Teahouses

When I first heard that I would be staying in Teahouses on the way to Base Camp my mind pictured a quaint gazebo type building in a romantic English garden setting. Wrong! The teahouses we would be staying in would consist of roughly constructed buildings with a dining room, bedrooms and a shared bathroom with a squat toilet (more on it in another blog).
The dining room is the centre of all activity. It is the social centre where you eat and meet fellow hikers and hear their stories. It usually has 3 sides of glass windows with terrific views of the snow capped mountains in the area. Benches covered in Tibetain rugs with long tables infront ring the room. A central pot-bellied stove provides the only heat for the entire building. They burn wood at low altitude and dried yak dung at higher elevations. Depending on the wind, the dining room and if you are unlucky your bedroom is quite smoky.
The bedrooms consist of two beds with a narrow centre aisle and a large window with a view of the mountains. The walls are paper thin and you can hear the person in the next room's every move. Sometimes the electricity in the rooms work and sometimes it doesn't so you always have a headlamp at the ready so you can find your belongings and stumble down the hall to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Some teahouses provide you with an extra quilt at night which is a luxury. All this for 200 rupees a night, approximately $4.00. Considering a person or a yak had to carry all the building supplies etc. up the mountain to the building site you feel quite fortunate to be indoors out of the weather. This is all part of the Everest experience.