Chitlang Tour

We drive to the Chandragiri cable car and ride up to the ridge at 2,551m, where the view runs back over the whole Kathmandu Valley on one side and north to the Himalaya on the other, with the Bhaleshwor Mahadev temple at the top. From here you have a choice: walk down the old stone-paved trade trail into Chitlang, about three hours and all descending, or continue by road if walking is not the point of the trip. Before the highway existed this was the road - traders and porters crossed the Thankot pass and dropped into Chitlang on their way to the Terai and India, and the paving underfoot is the original. Chitlang itself is a Newar farming village, quiet in a way that genuinely surprises people who have only seen Kathmandu, and the afternoon goes on the goat-cheese farm, the old village lanes and the Kulekhani reservoir below. You stay the night in a village homestay, in a family house rather than a hotel, and eat what the household eats.

The morning starts slowly, with a farmhouse breakfast and no particular schedule. There is time for a walk through the terraces and the older part of the settlement, where the stone-and-timber houses and carved windows are the same Newar building tradition you will have seen in Bhaktapur and Patan, only working rather than preserved. The village keeps bees, grows vegetables for the Kathmandu market and makes the cheese, and people are generally happy to explain any of it. We return over the ridge in the middle of the day, either by the cable car or by road round the hill, and you are back in Kathmandu by mid-afternoon.