Kathmandu or Leh?

Neither city is a place to swim. Both are high and landlocked, and their rivers are for rafting. What differs is the setting. In Kathmandu a hotel pool is the realistic option, while Leh's snowmelt lakes such as Pangong Tso are for looking at, not wading into.

Kathmandu eats noticeably better. Newari cooking, with choila, bara, yomari and rice beer in the old bazaars and in Patan, gives you something you will not find elsewhere, and the Tibetan streets around Boudhanath add thukpa and butter tea on top of the momos that are everywhere.

Leh shares the Tibetan staples and adds skyu, apricots and sea buckthorn juice, but most meals come from rooftop cafés serving trekkers. They are pleasant and filling but rarely distinctive, and many close outside the summer.

Here Kathmandu is clearly ahead. Its heritage fills whole districts: the temple crowd of Durbar Square, pilgrims circling Boudhanath at dusk, open cremations at Pashupatinath and the courtyard shrines of Asan, with Patan's square and museum just across the river.

Leh's heritage is striking but small. The Potala-style palace, Namgyal Tsemo, the mud-brick old town and the Shanti Stupa at sunset fill a day or two, and its best monasteries lie outside town.

Kathmandu at least has nightlife: Thamel's rooftop bars, pool halls and a few dance clubs full of trekkers celebrating the end of a route, though it closes around midnight. Leh has nothing comparable. You get a late dinner on a terrace, maybe a beer, and an early night before a dawn start.

Leh is the bigger mountain experience. You are inside a high desert of coloured ranges with the Stok peaks overhead, treks through Hemis begin close by, and passes above 5,000m, the Nubra dunes and Pangong Tso are all within reach. In winter there is snow leopard tracking and the frozen Chadar trek.

Kathmandu offers a gentler kind of outdoors: forest trails in Shivapuri, the Chandragiri cable car and sunrise over the snow from Nagarkot or Dhulikhel. The real heights there mean a mountain flight or a trek setting out from the city.

Leh has the better ring of outings. Thiksey, Shey and Hemis are close by along the Indus, and Alchi's thousand-year-old painted temples are some of the finest early Buddhist art anywhere. The range is narrow, almost all monasteries and palaces, but the standard is consistently high.

Kathmandu has one excellent day out in Bhaktapur, best combined with Changu Narayan. After that come smaller Newari villages and shrines such as Bungamati, Kirtipur and Pharping, and slow traffic makes all of them take longer than they should.

Neither is easy with children, but Kathmandu is the more workable of the two. Monkeys at Swayambhunath, prayer wheels at Boudhanath and the Garden of Dreams hold young children's attention, even if traffic, dust and care with food make for tiring days.

Leh adds a more serious problem: you fly straight to altitude, and children need careful acclimatisation. Outings are long mountain drives, so it really suits only robust teenagers who want to trek or raft.

Both have small centres you can walk and no public transport a visitor can rely on. The difficulty is different in each. In Kathmandu it is traffic: motorbikes in the lanes and slow taxi rides to Patan or Boudhanath. In Leh it is distance and altitude, with steep streets that leave you breathless, fixed-fare union taxis or hired jeeps for every outing, and passes that close in winter.

Kathmandu is the better place to buy craft. Patan's bronzes are cast in the town's own workshops, Tibetan carpets and thangkas fill the shops around Boudhanath, and Thamel has endless felt, pashmina and trekking gear. The Asan bazaar is worth a look even if you buy nothing.

Leh's Main Bazaar sells the same kinds of shawls, thangkas and turquoise jewellery, but the stock is smaller and repeats from stall to stall. The dried apricots that Ladakhi women sell along the street make the more unusual souvenir.

Kathmandu is the cheaper of the two, and here the spending goes on extras rather than basics. Foreigners pay entry fees at the Durbar Squares, Pashupatinath and Bhaktapur, and imported drinks cost far more than local ones. If you are planning a trek or a mountain flight, the permits and the flight are where your budget goes, not daily life in the city.

In Leh a bed and a bowl of thukpa are cheap too, but the sights are spread along the valley, so getting to them is where the money goes. Comfortable hotels also put up their rates in the short summer season, which is when most visitors come.

Kathmandu has more to see: cover and folk bands in Thamel most nights, dinner shows of regional dance, evening devotional singing at temples, masked dances at Indra Jatra and an autumn jazz festival. Leh has no regular stage at all. Its moment is the masked cham dancing in monastery courtyards at festivals such as Hemis, which is unforgettable but only if your dates line up.

Kathmandu is better set up for retreat and treatment. Kopan and the other monasteries near Boudhanath run meditation and philosophy courses, and yoga, Ayurveda and cheap massage are easy to find, even though the city outside is loud and dusty.

Leh is quieter but less restful than it looks. There are meditation centres and amchi doctors of Tibetan medicine, but thin air, dry skin and broken sleep make the first days hard. It suits contemplation more than pampering.