Chitlang

Chitlang is a Newar farming valley on the far side of the Chandragiri ridge from Kathmandu, at roughly 1,740 metres in the Mahabharat hills of Makwanpur. It is close enough to the capital to be a Saturday and far enough that almost nobody was going there twenty years ago. The valley floor is terraced paddy and mustard, the village core is old Newar brick and tile, and the language spoken in it is the Chitlang dialect of Nepal Bhasa — the Kathmandu Valley's culture spilling over one ridge line and then staying put.

The road that used to matter

Chitlang's history is a transport history. Before the Tribhuvan Rajpath opened in 1956, everything that entered the Kathmandu Valley from India came in on the backs of porters, and one of the two main routes ran up from Bhimphedi over these hills and down through Chitlang to the Chandragiri pass and Thankot. The valley has Licchavi-era stone inscriptions, which is unsurprising for a place that sat astride that road; local tradition, unsurprisingly, also claims the first motor cars carried into Nepal came through here on poles.

When the highway went in over Naubise and Daman instead, the traffic stopped, and Chitlang went quiet for fifty years. What brought it back was the Chandragiri cable car on the Kathmandu side of the ridge: ride up from Thankot, walk down the south side, and you are in Chitlang in four or five hours without organising anything. That walk is now the reason most people come.

What is actually there

Not a monument. The draw is a working village: homestays in family houses, buffalo and goats, pear and apple orchards, and the goat-cheese dairy that put Chitlang into Kathmandu food conversation — a small operation making hard cheese from local goat milk, which you can visit and buy from. There is a modest Bhairav temple, a scatter of old rest-houses along the former trade road, and a zip-line and boating operation that arrived with the weekend crowd.

The village pairs with Markhu and Indra Sarobar, eight kilometres south on the same road, which is why the standard Chitlang trip is one night rather than a day: walk or drive in, sleep in the valley, and do the reservoir the next morning.

Getting there

Three ways, in rough order of how good they are.

• Cable car up, walk down. Chandragiri cable car from Thankot, then the descent into Chitlang. Four to five hours of downhill walking on a clear track. No vehicle needed on the far side if you have booked a homestay to collect you.
• Drive. Kathmandu to Thankot, then over the Chandragiri pass road to Chitlang — roughly 30 km and two hours, on a narrow paved-and-broken road with switchbacks. Any car manages it in dry weather.
• Bus. Local buses run from Kalanki towards Markhu and Kulekhani via Chitlang. Slow, cheap, and infrequent enough that you should ask about the return before you commit.

When to go

Spring and autumn are the good windows — spring for blossom on the orchards and rhododendron higher on the ridge, autumn for the clearest air and the harvest in the terraces. Winter is cold at night in unheated village rooms but bright by day. The monsoon turns the valley an extraordinary green and the road into a genuine question mark; go with a driver who has done it before, or not at all.

If you want the same Newar-village texture without leaving the Kathmandu Valley, Khokana and Bungamati are the closer comparison.