundara, and it's a pretty crazy scene and very confusing. The buses, also, are usually more like vans, but sometimes will be actual buses. Different numbers go different places, but sometimes the numbers aren't clearly marked so ask the drivers where the bus to your destination is at until you find it. If you can, ask someone at your hostel what bus to take. They leave all the time, there is no schedule.
In order, our favorite hikes are to:
1. Changu Narayan - a beautiful, extremely well-preserved, and not-so-crowded temple complex in the hills. You could take a taxi to the trailhead, in an area called Chalantar I think (there isn't anything there) and take like a 45 min hike to Changu and then walk downhill back to Boudanath (for a sunset meal) or to Bhaktapur. Alternatively, you could start in Bhaktapur (maybe if you stay overnight there one night, or go very early in the morning) and take a bus up directly to Changu, then walk down to Bouda.
2. Dashinkali - another Hindu temple that has continuous animal sacrifices on Tuesdays and Saturdays. It's very unlikely you'll see other tourists there so you'll feel really cool. You take a bus (or taxi) directly to Dashinkali temple and then hike down to Pharping, a little town with a “Pilgrimage Route” through various Buddhist and Hindu temples/monuments. It's pretty far from the city so when you're tired of walking take a bus back.
3. Shivapuri National Park - You take a bus to the town just below the park, called Budanil Kantha. In town there's a famous Vishnu templeto check out, with an impressive snake sculpture. From town it's a mile or 2 uphill to the park entrance and there's no bus, so take a taxi - or you could hitchhike like we did. It costs 500 rupees to get into the park. Inside the park we hiked up to a Buddhist Nunnery called Nagi Gompa (where for a few rupees they'll probably feed you dal bhaat, means dal and rice) and then had a three hour hike down to Boudanath Stupa through the small village of Kopan along a gorgeous ridge through a pine forest. The trail gets pretty rough in one place just after the nunnery, it's just clamboring down a steep hillsideover a bunch of rocks, but it picks up again and is one of the best hikes we did. As long as you keep going downhill, you'll always endup in the right place.
From anywhere in the valley, almost any bus you get on should go backto Sundara, or at least somewhere in the central city - so if you get lost or tired, just hop on one to get home.
There's other awesome stuff in the valley to do besides these hikes, so look in the lonely planet and see if anything catches your eye.
BANDIPUR
If you want to get out of kathmandu for a few nights and see how rural Nepalis live, go to Bandipur. It's a 3 or 4 hour trip on a public bus, and you should probably plan to stay 2 nights. It's in the mountains and is just ridiculously gorgeous. There's a small town that has a bunch of tasty restaurants, and places to take short hikes to, like a silk farm, all overlooking incredible views of terraced farmland and Himalayan forest. The hostels there are pretty grody, but try to get a room with a view of the valley and it's not too bad. If you want a little more comfort there is one very nice inn, that I think will run you $30 a night - kind of a fortune in Nepal. Lonely Planet has all the info you need to get there, or ask someone at your hostel.
People might suggest that you go to Pokhara as a trip outside ofkathmandu, but don't listen. Though it has a beautiful lake and somenice hiking, it's mostly a tourist trap and you might as well just stay in Thamel.
WHERE TO STAY
Since we had an apartment while we lived there, we never got really well acquainted with hotels and hostels, so it's going to be hard to recommend where to stay. In the case that there's strikes while you're there (they're very common), I suggest you stay somewhere around Kathmandu Durbar Square which will be a good central place to walk to various sites. It's about a 20 minute walk to Thamel from there, and near Sundara, the central bus area. You could also just stay in Thamel, as there are plenty of hostels and it's near the nightlife. If there were no strikes (called Bandhs in Nepali) I would probably encourage you to stay near Patan Durbar Square, but I think you should play it safe and stay near Thamel/Durbar Square since things are a bit uncertain right now.
A decent room in any budget hostel should be about 600 - 900 rupees a night.
MONEY
Whenever you buy anything, especially in tourist areas or with taxis, people will try to overcharge you because you look like an easy mark. If you can, try to ask a nepali friend or hotel concierge what the acceptable price for any given thing should be beforehand, and feel free to haggle the quoted price down for pretty much anything. You will probably end up paying a premium anyway, so best to make peace with that - anyway, you can afford it as the extra is still next tonothing for an America
