Day Trip to Bhaktapur and Panauti from Kathmandu

Kathmandu is loud and getting louder. Two of the valley’s older towns sit far enough outside it to have kept their shape, and this is a full day visiting both — Bhaktapur, which everyone has heard of, and Panauti, which almost nobody has.

Bhaktapur was the third of the valley’s royal cities and is the one that survives most completely. Cars are kept out of the core, so the streets are brick underfoot and the scale stays medieval: courtyards opening off alleys, carved windows leaning over the lane, pottery drying in an open square.

The Durbar Square holds the old palace with its Golden Gate and the Fifty-Five Window Palace. A short walk away in Taumadhi Square stands the Nyatapola, a five-storey pagoda on a tall stepped plinth, with pairs of stone guardians climbing the steps beside you — wrestlers, then elephants, then lions, then griffins, then goddesses. It is the tallest temple in the valley and it came through the 2015 earthquake standing, as it had come through the one in 1934.

Panauti is around 30 kilometres south-east, at the point where two rivers meet — a spot that makes it sacred, and a confluence that the town treats as a third, invisible river. It is a working Newar town rather than a preserved one: a few streets of brick houses with carved wooden windows, and a temple compound at the water.

The Indreshwar Mahadev temple stands in that compound and is among the oldest pagoda temples in the country, a tall tiered roof over a Shiva shrine, with carved struts under the eaves worth stopping to look at properly. Panauti is on Nepal’s tentative list for World Heritage status rather than inscribed, and it feels it — far fewer visitors, and the town going about its business around you.

This is a seven-hour day with driving at both ends, most of the time on your feet in the two towns. The streets in both are brick, uneven and occasionally steep, so wear shoes you can walk on that in.

Bhaktapur charges a foreign-visitor fee to enter the walled town, and it is not included unless your booking says otherwise. Both towns are lived in and their temples are in use — dress with shoulders and knees covered, take shoes off where asked, and ask before photographing people.

Bhaktapur is busiest in the middle of the day when the Kathmandu coaches arrive; early morning and late afternoon are quieter and better lit.