An overland expedition through Nepal is not a thing you improvise. Long before the rig is loaded, the journey begins at a table covered in maps, permits, and a calendar that refuses to bend.
There is a romance to the idea of simply pointing a vehicle north and driving until the road runs out. Nepal answers that romance gently and completely. It is a small country you might cross in a long day, if the mountains allowed it — and they do not. The land stacks vertically rather than spreading flat, and the roads that thread it were carved by necessity, not leisure. To cross it slowly, by your own machine, is to accept that the planning is not a chore that comes before the adventure. It is the first leg of it.
We are still at the map table. The rig is in preparation; the routes are lines drawn and redrawn. But the work of this stage is real, and worth setting down — partly as a record, partly so anyone who follows the same long way in knows what the country actually asks.
The vehicle
A passport for the machine.
Overlanding Nepal in a foreign-registered vehicle is possible, but it is governed, not free. A vehicle that does not wear Nepali plates enters as a temporary import, and the document that makes that legal is a carnet de passage — in effect a customs passport for the machine, backed by a deposit that guarantees you will not sell it and quietly disappear. It is the paperwork overlanders the world over know and dread, and Nepal is one of the countries that requires it.
For vehicles crossing from India the rules differ again: an Indian-plated vehicle is allowed a cumulative thirty days inside Nepal in a calendar year, no more, travelling on a Bhansar permit obtained at the border. In 2026 the friction eased a little. Nepal's customs department moved the temporary-import process online — declare the vehicle, pay the fee, receive a QR code, present it at the checkpoint — replacing the older ritual of forms and queues at the border post.
None of this is a reason not to go. It is simply the first thing the country teaches: you carry your own world, and you carry the documents that let it move.
The permits
The restricted lines.
Beyond the border, Nepal draws a second set of lines — the restricted areas. These are the regions the government keeps a careful hand on, usually for their nearness to the Tibetan border or the fragility of the culture inside them. Two of the four roads we mean to drive run straight through them.
Upper Mustang is the clearest case. To go north of Kagbeni — into the old Kingdom of Lo, to the walled city of Lo Manthang — you need a Restricted Area Permit, and you cannot arrange it yourself. It must come through a registered Nepali agency, and a licensed guide travels with you the whole way. For decades the fee was a flat five hundred US dollars for ten days, an amount that turned most travellers back at the gate. Late in 2025 that changed: it became fifty dollars per person per day, charged only for the days actually spent inside the zone, and by early 2026 the old two-person minimum was dropped. A short crossing to Lo Manthang and back — the kind a vehicle makes in a handful of days — is, for the first time, a reasonable thing to plan. The checkpoints still read every permit; there is no improvising past them.
Lower Dolpo, to the west, carries its own restricted-area permit and the same logic of guide, agency and fixed trails. Manang sits inside the Annapurna conservation area rather than a restricted one, and asks only for the standard entry permit. Rara, far to the west, is national-park land — remote enough that the paperwork is the least of the planning.
The deeper and stranger the place, the more the country asks you to slow down and do it properly.
That is not an obstacle to the way we mean to move. It is the same idea, written into law.
The season
The calendar that won't bend.
The season is the one constraint that does not negotiate. Most of Nepal funnels its travellers into two windows — spring, roughly March to May, and autumn, September to November — bracketing the monsoon that drowns the trails from June into September. For a vehicle, those wet months are the real hazard: the mountain roads in the far west and the deep valleys are unsealed, and a single night of rain can close them with mud or wash a section into the river below.
Mustang is the exception that rewards study. It lies in the rain shadow behind the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri massifs — a high desert the monsoon barely reaches — which makes it one of the few corners of the country you can cross in summer when everywhere else is shut. The far west runs the other way: Rara and Dolpo are at their finest in autumn and locked by snow and cold through much of the winter. Reading the country honestly means accepting you cannot do it all in one season, and that the season chooses the route as much as you do.
The four roads
Ordered by what each one asks.
Four lines are drawn on our map — set down here not by beauty but by what each one demands of a vehicle and a plan.
- ManangThe gentlest entry — up the Marsyangdi valley beneath Annapurna, on the road the circuit has worn in over the years.3,520 m
- Upper MustangThe flagship. The road now runs from Pokhara through Jomsom on to Lo Manthang — the forbidden kingdom, opened just enough to drive into.3,840 m
- Lower DolpoPhoksundo, its turquoise lake and its silence — harder, remoter, the restricted-area paperwork part of the price of arrival.3,610 m
- RaraNepal's far west and its great lake — the least visited, the furthest from anywhere, the road that takes the most patience to reach.2,990 m
None of them is a day trip. Each is a small expedition in its own right, and the order we drive them will be decided by the season and the slow accumulation of readiness — not impatience.
The long approach
Where it actually begins.
There is a temptation, when a journey is still only lines on a map, to rush the planning so the real thing can begin. We are trying to resist it. The permits, the carnet, the season, the order of the roads — this is the journey, in its earliest and most administrative form, and there is a quiet pleasure in getting it right.
When the wheels finally roll, the journals here will turn from planning to road. Until then, this is where it starts: a table in Auckland, a calendar that will not bend, and a country that rewards the long way in.