Buddhist Pilgrimage (Gandhara) Tour

At a glance

• 7 days, Islamabad to IslamabadSix nights. Taxila, Peshawar and Swat, with Islamabad at either end.
• Easy — family friendlyMuseums and archaeological sites. Takht-i-Bahi involves a walk up a ridge.
• Taxila, Peshawar & SwatThree UNESCO-listed or UNESCO-adjacent sites and two major Gandhara collections.
• Three & four star hotelsTwin share with en-suite in Islamabad, Peshawar and Swat.
• All yearNothing here depends on a mountain pass. June to August is hot, around 35 °C.
• Private vehicleYour own car and driver, with a culture guide throughout.

Day by day

1. 1Day 1Islamabad and Rawalpindi

   

   Your guide meets you at Islamabad International Airport and transfers you to the hotel. The afternoon is an introduction to the two cities that sit side by side and could not be less alike: Islamabad, built from 1961 on a grid beneath the Margalla Hills, with the Faisal Mosque, the Pakistan Monument and the Lok Virsa museum; and Rawalpindi next door, four hundred years older and entirely unplanned, where the Raja Bazaar and the old lanes around it are the better half of the day.

2. 2Day 2Taxila

   

   Thirty-five kilometres north-west, and a full day. The museum first — about four thousand objects in stucco, terracotta, schist and precious metal, and the best possible preparation for the ruins. Then the sites themselves: Bhir Mound, the oldest city layer, going back towards 1000 BCE; Sirkap, the Greco-Bactrian grid city with a stupa in the middle of it; Dharmarajika, the great stupa complex founded to hold relics of the Buddha; and Jaulian on its hill, a monastery with twenty-seven smaller stupas and fifty-nine chapels, where the plaster figures are still in their niches. Back to Islamabad for the night.

3. 3Day 3Islamabad to Peshawar

   

   A hundred and seventy kilometres west to Peshawar, which has been a city on this crossroads for two thousand years. The Peshawar Museum holds one of the finest Gandharan collections in existence — sculpture, coins, manuscripts, and the sequence of Buddha images that shows the moment the figure enters the art. The Kanishka Stupa mound outside the city was one of the tallest buildings in the ancient world when the Kushan king built it. In the afternoon, Kissa Khani — the street of storytellers — and the seventeenth-century Mahabat Khan Mosque in the middle of the old city.

4. 4Day 4Peshawar to Swat, by way of Takht-i-Bahi

   

   North to the Mardan plain and the reason many people book this trip. Takht-i-Bahi — the throne of the water spring — is a Buddhist monastery on a ridge two hundred metres above the fields, founded in the first century CE and occupied for six hundred years. It escaped later settlement because of where it sits, which is why it is the best-preserved monastery in Pakistan and has been a World Heritage site since 1980. The walk up takes twenty minutes and is worth every one. Then the ruins of Sahr-i-Bahlol below it, and on into Swat for the night.

5. 5Day 5Swat

   

   Swat was Uddiyana, and Vajrayana Buddhism is generally held to have spread from here into Tibet — which makes this valley, now green and entirely Muslim, one of the source places of Tibetan Buddhism. The Swat Museum at Mingora has the sculpture: reliefs from the local sites, and beside them coins, weapons, carved wood and tribal embroidery that carry the story forward to the present. We visit the stupa at Butkara nearby, built to hold relics and rebuilt five times, and take the valley road up towards Kalam for the afternoon.

6. 6Day 6Swat back to Islamabad

   

   About four hours south, with stops. There are more Gandhara sites along this road than any itinerary can hold and we pick according to what the group has taken to by now — a stupa, a rock carving, or simply a long lunch and an early arrival. The evening in Islamabad is free.

7. 7Day 7Departure

   

   Breakfast, and a transfer to Islamabad International Airport for your flight home. This trip combines naturally with the north — Hunza and Skardu are a short flight or a long drive away, and we are glad to add either.

Good to know

This is the one tour we run that does not depend on the seasons, because nothing on it needs a pass to be open. The trade-off is heat: June to August on the plains runs to about 35 °C, and Taxila in July is hard work by mid-afternoon. October to March is the comfortable half of the year, and the winter light on the Mardan plain is the best of it.

Takht-i-Bahi is a twenty-minute walk up a ridge on an uneven path — the only part of the week that asks anything physical. Sensible shoes rather than sandals.

Peshawar and the Mardan plain are more conservative than Islamabad. Loose clothing covering shoulders and knees, and a scarf worth carrying for the mosques. Photography inside museums is sometimes restricted and the rules change; your guide will ask rather than assume.

The sites are archaeological rather than reconstructed. Taxila and Takht-i-Bahi are foundations, walls and stupa bases, and the sculpture that stood in them is in the museums — which is why both museum visits come before the ruins they belong to rather than after.

Questions about this trip

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