Where to stay

Bandipur Mountain Resort Veering up into the hills halfway between Kathmandu and Pokhara is Bandipur, an ancient Newari trading post. Just outside the village is the Bandipur Mountain Resort. The resort’s 12 rooms might be a little tired but the views from here are breathtaking: the snow-capped Dhaulagiri, Annapurna, Manasalu and the Ganesh Himal ranges rise majestically out of the early morning mist. Doubles from £38, including breakfast. Bandipur, 00 977 1 422 0162, islandjungleresort.com.np.

Dwarika’s Hotel The only hotel in Nepal to feature in Herbert Ypma’s Hip Hotels, this ‘heritage’ boutique hotel is a real melding of old and new, incorporating ancient wooden carvings, ornate window-frames and pillars, rescued from old buildings around the Kathmandu Valley. It is luxury with bags of character and a tranquil hideaway in the heart of the busy capital city. Double rooms from £125, room only. Battisputali, Kathmandu, 00 977 1 447 9488, dwarikasgroup.com.

Fish Tail Lodge A floating pontoon and pulley system ferries you over to a wooded peninsula jutting into Phewa Tal lake and this peaceful retreat established in the 1960s. The Annapurna range, dominated by the imposing massif of Machhapuchre, the Fishtail peak, is on the horizon, rooms are in round cottages scattered through the lush gardens. Double rooms from £115, including breakfast. Pokhara, 00 977 61 465 071, fishtail-lodge.com.

Old Bandipur Inn This atmospheric restored mansion is in the heart of the picture-perfect historic mountain town, located on an ancient trans-Himalaya trade route. It is a higgledy-piggledy warren of low-ceilinged rooms scattered with Newari and Buddhist art and traditional weavings. All rooms and the terrace have panoramic views over the valley. Doubles from £45, full-board. Bandipur, 00 977 1 470 0426.

Safari Narayani Lodge This jungle lodge overlooking the sluggish brown Rapti River and the rhino-rich Chitwan National Park beyond has real retro charm – and bags of bamboo furniture. Double rooms from £90 per person, based on two sharing, including all meals and tea and coffee, jungle activities (elephant safari, canoe ride, jungle walk, ox cart ride, Tharu village visit, Chitwan National Park entrance fees and naturalist guide). Ghatgain, Chitwan, 00 977 56 693 486.

Sapana Village Lodge ‘Sapana’ is the Nepali word for dream. This gorgeous Dutch/Nepali lodge, wedged between a river and rice fields on the border of the jungle – with views of the Annapurnas – is eco-chic. Its 24 funky rooms are comfortable, with local Tharu decoration scattered through the mustard-coloured colonial style houses. Dishes are created using vegetables from its own kitchen garden. Doubles from £15, including breakfast. Sauraha, Chitwan, 00 977 56 580 308, sapanalodge.com.

Travel Information

The currency of Nepal is the rupee. Nepal is 5.45 hours ahead of GMT. Kathmandu has a mild climate most of the year, summer temperatures range from 19-27°C, and in winter temperatures are between 2-20°C. During the rainy monsoon season (between June and August), there is an average rainfall of between 200-375mm in Kathmandu. May and June can be very hot and humid until the monsoon rains bring relief. In spring (March to April) and autumn (October to November) the temperatures are pleasant with occasional short bursts of rain, while November to February are dry but can be cold, especially at night.

GETTING THERE - Jet Airways (0808 101 1199, jetairways.com) flies daily to Kathmandu via Delhi.
Gulf Air (0844 493 1717, gulfair.com) flies daily to Kathmandu, via Bahrain.

RESOURCES - Nepal Tourist Board (welcomenepal.com). The excellent official website of the Nepal Tourism Board provides details on all aspects of travel to the country, including accommodation, cultural sites and cuisine. The site also incorporates a function to help you build your own itinerary, has various maps available for download and provides details of specialist tour operators. 2011 is designated Nepal Tourism Year and various events are planned as part of this.
Kathmandu Metropolitan City (kathmandu.gov.np). The website offers a comprehensive overview of the city’s history as well as providing tourism information on accommodation and attractions, photographs, local news, maps. There is also a page on the area’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

FURTHER READING - Taste of Nepal by Jyoti Pathak (Hippocrene Books, £22.99) This beautiful book offers a wide variety of Nepal’s typical and traditional recipes. Each recipe is easy to follow and includes practical cooking tips to help you create some of the finest comparable Nepalese cuisine in your own home.

Where to eat

Bandipur Mountain Resort The traditional Nepali set menu served here features rice, dal, chicken curry, seasonal vegetable curry, pickle, green salad with fruit for dessert. From £4. Bandipur (See Where to stay).

Bhanchha Ghar Established in 1989 in an old three-storey Newari house, this was the first of the four or five Nepali restaurants to spring up in Kathmandu. After the ‘cultural’ show with traditional dancers and local hooch, raksi, served with nibbles (bowls of popcorn, masala peanuts and chicken and vegetable momo), you tuck into a delcious set meal: basmati chamal ko bhuja (basmati rice), kalo daal (black lentils), saag (spinach), mismas tarkari (vegetable curry), bandel tareko (wild boar curry) chicken curry, and achar (pickles). For dessert, sikarni, a spicy yoghurt. £12. Kamaldi, Kathmandu, 00 977 1 422 5172.

Dwarika’s Hotel Dwarika’s Krishnarpan restaurant serves gourmet Nepalese banquets – six to 22 courses. Start with Samaya bajee, an assortment of Nepali hors d’oeuvres served during religious ceremonies, followed by chyau ko sekuwa (pan-grilled oyster mushroom finished with fresh cream), roti (unleavened griddle-roasted bread) and palungo ko saag (sautéed spinach with slivers of garlic). Momo (traditional Nepali minced meat dumplings and chutney) followed by kurilo ko jhol (fresh asparagus soup), then the main of rice, dal chicken curry and plum pickle. For dessert: Pharsee Ko Haluwa (pumpkin pudding). Six courses £20. Battisputali, Kathmandu (See Where to stay).

Sapana Lodge Organises Tharu village cookery demonstrations and a lunch of potato curry, yellow dal, rice, freshwater snails or ghunghi curry, tomato and coriander pickle or achar. £8 Birethanti, Chitwan (See Where to stay).

Food Glossary

Achar

A pickle or chutney to accompany the curry made with whatever vegetables are in season. Often tomato or radish with garlic, ginger, chillies and coriander.

Asala

Freshwater fish like sardines, marinated in turmeric, chilli and garlic and ginger paste and then deep-fried.

Bhat

Steamed rice.

Chatamari

A spicy rice-flour pancake fried then served with or without toppings (meat, vegetables, eggs, sugar).

Chiura

Flat or beaten rice flakes, fried and served as a snack.

Chiya

Nepali tea or chai. Milk is boiled in a pan then powdered tea, ginger, cardamom and sugar added.

Choyla

Roasted or grilled spiced meat.

Daal

(dal) Lentil, chickpeas or small beans. Daal or dal is also a lentil soup made with black, red or yellow lentils.

Daal bhaat tarkari

Nepal’s national dish of lentils, rice and vegetable curry.

Ghiu

(ghee) Clarified butter – one of the main cooking fats in Nepal.

Gundruk

Dried and fermented leafy greens. Can be served as an accompaniment with the staple meal or in a soup.

Ghunghi

Freshwater snails served in a curry.

Gurung

An Annapurna speciality – a bread made with wheat or buckwheat then deep-fried like a doughnut.

Jimbu

A herb endemic to the Himalaya, with a distinctive aromatic flavour.

Momo

Steamed dumplings stuffed with minced chicken, water buffalo meat or vegetables. May also be fried.

Pakauda

Potato and vegetable spicy fried patty served as a snack.

Raksi

Fermented rice liquor.

Saag

Green vegetables served with rice. Consists of spinach with mustard greens.

Sale roti

A rice flour, ghiu and sugar doughnut, deep-fried.

Sikarni

Yoghurt or curd dessert sweetened and spiced with cinnamon and then sprinkled with dried fruit or nuts.

Sukuti

Spicy dried buffalo meat that is roasted above a charcoal fire.

Food and Travel Review

Rootling around in the rubbish, as pretty painted trucks strung with ribbons swerve to avoid her, is a golden-brown cow with huge, soft eyes and long lashes. No jangling bell around her neck or bucolic Tyrolean backdrop: instead, motorbikes screech past, horns blaring, riders wearing face masks in a futile attempt to fight the fumes. She might wind up as accidental roadkill but one thing she doesn’t need to worry about is becoming a Big Mac: cows are sacred in Kathmandu. Now if she were a water buffalo, it would be a different story.

Once the Holy Grail of travellers on the hippy trail, just the name Kathmandu was enough to conjure up dewy-eyed romanticism; the capital of a mountain kingdom which only opened its doors to the outside world in the 1950s, when it became a modern-day Shangri-La. Today, sandwiched between the major powers of China and India, Nepal is a republic after a decade of civil war and Maoist uprising, while Kathmandu is more Gore-Tex than tie-dye – a gap year hangout and the jumping off point for trekking trips into the Himalayas. With its temples and teahouses, wild dogs and monkeys, its ramshackle, squalid beauty is intoxicating and exhausting in equal measure.

The Old Town’s narrow backstreets are peppered with hidden gems; at its heart the medieval temples of Durbar Square, declared a World Heritage Site in 1979. Thamel, Kathmandu’s version of the Khao San Road, is backpacker central, where your taste-buds can take a tour from Mexico to Thailand, Italy to Japan. However, for real Nepali cuisine you need to weave your way through the alleyways to a handful of old palaces that have been converted into traditional Newari restaurants. While Hindu Nepalis are vegetarian, the Newars, the ethnic group in Kathmandu Valley, feature heavily spiced meat – usually water buffalo or goat – in their cuisine.

After trooping up the dimly lit wooden staircase of Bhanchha Ghar, an old three-storey Newari house next door to a Ganesh temple, we curl up crosslegged on cushions in the Bedouin-style loft. The ceiling is a tent-like canopy above low-slung tables. As dancers perform in the candelight, we knock back shots of raksi, poured with a flourish from a brass teapot into tiny terracotta cups. ‘It’s our Nepali tequila,’ grins Lapka Lama, our guide, as the fiery liquid, distilled from fermented rice, burns our throats.

Down in the cramped kitchen, flames soaring out of the stove, the cooks in their chefs’ whites and black fezzes also perform an elaborate dance as an aromatic chicken curry sizzles in a huge wok and we learn how to make a local speciality, chatamari. Rice soaked for 10 hours is ground into a paste with masala spices and pan-fried into a patty. Then an egg is cracked on top.

The staple meal in Nepal is daal bhaat tarkari – a watery lentil soup, rice and curried vegetables. However, the secret to Nepali cooking is in the herbs and spices. ‘The most important ingredient is garlic and ginger paste,’ I’m told. Other key ingredients include coriander, cumin, chillies, mustard oil, turmeric, nutmeg and jimbu, an aromatic herb, with a taste somewhere between onion and chive, only found in the Himalayas.

We tuck into a mouth-watering medley of rice, dal, chicken curry, gundruk (fermented leafy green vegetables), wild boar curry and cucumber pickle, or achar, served on a burnished brass plate. For dessert, sikarni: yoghurt sweetened and delicately spiced with cinnamon and sprinkled with broken cashews.

The street stalls around Kathmandu reflect the culinary influences of its neighbours. Daal bhaat might be the national dish but ask anyone in Nepal what their favourite food is and nine times out of 10 the answer will be momo.

Momo or steamed dumplings are Tibet’s most important contribution to Nepali cuisine. In Nepal, however, the pasta parcels have been fine-tuned into dainty delicacies. ‘Everyone in Nepal loves momo,’ DH Bahadur Budhathoki, the head chef at Dwarika’s Hotel, an unexpected retreat in the heart of Kathmandu, tells me. ‘You can find them everywhere: from small restaurants to five-star hotels. The shells are filled with chicken or vegetables, mutton or cottage cheese. In the markets they’re stuffed with buffalo meat.’

Dwarika’s – whose past guests include Orlando Bloom and Richard Gere, and the only hotel in Nepal to make it into Herbert Ypma’s Hip Hotels tome – was the dream of one man, the late Dwarika Das Shrestha. In 1952 he stumbled across two carpenters sawing an ancient pillar in half. He swapped it for new timber – and began a one-man crusade to preserve Kathmandu’s architectural heritage. Dwarika’s might look centuries old but is in fact contemporary ‘heritage’. Behind its huge doors are cool courtyards, a waterspout inaugurated by Prince Charles and 16th-century carved windows, all lovingly restored in the on-site workshop. It’s a clever optical illusion: part living museum, part boutique hotel. The sumptuous restaurant, Krishnarpan, all red and gold and dark wood, serves Nepali banquets – from six to 22 courses.

The road out of the Kathmandu Valley is a crocodile of garishly daubed trucks. The bumper-to-bumper crawl can take one hour or three. Eventually the Prithvi Highway which heads west to Pokhara, the gateway to the Himalayas, opens out into vast panoramas, gorges that plummet to fast-flowing rivers, frothy and brown like churning chai, and vivid emerald-green paddy fields. Tiny settlements spring up along the roadside, the roofs strung with bundles of drying corn. Open kitchens have burnt-orange adobe stoves – a mix of cow dung and clay is reapplied every day ‘to purify’ them.

In the roadside village of Malekhu every street stall sells the local speciality: strings of sardine-like vivid orange asala fish hang from the roofs. These freshwater river fish are marinated in turmeric, chilli and the ubiquitous ginger and garlic paste, then deep-fried. As we shade from the intense sun, we nibble on sale roti, a bread made from rice soaked overnight then ground into a fine paste. Clarified butter or ghiu is added and sugar then a scoop of the liquidy dough is deep-fried, like a doughnut, in a wok.

A little further on, in the village of 5km (named because it’s 5km from the crossroads town of Mugling) we screech to a halt to watch Sukmaya Gorung making raksi. Wizened and round, she stands beside a huge black pot or still. The first distillation of the fermented rice costs 50 rupees (50p) a bottle, she tells us, because it will be the strongest. There will be four distillations in all, each slightly weaker than the last.

Mugling, with its Wild West-feel, is where the belching buses to and from Kathmandu stop. Hawkers clamour around the windows selling snacks. A young girl is making chiya – Nepali tea. She boils the milk in a pan then adds powdered tea, ginger, cardamom and sugar. It’s creamy, sweet, spicy and delicious. Tibetans here take their tea with salt and yak butter – but it’s an acquired taste.

Above an adobe stove, strips of buffalo meat – sukuti – hang drying. The smoke gives the sukuti a more intense flavour. It’s not eaten dried, jerky-like, however, but chopped into pieces, softened in cold water, then cooked with chilli and oil. The momo at the next stall are filled with buffalo meat – mixed with onions and, of course, garlic and ginger paste.

Pokhara, 200km from Kathmandu, sprawls along the shore of dreamy Phewa Tal, the second-largest lake in Nepal. It’s the hopping-off point for treks into the Annapurnas. We stoke up with lunch – daal baaht and potato and squash curry in a little teahouse in Birethanti. River View Lodge, with its shady terrace above the rushing Modi river, has been in Rajani Gauchan’s family since her grandparents’ time. She has a handful of rooms and makes her living feeding hungry trekkers.

Our path follows the swirling, milky-brown river. We pass an old woman husking corn, which she will take to a local mill to grind into flour for polenta. There are banana trees, orange groves and coffee bushes along the way. The first hour’s walk is fairly gentle, past slopes terraced with paddy fields in myriad shades of green. Then we start to climb sharply, up huge steps cut into the rock. The route takes us through tiny settlements; donkeys laden with supplies pick their way past us. It’s a five-hour, calf-burning, lung-gasping schlep up to the teahouse at Ghandruk and a welcome cold Everest beer. Hearty Tibetan soups and potatoes, adopted by the Sherpas after their introduction from Europe 200 years ago, are the staple fare in the mountains. You need stodge for energy up here.

The next morning, after flinging open the shutters onto a heartstopping view of the Annapurnas, the air thin, cold and pure, we devour fried eggs and gurung bread – an Annapurna speciality – made with wheat or buckwheat, then deep-fried like a doughnut.

The little village of Ghandruk with its slate and stone houses and Buddhist monastery, complete with fluttering prayer flags, is picture-perfect. Children in smart navy blue uniforms skip past us on their way to school. In their gardens are round green cabbages, trailing French beans and, on the roofs, barrel-shaped beehives.

This area is also home to the honey hunters of Nepal. Intrepid hunting parties head out from the villages along the vertiginous cliffs twice a year. They risk their lives, lighting fires to smoke out the bees then dropping down to the giant honeycombs on bamboo ladders – breaking off oozing clumps and sending the highly prized booty down in baskets.

The Himalayas are undoubtedly Nepal’s star attraction but the Chitwan National Park, down in the Terai, on the border with India, comes a close second. Chitwan, a national park since 1973, was once a royal hunting reserve. Today, it is World Heritage listed and, covering 932 sq km of steamy jungle, a mix of sal forest and grasslands, it’s one of the best areas for wildlife-watching in Asia: you can tick off the one-horned rhinoceros, leopard, sloth bear, monkeys, around 450 species of bird – and, if you’re lucky, the endangered royal Bengal tiger.

During the Maoist uprising poachers had free rein and animal numbers fell alarmingly. Today, thankfully, they are recovering: there were around 125 tigers and 408 rhino at the last count.

The Safari Narayani Lodge lies just across the River Rapti from the park. At 6am mist hangs over the river as, perched on top of Saraswati Kali, a slightly mischievous 17-year-old elephant, we wade through the water. Crashing up the bank, snapping undergrowth as she stamps through the forest, we startle a pair of rhino enjoying an early-morning bath. The lumbering rhythm is hypnotic; we waft through tall, wispy elephant grass – the perfect foil for tiger and rhino – and butterflies flit around us as dug-out canoes float silently past.

‘The Tharu [indigenous people of the Terai] are the only people in the world immune to malaria,’ Lapka tells me as I swat away a mosquito. I’m intrigued. Why? ‘Diet’, he says. ‘The curries are incredibly hot and they use so many chillies.’

Sapana Village Lodge in nearby Sauraha offers cookery courses in local Tharu village, Goutali. ‘Sapana’ is the Nepali word for dream and the lodge was the dream of another visionary Nepali, Dhurba Giri. The cluster of mustard-coloured houses – think ecochic with bare wooden floors and funky design – is part-owned by the FEMI foundation, a Dutch development project with all profits being ploughed back into community projects. Next door, at the Tharu Dau Women’s Skills Development Project, a group of young girls sew cushion covers and trinkets for tourists to buy.

Just down a little track, the village of Goutali looks like a film set, surrounded by rippling rice fields, the houses thatched mudhuts or vibrant turquoise brick. A young girl sweeps the red dirt track as ducks and ducklings waddle by and a girl on a bicycle sails past. Another carries a bundle of straw on her back. There are water buffalo, goats and chickens. A tray of chillies is drying on a thatched roof. It’s a perfect tableau.

Channawi Mahat, wearing a pink floral dress, crouches in the shade on the front porch, peeling potatoes and onions with a sickle-shaped knife, holding it between her feet and slicing the vegetables along the blade.

We’re making a potato curry, dal, achar and a local delicacy – snail curry. The tiny freshwater snails, or ghunghi, have been collected from the River Rapti. Channawi’s daughter chops off the ends so we can suck out the meat when they are cooked.

We take the rice, potatoes, onions and snails to the hand pump to wash them, swishing the snails around the dish to get rid of the grit and algae from the shells. The water used to wash the rice can cure urinary infections, I learn. If you wash your hair in it, it cures dandruff.

We wander back to the hut and into the smoky darkness where the village women crouch around pots on the fire in the middle of the room. Channawi wanders outside to make the ginger and garlic paste on a rock – a makeshift pestle and mortar. The snails sizzle in a pan with mustard seed, onion, cumin seeds, chillies and garlic and ginger paste.

Channawi gestures for us to sit lotus position on a woven mat or gonari. It’s spotlessly clean. Every day the floor is mopped with a mixture of cow dung and clay. A bottle of raksi appears. And onto our plates is scooped rice, yellow dal, potato curry, snail curry, spinach greens. The smoke makes my eyes water, the curry makes them stream. Hot? Channawi smiles. And delicious.