On Teahouses

People who trek in Nepal become very familiar with teahouses. They are in every trekking town and they can be found along the road. They vary in size and quality. Some have only a few rooms and look like a dormitory attached to someone's house, while some have dozens of rooms, even some with their own toilet and shower. The rooms are very cheap, about $4 per night if using shared facilities and between $10 and $20 if private facilities. Clearly they aren't big money makers based on the rooms alone. However it is expected that occupants will eat their meals at their meals at the teahouse, and usually this will net some income for the owners. Food prices in Nepal have gone way up this year, so teahouses are having trouble remaining profitable according to some owners we talked to.

Meals are generally ok. Food isn't restaurant quality except in special cases, but it is very edible and sometimes surprisingly tasty. Tea is the normal drink, either milk tea (a sort of chai) or ginger tea, although there are about a dozen offerings for warm drinks. A single cup is about $1.

Food is generally rice, noodles, or spaghetti for trekkers and nepalese dishes for the guides and porters. But there are other options like pizzas, soups, potatoes in various forms. Breakfast can be eggs transported up from Kathmandu and Tibetan bread or pancakes, or some porridge of some type. Most places have some sort of hash brown which is a bit different from what we call hash browns, but still reasonably tasty.

Prices are about $2-3 per dish and several dishes are usually enough to feel 'fed' but not too full. So one can expect to spend about $10 per meal. So one can expect to spend about $35 per day per person for a pair of trekkers double occupancy. One way to save is to camp out at a tea house, but it really only saves about $5 per day. So, Barbara and I will spend a base of about $500 each for the two weeks we are trekking, added to about $5 each per day (or $70 total each) for porters to carry one of our bags.

There are additional charges for water (about $3 per liter), beer (about the same as water but not a good idea at high altitudes) and soda (also $3). You can guess that the main driver of prices is the labor of porters to carry the stuff up from Lukla.