Kathmandu 7 Day Itinerary
A week in Kathmandu is enough to slow down, which is exactly what most visitors refuse to do. If you’re going to rush three temples into one afternoon anyway, you didn’t need seven days. Here’s a pace that actually uses the time; our Kathmandu guide has the full breadth of the valley this pulls from, including the hidden-gem villages a seven-day trip still won’t have time for.
| Day | Focus |
|---|---|
| 1 | Arrival, rest |
| 2 | Kathmandu Durbar Square, Swayambhunath |
| 3 | Pashupatinath, Boudhanath |
| 4 | Patan |
| 5 | Bhaktapur |
| 6 | Nagarkot overnight, Changu Narayan |
| 7 | Wind down, departure |
Book these before you go:
- A Nagarkot hilltop guesthouse room on Agoda ; mountain-view rooms sell out fast on a clear-forecast night.
- A Bhaktapur and Changu Narayan day tour on GetYourGuide , if you’d rather not arrange the taxi and timing yourself.
Day 1: land and do nothing ambitious. Kathmandu sits at roughly 1,350 meters, which isn’t extreme altitude but is enough to leave you sluggish after a long flight, so treat today as recovery, not sightseeing. Get through visa-on-arrival with crisp USD ready, take the prepaid taxi counter into town rather than negotiating with a curb tout, and if anyone claims your hotel is closed or burned down, ignore them and call the hotel directly. Settle into Thamel, walk a couple of blocks, eat something simple, sleep early.
Day 2: Kathmandu Durbar Square and Swayambhunath. Morning at Kathmandu Durbar Square. Don’t expect it fully finished: Kasthamandap reopened in 2022 and the Trailokya Mohan Narayan Temple finished reconstruction in early 2024, but the Basantapur Nine-Story Tower’s interior is still closed to visitors even though its exterior work was formally handed over back in early 2025, and parts of Hanuman Dhoka remain actively scaffolded a decade on. Take your time at Hanuman Dhoka Palace rather than treating it as a walkthrough. In the afternoon, Swayambhunath , the actual Monkey Temple, not to be confused with Pashupatinath, which some lazy write-ups still get wrong. Climb the roughly 365 east-side steps for the payoff view over the valley.
Day 3: Pashupatinath and Boudhanath. Go early to Pashupatinath, the Hindu cremation temple on the Bagmati. You won’t get past the inner sanctum as a non-Hindu, not the whole complex, and the ghats are visible and worth your attention from across the river; this isn’t a site you rush through or skip because of the access restriction. If a sadhu offers a tika, know your answer before he reaches you. Afternoon at Boudhanath Stupa , one of the largest stupas anywhere, and worth a genuinely slow kora walk rather than a single fast loop, ideally timed for dusk when the butter lamps are lit.
Day 4: Patan gets a full day, not an afternoon. Cross into Patan and stay there. Patan Durbar Square beats Kathmandu’s for preservation and crowd levels, full stop, and the Golden Temple and Krishna Mandir deserve unhurried time. Eat lunch and dinner here too: Newa Lahana or Honacha for real chhoila and bara, streets ahead of anything back in central Thamel.
Day 5: Bhaktapur , properly. This is a separate medieval town about 45 to 90 minutes out, and its entry ticket, the priciest of the three squares at NPR 1,800-2,000 (current figures from the Nepal Tourism Board ), covers the whole town rather than one plaza, which is why it deserves the whole day. It’s the best-preserved of the three not because it dodged the 2015 earthquake (it took damage as bad as or worse than Patan’s) but because the rebuild since has stuck to traditional materials rather than rushed fixes. Nyatapola Temple came through the earthquake largely intact. Wander the pottery square, eat lunch there, don’t rush back for an evening in Thamel you don’t need.
Day 6: Nagarkot, or swap it for Dhulikhel if you want fewer crowds. Nagarkot at 2,175 meters delivers genuine Himalaya sunrise views on a clear October-November or March-April morning, and it’s worth the overnight rather than a rushed round trip: sunset on arrival, sunrise the next morning, don’t compress it into a single afternoon. If Nagarkot sounds oversubscribed, Dhulikhel to the east covers similar ground with a quieter, less touristed hilltop and its own short hikes toward Namobuddha. Either way, this is a proper overnight, not a half-day tour squeezed between breakfast and dinner back in the city. If you’ve got the legs for it after sunrise, the descending hike from Nagarkot to Changu Narayan, the valley’s oldest and least-crowded UNESCO zone, is genuinely the best way to see it, and it’s the one of the seven monument zones most rushed itineraries forget exists.
Day 7: wind down and leave. Head back to Kathmandu with time to spare, since traffic on the return leg is unpredictable and you don’t want to be sprinting for Tribhuvan airport. Use the extra hours for anything you skipped rather than forcing in one more monument, or make this your buffer day if yesterday’s Nagarkot views got rained or clouded out, since both the drive and the sunrise are weather-dependent. A calm last dinner on Durbar Marg beats one more scramble through Thamel’s crowded lanes.
Throughout the week: there’s no metro, so pad your transit time between stops. Taxis dodge the meter on principle, so agree fares up front or use Pathao, InDrive, or Yango. Keep small notes on hand, since change is perpetually short everywhere you go, and don’t book any trek or day-tour from a random Thamel storefront without confirming TAAN or NTB registration first; a fake-helicopter-rescue insurance fraud scheme has been working through Nepal’s courts since April 2026, which makes walk-in trekking deals a genuinely bad bet now, not just an overpriced one. If seven days turns into a launch pad for Everest or Annapurna, treat this week as the valley portion and start the trek logistics separately rather than trying to fold both into one trip.