Nepalese lodges and guesthouses

Nepalese lodges are small guest houses (guesthouses) or inexpensive hotels located on trekking routes. Thanks to their existence, it is possible to travel through the mountains of Nepal without a tent or food supplies. The lodges will provide you with shelter and food. What else does a traveler need? I mean a traveler who is undemanding in terms of comfort, who in his travels is looking for new friends and mesmerizing landscapes, and not for the level of service and square meters for a TV. Personally, Nepalese lodges seem to me like a chic place to relax - it’s inexpensive, wildly beautiful and very soulful. I hope that after reading this article, you will understand what this very “wildness” and “spirituality” are and then you will prepare for your trip to Nepal more consciously:)

Typically, lodges “stand” on the trail not individually, but in small groups of 3-4. On popular routes (to the base camp of Annapurna and Everest), such groups are located quite densely - on average every 2-3 hours of the journey. In places where tourists go less often, you can walk all day from lodge to lodge. And on very rarely visited tracks, it is better to go with your own tent. Often in Nepal on the trek you can find such diagrams where the distances between villages are indicated in hours, which is very convenient for planning the day.

Services in Nepalese guesthouses

• overnight rooms
• dining room
• kiosk (beer, cola, cookies, snickers, toilet paper)
• hot shower
• recharging electronics
• telephone connection

The coolest establishments boast fresh baked goods, a Wi-Fi router, a washing machine or a pool table. But all these are exceptions to the rules. For the most part, guesthouses in Nepal are cheap and unpretentious accommodations, the main attraction of which is the view from the window.

Prices

Prices for accommodation within the same village and even within the same track vary very little. Almost everywhere they are negligible - from 1 to 4 dollars per person per night. After all, lodge owners receive their main profit not from renting out rooms, but from restaurants. That is why the rules of most of these establishments state that you should eat in the dining room of “your” lodge, and if you eat elsewhere, the price of accommodation will increase significantly. Prices for food and many services are highly dependent on the transport infrastructure of a given location. Since most food is grown below and transported up the mountains by hand on the backs of porters, the higher you go, the more expensive the food becomes.

Numbers

In some lodges there are large rooms for 4-8 people, but for the most part tourists are accommodated in double rooms. These are stone or plywood cells (I like the latter better) not much different in size from a train compartment - two bunks, a narrow passage between them, a window and a table in the middle. There is a trash can in the corner, a couple of nails sticking out of the wall for hanging clothes - that's all the furniture. The beds are entirely orthopedic, i.e. not armored or spring, but simply plywood. A thin (5-7cm) foam mattress covered with a sheet, plus one pillow in a pillowcase, is thrown on top of the plywood. It is assumed that you will sleep on the bed in your sleeping bag. In some “cold zone” lodges you can ask the owners for a blanket. Usually this is a colorful and fluffy Chinese blanket without a duvet cover. Although sometimes we get heavy cotton blankets. Don't forget about the law of meanness - in the coldest lodge, on the coldest night, you won't have enough blankets. Therefore, it is better not to count on them initially, but simply take a warmer sleeping bag with you. Why? And because...

There is no heating in the lodges

Not a single lodge, even at high altitudes, even at sub-zero temperatures, has heated bedrooms. This is why I prefer to go to Nepal with a winter sleeping bag and choose plywood rather than stone huts. The only warm room in the entire hotel is the kitchen and the adjacent dining room. The kitchen is heated by eternally working primus stoves, and in the dining room there is usually a potbelly stove, which is heated on cold evenings so that guests of the establishment would want to stay longer in the dining room and eat more:) Sometimes you can order a “hot water bottle” for an additional fee. This is a huge primus stove that is shoved under the table where your group is dining. The Primus under the table growls terribly, flares up furiously and slowly warms your feet. True, the amount of fresh air in the room is rapidly falling, but we, city dwellers, are not used to this.

Evening party

In the evening, a motley international group gathers for dinner in the lodge's dining room. Of course, everyone is seated in small groups. Nevertheless, the cramped space and the presence of only one stove provide an excellent opportunity to communicate with live foreigners, practice English and generally have a good time. Just don’t stay too long - after all, porters sleep in the canteens at night, so don’t disturb them. Usually after 10 pm they begin to move the tables, take their blankets out of their chests and begin to spread out on the benches.

Shower and toilet

Shower and toilet in the room are an unprecedented rarity for mountain guesthouses. I saw this literally a couple of times in large villages like Namche Bazar. But even then the shower in the room was cold. Usually the bathrooms are located “on the floor”. In general, showering and the peculiarities of bathing in Nepal is a huge and extremely important topic that requires a separate article. Therefore, here I will limit myself to mentioning the main thing - if you wish, you can find the opportunity to swim anywhere. And secondly, you have to pay for a hot shower.

Electricity in the lodges

Plug sockets are a rarity in mountain lodge rooms. They are found only in large villages directly adjacent to tiny hydroelectric power stations. Usually, you can charge your equipment at the lodge administrator's desk. The price and charging efficiency can vary widely. After all, many high-altitude shelters “live” on solar panels and their supply of electricity is strictly limited. Also, you shouldn’t rely too much on the lighting in the rooms (it can be turned off) - be sure to take a flashlight with you.

Check-in procedure

When checking into a lodge, passports are almost never required. They simply give you a key with a huge fob and remind you that you need to order dinner on time. There is no need to hand over your keys when going for a walk. Checkout time is usually not clearly marked, but this is not necessary - all guests leave immediately after breakfast. After all, you need to have time to run the route before the mountains are covered with clouds. Payment for accommodation occurs upon check-out, along with payment for meals.

How to choose a good guesthouse?

I think many of you are accustomed to looking for accommodation based on reviews on the Internet. This practice is not very convenient for mountain lodges. The fact is that they are very easy to confuse, since the names are constantly repeated. Every second village has a Panorama View Lodge or some kind of Hungry Eye. Therefore, even if you take a break from a lot of reviews and write out your personal hit parade of shelters, you will most likely get confused and take a simpler path. Firstly, you can trust the professionals. If you are going with a commercial group or with a personal guide, or even just with a porter, then the choice of accommodation for the night will be made for you. And I must say that in most cases it will be absolutely adequate. Satisfied clients give good tips, so financially motivated guides lead tourists to good lodgings. If you travel on your own, you won’t be lost either. Choose the most crowded, outwardly attractive lodge in the center of the village and don’t be tormented by long doubts.

Do I need to book lodges in advance?

If you are traveling in a tiny group of 2-3 people, you can easily find accommodation for the night locally, without any prior booking. Just try to set up for the night not after dark, but during the day, so that you have time to look for housing. For larger groups, it makes sense to book rooms at least a day in advance. You can simply ask the administrator of your current lodge to call the next village and order something for you. Participants of commercial trips have nothing to worry about at all - the instructor books everything for them.

In case of severe bad weather (snow debris at the pass, bad weather in Lukla, etc.), traffic jams are possible at key transshipment points of the trekking routes. Of course, people here accumulate not on the trail, but in shelters. The systematic rotation of groups is disrupted, lodges become overcrowded and then finding housing becomes a more non-trivial task. And here even the presence of a nosy guide does not always save you. A couple of times we spent the night on benches in canteens (a very good option) and in reed sheds. But this is pure nonsense compared to the threat of not being able to make it to the plane, and therefore no one complained; movement along the route continued.

Japanese hotels

Among the more or less homogeneous mass of Nepalese mountain guesthouses, the so-called Japanese hotels stand out sharply. They say that many Japanese have very short vacations and in the allotted time they simply do not have time to properly acclimatize and safely reach the desired peak (more precisely, to the base camp). And especially for such comrades, several hotels with oxygen supply were built in the Namche Bazar area. They perched on the slopes high above the valley, so that the treasured view of Everest could be admired (through binoculars) right from the window of the room, calmly sipping oxygen from a personal cylinder:) Such hotels are a kind of local attraction - tourists are told about them, they pass by on occasion, but nothing more. In the sense that there is no point in spending the night there and paying crazy money. If you have enough time, then you will already learn to extract oxygen from the depleted atmosphere, and when you approach the mountain with your own feet, you will be able to see and understand Everest much better than anyone with binoculars.