Teahouse Life: What to Expect from Lodges on a Nepal Trek

One of the things that sets Nepal apart from most mountain regions is that you can walk for weeks without carrying a tent, a stove or food. Along the main routes, villagers have built lodges every hour or two, known as teahouses, where trekkers eat and sleep. They are the reason trekking here is so accessible. They are also quite unlike hotels, and it helps to know how they work.

The room

A standard room has two narrow wooden beds with foam mattresses, a pillow each and sometimes a blanket. Walls are thin plywood or stone, and you will hear your neighbours. There is usually a small window, a light bulb, perhaps a hook and a shelf. There is no heating.

At lower altitudes and on popular routes, rooms with an attached toilet and even a hot shower are increasingly available at extra cost. Higher up, expect shared facilities down the corridor or in an outbuilding.

Bring a sleeping bag suited to the season. Lodges will usually lend an extra blanket if you ask, but in peak periods there may not be enough.

Toilets and washing

Toilets may be Western-style seats or squat pans, flushed with a jug of water from a barrel. Carry your own toilet paper and put it in the bin provided, not down the pan. At high altitude the water barrel freezes at night.

Hot showers are heated by solar panels, gas or a wood-fired boiler, and are charged per use. The price rises with height, and above about 4,000 metres many people give up showers for wet wipes and a bowl of warm water. Solar showers are warmest in mid-afternoon.

The dining room

This is the heart of every teahouse: a large room with benches around the walls, long tables and a single stove in the middle. The stove is lit in the late afternoon or evening, burning wood lower down and dried yak dung higher up. Everyone gathers round it to eat, read, play cards and talk. It is where you will meet other trekkers and swap information about the trail ahead.

Guides and porters usually eat after their clients, often in the kitchen.

Food

Menus are remarkably similar from lodge to lodge, because local committees agree them along with the prices. Typical choices:

• Dal bhat: rice, lentil soup, vegetable curry and pickle, with free refills.

• Fried rice and fried noodles.

• Noodle soups, including Tibetan-style thukpa.

• Potatoes in many forms.

• Momo dumplings.

• Eggs, porridge, pancakes and Tibetan bread for breakfast.

• Pizza, pasta and spring rolls of varying success.

Order dinner soon after you arrive and breakfast before you go to bed, so the kitchen can plan. Meals are cooked to order on one or two burners, and a full dining room means a long wait.

Meat above the road-head has been carried up for days without refrigeration. Many experienced trekkers go vegetarian on the trail.

The one firm rule

Rooms are priced very low, sometimes almost nominally, on the understanding that you eat dinner and breakfast where you sleep. The lodge makes its living from food. Eating elsewhere is considered bad form, and some lodges charge a much higher room rate if you do.

Water

Bottled water is sold everywhere but creates plastic waste that has to be carried out or burned. Better options are boiled water from the lodge, sold by the litre, or treating tap or stream water yourself with a filter, purification tablets or an ultraviolet pen. Some regions have safe drinking water stations where you can refill a bottle cheaply.

Electricity and connectivity

Most lodges have solar or small hydro power. Charging a phone or camera battery costs a fee per device or per hour, increasing with altitude. Sockets in rooms are rare above the lower villages. A power bank saves money and queues.

Wifi is available in many lodges for a charge, and in some regions through prepaid data cards. It is slow and weather-dependent. Mobile signal comes and goes.

Etiquette

• Remove boots before entering bedrooms if asked.

• Do not dry socks on the stove.

• Keep noise down after about nine; walls are thin and people rise early.

• Ask before taking photographs in the kitchen or of the family.

• Settle your bill the night before an early start.

What makes it special

A teahouse is someone's home and business. The person taking your order may also be the cook, the owner and a farmer with a field to plant. The comfort is basic, the welcome is real, and the evenings round the stove are, for many people, as memorable as the mountains.