Dashain: Fulpati to Vijaya Dashami — 4 Days

Dashain's first six days are domestic. Ghatasthapana plants jamara in a household shrine a visitor will never see, and Navaratri's nine nights of goddess worship are already running by the time you arrive. The festival becomes public on the seventh day, Fulpati, when a palanquin of sacred plants leaves the old Shah palace at Gorkha and is carried to Kathmandu under army escort, received at Tundikhel with a formal parade. The city that had been emptying out is suddenly full again. Day 1 here is Fulpati — the festival's seventh day, not its first.

This is a ritual calendar, not a route — so add your own places to it. Dashain happens in homes, in neighbourhood shrines and at whichever temple is nearest you, which is why the days below name what is happening rather than where to stand. Put your own stops on each day: the house you are invited to, the temple at the end of your street, the square you can walk to, the bus park you pass. That is what turns this from something to read into your plan.

Tundikhel is a parade ground rather than a temple, and that is the point — the honours are military, which is also why Bhadrakali on its eastern edge, the Shakti shrine tied to the Nepal Army, is the shrine that matters today. Neither has a published schedule: ceremony times are set locally each year and the surrounding roads close on short notice, so ask where you are staying the day before rather than trusting anything printed.

Plan the practical side before anything else. Long-distance buses and domestic flights sell out weeks ahead of Dashain, most shops and offices close from about the eighth day, and city residents leave for their family districts. Arriving without transport and a bed already booked is the one mistake that ruins this week.

The eighth day is Dashain's most intense and the quietest on the street. Shops are shuttered, traffic is thin, and the ritual centre moves to the goddess temples, where the night of Kali brings animal sacrifice on a scale that is genuinely confronting to visitors who have not expected it. Plan this day honestly: if that is not something you want to witness, spend it on the Durbar Squares instead — Patan is as calm this week as it ever gets, and open when almost nothing else is — and tomorrow picks up unchanged.

If you do go, Dakshinkali south of the Kathmandu valley is the accessible choice: a public temple in a forested ravine, roughly 20 km out but a slow morning in Ashtami traffic. A hired vehicle with a driver who will wait beats public transport on a day when most of it has stopped. Crowds are very large, vehicles queue a long way down the approach road, and you should expect to walk the last stretch. Keep clear of the queue of families carrying offerings — you are a guest at somebody's rite, not at a display. Wherever you are in Nepal, the Bhagwati or Kali temple nearest you will be doing the same thing on a smaller scale, and is worth adding here.

The sacrifices at Kot, beside Hanuman Dhoka, are the ones written about and the ones you most likely cannot attend. It is an army courtyard and access is restricted; there is no public gate to join.

The ninth day closes Navaratri, and it is the one day of the year the Taleju Bhawani temple at Kathmandu Durbar Square is unlocked. Be clear about what that means before building a morning around it: the temple opens to Hindus only. For everyone else the day is the courtyard, the queue that runs the length of the square, and the tallest pagoda in Kathmandu seen from outside a gate that is open for the first time in twelve months — still worth standing in, provided nobody has promised you the interior. Go early; the queue is long by mid-morning.

Navami is also Vishwakarma puja, and this is the part of Dashain that most rewards simply walking, wherever you are. Tools, machines and vehicles are consecrated: taxis, buses and delivery trucks washed, marigolded and marked with vermilion, mechanics' workshops making small shrines of their own equipment. A bus park on this morning is one of the more photographable things in the country, and you need no temple and no ticket for any of it — add the one nearest you.

End in Bhaktapur if you are in the valley, where the Malla-era palace rituals still run and the squares stay busy while Kathmandu's own streets thin out.

The tenth morning is the festival's point and the least visible part of it. Elders press red tika and yellow jamara onto the foreheads of everyone younger, in order of seniority, in house after house across the country — indoors. Towns are close to shut: almost no shops, little traffic, restaurants on skeleton hours. If a Nepali household invites you in for tika, accept; it is the whole festival in one gesture, and being offered it is not unusual. If you have somewhere to be today, add it here — this is the day the plan is most likely to be a house rather than a place on a map. Otherwise plan a day that needs nothing to be open.

Bhaktapur is the answer in the valley. Its squares stay populated, and the Taleju shrine inside the Mul Chowk palace courtyard is the Bhaktapur Mallas' holiest — accessible only to Hindus, like its Kathmandu counterpart, so treat the Golden Gate itself as the destination.

Look for a ping on the way: easiest found on the edges of towns and in villages rather than city centres. The festival does not end today — Kojagrat Purnima closes it on the full moon five nights later — but Dashami is where a visitor's Dashain finishes.