There are two ways to cover a small country. One is the classic itinerary: one leg, one hotel, and next morning you pack up and move on. The other is to pick a base and go out and back each day. The first is the usual one; the second only works when the geography allows it, and here it does.
01 How it fits you
The reason is purely geographical. The capital sits in the middle of the country, on the plateau, and the main roads run from it in all four directions. That turns a city which on its own fills two days into a base from which you can reach almost everything else and come back the same day.
02 What is within a day of here
To the north, a little over an hour away, is the country's best-preserved Roman city: a complete urban fabric, with its oval plaza, its colonnaded street, its theatres and its temples, and the modern town built right alongside. It is a long half-day and probably the trip with the best ratio of travel to content.
To the west, a little over half an hour away, the road drops more than twelve hundred metres to the Dead Sea shore, some four hundred metres below sea level. And to the south, several hours by road, are the rock-cut city and the sandstone desert, the trip's two long excursions.
03 What it will cost you
The first friction is hours in the car. The northern and western trips are comfortable; the southern ones are not. Four hours out and four back turn a whole day into a journey with a stop in the middle, and doing that twice in a week is more tiring than it looks on paper.
The second is the vehicle. Without a hire car or a driver, almost every trip depends on organised excursions with fixed timetables, and that costs you the best of each place, which is the first and last hour of the day. It is the expense with the best return of the whole trip.
And the third is that the capital, as a destination in itself, is modest. The Roman theatre, the citadel hill and the valley centre are well covered in two days; beyond that, the city does not give much more. Anyone expecting a capital with a week's programme will be filling the days with road, not with city.
04 How I would build these days
Six days in April, in the same room all six nights. Day one: the city on foot along the valley floor, with the Roman theatre late in the day, when the stone has stopped burning. Day two: the citadel hill in the morning and the rest of the day loose, to get used to the gradients.
Day three: the Roman city to the north, leaving early and back mid-afternoon. Day four: the valley to the west, dropping the twelve hundred metres to the shore, easily done in a day. Days five and six: the long southern trip, and here I would break the rule and sleep out one night, to see the important part at dawn.
05 The verdict
If the churn of a classic itinerary exhausts you, this is one of the few capitals in the world from which you can see a whole country while always sleeping in the same place. The combination of the country's size, the central position and a summer with no rain makes the plan work with a reliability almost no destination offers.
If what you want is a great capital that fills the trip on its own, this one will run short by the third day and the rest will be road. The deciding question is simple: does it bother you more to unpack five times or to spend four hours a day in a car? Here you can only pick one.
Ken and Nyetta Astana for anyone who wants to see a capital designed whole in one go
Bernard Gagnon Thimphu for the traveller who accepts that here the trip is priced by the night
Mindia Jalabadze