Nepal

Arrive at Tribhuvan International and transfer into the city, most likely through the traffic that is every visitor's first impression of Kathmandu. The afternoon does not fight it: you go straight to Boudhanath, ten minutes from the airport and a world away from it, to walk the kora at the hour it is meant to be walked. Pilgrims circling clockwise, prayer wheels turning, butter lamps going on around the base of one of the largest stupas on Earth. Dinner on a rooftop overlooking the dome, and an early night against the flight.

The old city on foot. Kathmandu Durbar Square first, before the crowds: the Hanuman Dhoka palace, the Taleju temple, the earthquake restoration still visibly in progress, and the Kumari Ghar, where Nepal's living goddess appears at her window. Then up the three hundred and sixty-five steps to Swayambhunath on its hill, the oldest stupa in the valley, with the whole city laid out below and the monkeys running the handrails. The afternoon crosses to Pashupatinath, the holiest Hindu site in the country, ending with the fire aarti on the Bagmati at dusk.

Across the river to Patan, the valley's third kingdom and its finest craftsmen. Its durbar square is the most concentrated of the three, and the Patan Museum inside the old palace is genuinely one of the best small museums in Asia; an hour there re-reads everything you saw yesterday. Then the Golden Temple, the Kumbeshwar, and the back lanes where the lost-wax casters and repoussé workers still supply monasteries across the Himalaya. The afternoon runs south to the Newar villages of Khokana and Bungamati, where the mustard-oil presses and woodcarvers work as they always have.

Bhaktapur is the one that stops people talking. Vehicle-free at its core, it is a whole medieval Newar city rather than a square: the Nyatapola towering five storeys over Taumadhi, the fifty-five-window palace, the Golden Gate, and Pottery Square where the wheels are turning and the pots are drying in the sun exactly as they are supposed to be. In the afternoon you climb to Changu Narayan, the oldest temple in the valley and the seventh monument zone, then continue up to the rim and check in at Nagarkot for the night, at 2,100 metres.

Up before light for the view the ridge exists for: the Himalaya coming up out of the dark from Annapurna in the west across Manaslu, Ganesh and Langtang, and, on the clearest mornings, Everest itself on the far eastern horizon. After breakfast the road drops south through terraced hills to Namobuddha, a hilltop monastery marking one of the three great Buddhist sites in Nepal, where you can sit in on the afternoon chanting. Then Panauti, a small medieval town at a river confluence with a thirteenth-century temple complex and almost nobody in it. Back into Kathmandu by evening.

The morning flight to Bhairahawa takes thirty-five minutes and, on the right side of the aircraft, runs the whole Himalayan wall from Dhaulagiri to Langtang; we book the seats accordingly. On the ground the world changes completely: the Terai is flat, hot and agricultural, the Indian border half an hour away. Lumbini in the afternoon, when the light softens: the Maya Devi Temple over the marker stone and the excavated foundations, the Ashokan pillar of 249 BC that fixes the site beyond dispute, the sacred pond and the old bodhi tree hung with flags.

The monastic zone in the morning by bicycle rickshaw along the central canal, where nearly every Buddhist nation on Earth has built its own temple: the Burmese golden stupa, the Thai marble wat, the vast Chinese and Korean complexes, the German Lotus Stupa, ending at the World Peace Pagoda. In the afternoon, out to Tilaurakot, the excavated ruin most archaeologists identify as Kapilavastu, the palace city where the future Buddha grew up and from whose eastern gate he is said to have left. Quiet, unrestored, under mango trees, and usually empty. Evening flight back to Kathmandu and a farewell dinner in Thamel.

The last morning is shaped around your flight. If there is time we use it well: the Garden of Dreams behind Thamel for a quiet hour, the thangka studios where painters will show you the grid a mandala is built on, or the Asan and Indra Chowk bazaars for the spice and bead markets that have run on the same corner for centuries. Then the transfer to Tribhuvan. We are glad to add Pokhara and the Annapurna foothills, a Chitwan extension, or our Tibet and Bhutan expeditions onto either end.