Kathmandu essentials: getting in, getting around and getting it right

Kathmandu arrives through every sense at once — prayer flags, temple bells, motorbike horns, incense and dust, all in the same breath. It is also a city that repays preparation. Handle the practicalities before you land and the chaos turns from stressful to thrilling. Turn up without them and you spend your first two days negotiating rather than looking.

What follows is the groundwork: how to get in, where to sleep, how to move between the valley's scattered sites, roughly what it all costs, when in the year it works, and the order to do it in.

Key facts

• Airport: Tribhuvan International, a short drive east of the centre
• Visa: most nationalities can get a visa on arrival — confirm current rules and fees on Nepal's official immigration portal before flying
• Altitude: around 1,400 metres — noticeable, but not high enough for serious altitude concerns
• Clearest months: October to November, and March to April
• Money: Nepali rupees; carry cash, as cards are reliably accepted only in hotels and larger restaurants

Getting in

Tribhuvan is compact and frequently slow. Visa on arrival is really a three-stage queue — a kiosk where you complete the digital arrival form, a bank counter where you pay, and the immigration desk itself — and each stage can stall behind a single wide-body arrival. Two things shorten it. Complete the tourist visa form on Nepal's official immigration portal in the fortnight before you fly and bring the printed receipt, which lets you skip the kiosk scrum entirely. And carry the fee in cash US dollars: expect to pay somewhere around USD 30 for fifteen days, roughly USD 50 for thirty and about USD 125 for ninety, though these are revised periodically and the official portal is the only figure worth trusting on the day. The notes need to be clean, unmarked and recent — torn or heavily creased bills get refused, and the card machines at the counter have a reputation for choosing that moment to fail. Bring a spare passport photo too; the kiosks photograph you, but the backup costs nothing and solves a bad morning.

Landside, the simplest route into town is the prepaid taxi counter inside the arrivals hall, where a fixed fare to Thamel typically runs somewhere in the region of NPR 800 to 1,200. Ride-hailing is usually cheaper, but you collect the car outside the terminal perimeter, which after a long flight is a fair trade to decline. If your guesthouse offers a free pickup, take it: the first drive into Kathmandu is disorienting enough without also arguing about it.

Where to base yourself

Most travellers land in Thamel, the dense tourist quarter of guesthouses, trekking-gear shops and rooftop restaurants. It earns its reputation in both directions — everything you need is within a few minutes' walk, including permits, duffel bags and a last-minute down jacket, and it is loud until late, relentlessly commercial and not remotely representative of the city. For a first visit of a few days it is genuinely the practical choice.

Patan, across the Bagmati in Lalitpur, is the alternative worth weighing. It has a densely woven old town, a living craft tradition in metal and stone, quiet courtyards behind every other doorway, and a restaurant scene aimed at residents rather than trekkers. It sits twenty to thirty minutes from Thamel outside rush hour and considerably more inside it, which is the trade: you sleep better and you commute.

Boudha, out toward the airport, suits anyone drawn to the Tibetan Buddhist side of the city. Staying inside the stupa's ring of monasteries and cafés means you get the dawn and dusk circuits without a taxi, and the neighbourhood keeps a slower rhythm than anywhere central.

Bhaktapur is the outlier: a walled medieval town forty-five to ninety minutes east, depending entirely on traffic. Almost everyone visits as a day trip and leaves by late afternoon, which is exactly why staying a night changes it completely — the squares empty out, the light goes long, and you have a UNESCO town largely to yourself. If you do stay, ask at the ticket office about extending your entry ticket, which is typically granted for up to a week on production of your passport.

Getting around

Kathmandu taxis are small, plentiful and rarely use their meters. Agree the fare before you open the door, and expect good-humoured haggling as part of the transaction. Ride-hailing apps remove the negotiation and usually undercut the street price: Pathao and inDrive are the established pair, with Yango and Sajilo more recent arrivals. Motorbike pillion rides are offered through the same apps for a fraction of the car fare — fast, efficient, and a decision to make with your eyes open given the traffic. Expect fares to climb sharply during the big autumn festivals, when demand outstrips the fleet.

The historic core — Kathmandu Durbar Square and the bazaar lanes running north through Indra Chowk and Asan Tole toward Thamel — is for walking, and best done early. The market is at full tilt by around seven in the morning, and the traffic has thickened badly by mid-morning. The air is genuinely dusty and the valley's pollution is worst in the cold months; many residents wear masks, and following suit on longer walks is sensible rather than squeamish.

For the outlying sites, take a taxi and budget half a day each. Rough travel times from the centre: Swayambhunath around fifteen minutes, Boudha and Pashupatinath thirty to forty-five, Patan twenty to thirty, Bhaktapur forty-five to ninety. Those numbers are elastic in a way that is hard to convey on paper — the same journey can double between ten in the morning and six in the evening.

How long to spend, and in what order

Four full days is the realistic minimum for the valley; five or six lets you do it without rushing. The common mistake is treating Kathmandu as a one-night staging post before a trek, which reduces a valley holding seven UNESCO monument zones to a taxi tour.

An order that works:

Day one — the old city, on foot. Start at Kathmandu Durbar Square, where entry for foreign visitors typically runs around NPR 1,000, then walk the bazaar lanes north through Indra Chowk and Asan Tole. This is the day that orients you. Finish at the Garden of Dreams, the restored neoclassical garden at the edge of Thamel, where entry for foreign visitors is usually around NPR 400 and the walled quiet is worth every rupee after six hours of horns. It generally opens mid-morning and stays open into the evening.

Day two — Swayambhunath early, Patan after lunch. The hilltop stupa is best climbed before the heat and the crowds arrive; entry is typically around NPR 200. Then cross the river to Patan, where a single ticket of roughly NPR 1,000 to 1,500 for foreign visitors covers the Durbar Square and, importantly, the Patan Museum inside it — a carefully curated collection of Newar bronzes housed in a restored palace wing, and the rare indoor museum here that repays a slow hour. It typically opens late morning and closes in the late afternoon.

Day three — Bhaktapur, all of it. Entry for foreign visitors runs somewhere around NPR 1,800, which sounds steep until you understand it is a town-wide ticket funding continuous restoration. Give it the whole day: Durbar Square, then Taumadhi Square and the five-tiered Nyatapola temple, then the potters' square, then simply get lost in the lanes between them. Eat juju dhau, the sweetened buffalo-milk curd set in shallow clay pots that Bhaktapur is known for across Nepal.

Day four — Pashupatinath in the morning, Boudha at dusk. Pashupatinath, the great Shiva complex on the Bagmati, charges foreign visitors roughly NPR 1,000 and asks a particular kind of respect: cremations take place in the open on the ghats, and photographing them is intrusive whatever you see others doing. Boudhanath, a short drive on, typically costs around NPR 400 to enter.

With a fifth or sixth day, three good options open up. Kirtipur is a hill-top Newar town south-west of the city that sees a fraction of the visitors. The Chandragiri cable car climbs the valley's western rim, with foreign tickets typically somewhere around USD 13 one way and USD 23 return, running from mid-morning through the afternoon; the Himalayan panorama on a clear winter morning is the payoff. Or take a night at Nagarkot on the eastern ridge for sunrise over the range.

What to skip: trying to fit two Durbar Squares into one day. Each was the capital of a separate kingdom and each rewards several unhurried hours; doing two in a day makes both a blur of carved struts. Skip, too, the full-day valley tours that promise all seven monument zones before dinner. They exist, they sell well, and they deliver almost nothing.

What it costs

Nepal remains inexpensive by most standards, with one asterisk: heritage entry fees for foreign visitors are not trivial and they stack. Budget somewhere in the region of NPR 5,000 to 6,000 in site tickets across four days if you visit everything above. That money is not a tourist tax in the cynical sense — it funds reconstruction that has continued since the 2015 earthquake, and the results are visible in every re-raised temple plinth.

Beyond tickets, a guesthouse bed in Thamel typically starts somewhere around USD 15 to 25, mid-range boutique hotels in Patan or Boudha run roughly USD 50 to 120, and the handful of heritage properties go considerably higher. A plate of momos at a local place costs a few hundred rupees; a full dinner with drinks at a tourist-facing restaurant is usually somewhere around NPR 1,500 to 3,000 a head. ATMs are widespread but most cap withdrawals fairly low and charge a fixed fee of roughly NPR 500 a transaction, so draw larger amounts less often.

When to come, and when not to

October and November are the clearest, driest and busiest months, with the autumn festival calendar — Indra Jatra, Dashain and Tihar — falling across them. March and April are the second window, warmer and greener, though pre-monsoon haze and agricultural burning across the plains can flatten the mountain views that draw people up Chandragiri in the first place.

The monsoon, roughly June through September, is wetter than most visitors expect and brings landslides that disrupt road travel outside the valley. The city itself is perfectly workable — the rain tends to fall hard and briefly rather than all day — and the valley is at its greenest. But mountain flights and viewpoints become a lottery.

December through February is the honest problem. It is dry and often sunny, and the Himalaya can be spectacular on a good morning. It is also when the valley's bowl-shaped geography traps pollution under a temperature inversion; monitoring studies of the valley have found particulate levels peaking in January, with the large majority of winter days rated unhealthy on the air quality index. Visitors with asthma, and anyone travelling with young children, should weigh that seriously. If you do come in winter, do your walking in the middle of the day, once the overnight inversion has burned off.

One further piece of context. Nepal saw significant political protests in September 2025, concentrated around government buildings in central Kathmandu. Tourist infrastructure and ordinary life returned to normal quickly afterwards, and the demonstrations did not target visitors. Protests here are typically political, localised and flagged in advance; the practical advice is to check your own government's travel advisory before flying, and to walk away from any gathering rather than toward it.

Eating

Nepali food deserves better than the banana pancakes of Thamel. The tradition to seek out is Newar — the cuisine of the valley's indigenous people, built on buffalo, beaten rice, lentil patties and fierce pickles.

In Patan, Honacha sits behind the Krishna temple on the Durbar Square and is described by Nepali food writers as the oldest and best known of the city's Newari hole-in-the-wall eateries; it is a bench, a low ceiling, choila and bara, and no concessions whatsoever. In Kirtipur, Newa Lahana is a community-run, multi-storey bhatti staffed by a women's cooperative, which Nepali Times has called a favourite among Newari eat-outs — order yomari and chatamari alongside the standards. In Dillibazar, Bhojan Griha serves a full Nepali set menu with live music and dance inside a century-old building that once housed a royal priest; it typically runs from mid-morning until late evening, and booking ahead is wise in season. At the top end, Krishnarpan at Dwarika's offers a slow multi-course Nepali tasting menu, generally in the evenings only and by prior reservation.

In Boudha, Utpala Café, founded by one of the neighbourhood's monasteries, is entirely vegetarian, opens early and runs a farmers' market on Saturdays; it ranks among the higher-rated places in the area on TripAdvisor and makes a useful base between monastery visits. Shechen and Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling, both within walking distance of the stupa, welcome respectful visitors to morning prayers — cover shoulders and knees, leave shoes at the hall door, and put the camera away during ceremonies.

Doing it right

Walk clockwise around stupas and mani walls. It is the single point of etiquette that costs nothing and is always noticed. Remove your shoes where you see locals removing theirs, dress modestly at temples and monasteries, and ask before photographing anyone — particularly monks at prayer and mourners at Pashupatinath. Keep small notes for ticket booths and donation boxes, since change is perpetually short. Power cuts are far rarer than they once were, but a power bank remains a sensible thing to carry.

Tip: Do Boudhanath at dusk. Joining the evening kora — the slow clockwise circuit of pilgrims, monks and neighbourhood families as the butter lamps come on — is, for our money, the most atmospheric hour in the city.

One last habit worth adopting: build slack into every plan. Traffic, festivals and spontaneous invitations to tea all conspire against tight schedules here, and the travellers who enjoy Kathmandu most are the ones who left room for it to surprise them. Kathmandu asks a little patience and gives back tenfold.