Kathmanduculture & etiquette

Nepal permits a maximum of 150 days on a tourist visa in a calendar year — 1 January to 31 December — not in a rolling twelve-month period and not per entry. Someone who arrives in October, stays through to March and assumes they have a year's worth of allowance has in fact used part of two separate annual budgets, and can find themselves out of days in a way a rolling-year mental model does not predict. Extensions are done at the Department of Immigration in person, before expiry, even if applied for online, and late extensions attract a daily fine on top of the extension fee.

A working visa in Nepal is issued by the Department of Immigration only on the strength of a labour permit from the Department of Labour and Occupational Safety and a recommendation from the line ministry that regulates your employer's sector, plus the work agreement route the Department specifies. Three bodies, in that order. Going to immigration first is the classic wasted trip, and an employer who has never sponsored a foreigner will not know the sequence either. Ask, in writing, who is obtaining what.

The constitutional and Land Act position is that foreign nationals may not own land or immovable property in their personal capacity. No visa category alters it — not the working visa, not the business visa, and not the residential visa. What is available is leasing, which is common and can run for long terms, and corporate holding through a properly structured Nepali company for genuine business purposes. Non-Resident Nepali card holders are the partial exception: they may acquire residential and commercial property, excluding agricultural and forest land, on application to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Anyone told they can buy a house here should ask exactly which of those routes is being described.

Scheduled power cuts defined life in Kathmandu for years, and a great deal of published advice still tells you to buy an inverter and plan your evening around the schedule. Nepal declared the country free of load shedding in May 2018 and national electricity consumption has roughly tripled since. Short unscheduled outages still happen, and a UPS on a router is sensible, but the elaborate battery-and-inverter arrangements of the 2010s are no longer part of ordinary life. This is the single most commonly repeated stale fact about the city.

The 2015 Gorkha earthquake killed around 9,000 people and destroyed a large amount of Kathmandu Valley housing. Nepal updated its national building code, publishing NBC 105:2020 with revised seismic hazard provisions drawing on post-earthquake research. The honest caveat is that studies of compliance in Nepali municipalities have found it to be low, so a code existing is not the same as a building following it. Ask when the building was constructed, whether it was engineer-designed, whether a structural engineer signed off, and whether it was retrofitted after 2015. A reinforced-concrete frame from the last decade with a named engineer is a materially different proposition from an unreinforced brick building of unknown age.

Kathmandu sits in a bowl, and from roughly December to March a temperature inversion traps vehicle emissions, brick kiln smoke, construction dust and open burning inside it. Readings regularly reach unhealthy levels and the city has appeared among the world's ten most polluted at points during the season. It clears dramatically with the pre-monsoon rains and the winter months are otherwise the best weather of the year, which makes the contrast disorienting. Buy a HEPA purifier for the bedroom before December.