Although Kathmandu is easy to visit by taxi, we can also take you on a tour with a private vehicle and a guide. We try to steer clear of the long boring speech, and we like you to ask about what interests you most about each place or what you are most curious about.
Full or half day
Starting and ending in Kathmandu
Local tour guide
The tours we tell you about here are full-day tours, but they can also be just a half-day tour and, of course, there are many different options for a guided tour of Kathmandu, which is an interesting enough city to have many different places.
You can design your own tour, or we can help you design it according to what you want. You have information about many places on our website, which can help you to decide not only on these tours but also on your own trip around Nepal.
The two options we tell you about here can be combined with each other. But they can also be combined with a visit to Bhaktapur or Patan, although we recommend spending a full day in both of them. For example, a good option would be, among others, to visit Pashupatinath and Bouddha in the morning and Patan in the afternoon and evening, as the Durbar Square in Patan has become very beautiful with the lights that have been put up after the restoration work.
Many people do the sights quite quickly, but we always like to do them much more relaxed. In fact, the pace is set by you, because it is not only about seeing the sites themselves, but above all about feeling their environment, the people who visit them, who live there and letting yourself be seduced by each different atmosphere.
not so standart visit
a different visit
price
not so standart visit
This option is the one that is closer to the classic visit, but it is still interesting. On the contrary, we believe that these three places are a must if you come to Kathmandu. Many agencies can do this tour in one morning, but we spent a whole day. It can be done in the opposite direction, but then you have to get up early, and as most of our travellers visit Kathmandu at the end of the trip, we prefer not to make you get up early after a trek or a trip around Nepal.
First, we go to Swayambhunath, also known as the monkey temple, for obvious reasons. Itis perched on a hill overlooking the city and can be reached by the steep stairs leading up to it. Swayambhunath is mainly its stupa, the second largest in the city but it is also a collection of Hindu and Buddhist temples in a sample of the religious syncretism. The area extends into Amideva Park on the western side, just off the Ring Road where the bus parking area is located and where there are three giant Buddha figures.
We will go to Bouddha where we will have some time to eat wherever you want. There are many restaurants of all kinds with views of the stupa from their terraces. As our pace always varies, you can have lunch before walking around Bouddha or after.
Bouddhanath, or simply Bouddha, is the biggest stupa that has become an iconographic picture of Nepal in its own right. The Bouddha stupa is located within a large, roughly round square full of shops, cafes and restaurants. Worshippers walk around the stupa in a clockwise direction, so feel free to do so and take the opportunity to spin some – not all! – of the 108 prayer wheels that surround the stupa. The different outer levels of the stupa can be accessed by entering through a door that you will see clearly and can be seen from the balconies and terraces of the Guru Lhakhang temple. But Bouddha is much more, it is a whole neighbourhood that concentrates the Tibetan community in Kathmandu, with shops with paraphernalia for Buddhist temples and many monasteries, most of which are free to visit. We will stroll around the area for a while.
From Bouddha to Pashupatinath you can walk for about 40 minutes through narrow streets where you will meet almost no tourists. We will go down to cross the river and enter through the back door of Pashupatinath. We walk up by stairs among some temples that have been somewhat demolished. Up the hill, you will see temples of all kinds and “Sadus” and astrologers offering their services. Then we go down towards the main temple area.
Pashupatinath is the holiest and most important Hindu temple in Nepal where cremations are performed in the ghats on the sacred (and polluted) Bagmati River. Be respectful and cautious both in your behaviour and in taking photographs. This is not a spectacle. It is during the late afternoon or early morning that the site is for the local people and you can breathe the real atmosphere, unlike the rest of the day when large groups of tourists arrive.
PRICE INCLUDES
· Private vehicle
· English speaking local guide
· Entrance fees to the monuments indicated
PRICE EXCLUDES
· Lunch
· Hot and cold drinks and any personal needs.
· Staff tipping
a different visit
This is a very different route through Kathmandu. It does not go through any of the city’s tourist spots and yet, or perhaps because of that, it is a more “real” Kathmandu, or rather, it is closer to the Kathmandu of its inhabitants.
What did we want to offer in designing this itinerary? Most of the time when we visit a city we are guided by its main points of interest and this is normal. But of course, we are all aware that a city is not only its monuments. A city is above all its people and those spaces that are close to them: the places where they walk, where they shop, where they socialise, where they work. And of course, there is not just one city, there are infinite and overlapping cities.
Kathmandu is a city in constant evolution, so this itinerary is flexible and adapts to the reality of the moment. It seems that, after the powerful earthquakes of 2015, the city has regained a new momentum, new energy. A strong middle class is emerging and this has a very interesting effect on the city. Until now, most of the shops or restaurants that took care of their design, their offer, their service or their cleanliness did it just for the tourist market. Nowadays, it is also the local customer who appreciates more and more tasteful restaurants, different food, quality service, beautiful design, etc.
Naturally, this is not absolutely true, we have simplified it and we are not going to evaluate this reality here either, but we do want to bring you closer to this new Kathmandu that is consolidating together and mixed with the more traditional Kathmandu, and generating a more multifaceted Kathmandu. We will jump from the popular city to the more “high standing” places, and we have tried to do it in a way that is accessible to a day’s route where all the displacements take time.
Our route starts mid-morning. We will pick you up from your accommodation and drive to a shopping centre, a “Mall”. Since the Kathmandu Mall opened years ago, large shopping malls have proliferated and become more and more modern. The City Centre, or the Civil Mall, both near Thamel, still retain a certain Nepalese idiosyncrasy with their peculiar architecture and shops.
After this visit, we can think about our meal, either near the Mall or on the way.
As we move away from the central neighbourhoods, the dominant architecture of much of the city becomes more evident. Individual mid-rise houses have been growing without a clear urban order, so the streets are often narrow and labyrinthine. Naturally, Kathmandu is growing outwards, and it is throughout this wide strip that we still find small farms and crops of rice, corn, or different varieties of vegetables, that are sold in the nearby stores. This is the real Km-0. We will visit one of these farms, preferably one that includes mushroom production, a rather interesting activity, but the choice will depend somewhat on the time of year and the state of production.
South of Kathmandu, almost next to the Bagmati River near the border with Patan is a group of temples known as Teku, although each has its own name. These temples do not appear in guidebooks, do not attract tour operators and very few tourists stumble upon them. They are a nice example of the everyday life of a temple among the many scattered here and there in the city. We will visit this temple in the late afternoon. Sunrise and sunset are the peak times, and many people make a brief stop at the temples on their way home. These temples have no ritual, no timetables, so maybe one day we find a family group, and the next day there is no one there. If we have time, we’ll take a stroll down to the river where other adjacent temples are located, and get a better feel for the pulse of a popular part of the city.
The only thing left is dinner, which we include in this tour. We can go to one of the city’s “chick” areas, which vary from time to time. One choice might be the Baber Mahal Revisited galleries, a renewed old building that includes several stores, a couple of small hotels, cafes and restaurants. This is a clear example of the places that are now beginning to be enjoyed by Kathmandu’s upper-middle-class, usually young or middle-aged people with high purchasing power. What a few years ago was practically only for tourists or foreign residents, is increasingly for the local customer, and that is good news for the country.
PRICE INCLUDES
· Private vehicle
· English speaking local guide
· Dinner
PRICE EXCLUDES
· Hot and cold drinks and any personal needs.
· Staff tipping
price
Inquiry
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