Rara Lake

Rara is Nepal's largest lake — about 10.8 square kilometres of improbably blue water at 2,990 metres in Mugu district, so far from anywhere that most Nepalis know it only from photographs. The colour is the thing: through a single afternoon the surface slides from cobalt to turquoise to slate as the light moves, with snow peaks doubled in the calm.

Locals call it the 'Queen of Lakes', and it carries an easy, unmarked sacredness — offerings are made at small shrines on the shore, and the lake figures in the origin stories of the Thakuri villages around it. After King Mahendra flew in and was moved to write verse about the lake in 1964, it briefly carried his name, Mahendra Tal; the poem is still quoted, the name never stuck.

The lake sits at the heart of Rara National Park, Nepal's smallest, whose pine, spruce and juniper forests come down to the waterline and hold red panda and musk deer. The classic things to do are simple: walk the full lake circuit in about four hours, climb Murma Top for the postcard panorama of blue water and white ridgelines, and watch the snow trout — found nowhere else on earth — rise in the shallows.

Getting there is the filter that keeps Rara pristine: a Nepalgunj–Talcha flight and a short walk, or several long road days through the Karnali hills, with simple lodges near the shore. Spring brings rhododendron bloom to the ridges; autumn brings the stillest air and the deepest blues; winter wraps the basin in snow and near-total solitude.