Everest Base Camp Tea Houses: Where You Sleep and Eat for Two Weeks

Dal bhat is rice, a lentil soup you pour over it, a cooked vegetable and usually a pickle. It is the national dish of Nepal and it is what every Nepali on the trail eats. Refills are the custom: when your plate empties, somebody comes round with more rice and more lentils and does not charge you again.

There are two practical reasons to order it. The kitchen makes more of it than anything else, all day, so it is the freshest food coming out of that kitchen. And it is the right food for the job, which is carbohydrate, some protein, salt and a lot of warm liquid, in a quantity that keeps coming until you stop. The pizza has been sitting in the same kitchen waiting for the one person a day who orders it.

Meat. It stays on the menu all the way up, and above Namche Bazaar it has been carried unrefrigerated for days before it reached that kitchen. Our guides eat vegetarian from Namche upward and we ask groups to do the same. A stomach illness high on this trail is not just unpleasant. It dehydrates you, it stops you eating, and both of those make you worse at altitude.

Alcohol is the other one. We ask groups not to drink above Namche Bazaar. That is our own operating rule rather than a medical finding, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up as science.

Beyond those two, order simple and order cooked. Fried food late in the evening sits badly when you are about to sleep at height, and the cheese and the heavy sauces are usually what people regret at two in the morning.

More than you expect for the first week, and then less than you should for the last few days. Walking six or seven hours in cold air burns a great deal, and most people are hungry in a way they are not at home. That part is easy.

What catches people out is that appetite usually falls away as you go higher. Around Dingboche and above, food stops being appealing at exactly the point where you need it most. Eat anyway. Eat the rice when you do not want it, drink the soup, and take the second helping of dal bhat. Your guide will notice if you stop eating, and being asked about it twice a day is part of what a guide is for.

Nepal has two mobile carriers that matter here, Nepal Telecom and Ncell. The picture our guides describe, and the one several independent reports agree on, is this.

That paragraph carries the hollow circle because it is not settled. Neither carrier publishes a coverage map for the Khumbu, so there is no authority to check it against. It is our own guides plus outside reports that agree with each other, and it was last read on the date at the foot of this page.5 Our own older pages said there was no cell reception at all at Phakding, Dingboche or Lobuche and that staff carried satellite phones. That is years out of date, and we are correcting it here rather than leaving it standing.

Buy your Nepali SIM card in Kathmandu, not on the trail. The counters at the airport and the shops in Thamel both sell them, you need your passport, and it takes a few minutes. We are not quoting a price or a data allowance, because the plans change and we have not checked the current ones against the carriers.

One practical note. Signal in the Khumbu is line of sight to a tower on a ridge. You will have full bars standing outside a lodge and nothing inside it, or nothing in the village and a clear signal twenty minutes up the hill. That is normal here and it is not your phone.

Wifi on this route is mostly one private network. Everest Link runs cable up the valley and sells prepaid cards, from Namche Bazaar upward, that work in the lodges along it. You buy a card with a data allowance on it, scratch off a code, and it follows you from village to village until the data runs out. Some lodges also sell their own wifi by the day.

It is slow, it drops, and it costs more with every village you climb. It is fine for a message and a photograph. It is not fine for a video call, and you should tell the people at home that before you go rather than after they have not heard from you for two days.

Charging is sold per device and usually per hour. It happens at the reception desk or on a power strip in the dining room, not in your room, so you hand over the phone and sit with it. Some lodges at Dingboche sell power in the room instead, as a fixed rate for a day or two days, which is the exception rather than the rule.

Prices rise with altitude, exactly like the shower and the drinking water. Charging, wifi and hot showers are priced per use and rise with altitude, and no figure we can stand behind has been published for any of them, so this page prints none.

Two habits save you money and worry. Carry a power bank big enough for several phone charges and charge the bank, not the phone, when you pay. And keep the phone, the camera battery and the power bank inside your sleeping bag at night, because cold flattens a battery that looked half full at dinner.

2,860 m (9,383 ft). Lukla is a town built along one street above an airstrip cut into the hillside, and it is where the walking starts. It has the most developed lodges on the route, hot showers that work, bakeries, bars, gear shops, a pharmacy and a bank.

Your Khumbu permit is issued here, not in Kathmandu. The Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality issues it at the Tourist Information Center, Lukla.1 Both permits and how they are bought are on the permits and fees page, and the flight itself, including the season when it leaves from Ramechhap instead of Kathmandu, is on the Kathmandu to Lukla flight page.

Most groups land in the morning and walk the same day, which is the right way round. You sleep here again on the way back, and that night is the loudest and the happiest of the trek.

2,610 m (8,563 ft). Look at that figure beside Lukla's. Phakding is lower than the airstrip you landed on. Day one walks downhill along the Dudh Koshi river, and you sleep lower than you started, which is exactly how a trek at altitude ought to open.

It is a string of lodges along the water rather than a village with a center. It is warm compared with everything above it, the rooms are comfortable, showers and wifi and charging all work, and phone signal is normal. Enjoy that. It is the last completely easy night.

Monjo is where Sagarmatha National Park begins, and your park permit is checked at the post here. Our sources disagree about Monjo's height, so we publish none.

There are lodges on both sides of the checkpoint, and some itineraries sleep here instead of Phakding. It is small, quiet and tidy, and it is the last village before the long climb to Namche.

3,440 m (11,286 ft). Namche is the largest settlement in the Khumbu and the only one that works like a town. It sits in a horseshoe of terraces above a river junction, so the whole place faces the same way and you get between the streets on staircases. Everybody who walks to Everest Base Camp comes through it twice.

You sleep here two nights, not one. Namche is the first of the two acclimatization stops, and acclimatization means letting your body get used to less oxygen before you climb any higher. We build two acclimatization days into every Everest Base Camp itinerary we run, at Namche Bazaar and at Dingboche, and we will not sell you a version without them. What happens on each of those days is on the itinerary page.

The rest day is not a day in bed. You walk uphill, spend a few hours higher than the village, and come back down to sleep in it. The usual objectives are the hotel on the ridge above the village, which has the Everest view, and the villages of Khumjung and Khunde on the shelf behind it. Walking high and sleeping low is the entire point of the day.

What is actually in Namche: lodges at every standard, from plain rooms up to places with a heated dining room and a bathroom off the bedroom. Bakeries and coffee shops. Gear shops selling both real brands and convincing copies of them. A market on Saturday morning that the whole valley comes to. Money changers, pharmacies, a museum of Sherpa life and Everest climbing history, an army post, and internet cafes older than the wifi cards.

Namche has the last cash machines on the route. Above here, card facilities are unreliable and then absent. Whatever you plan to spend on showers, charging, wifi, water and snacks for the rest of the trek has to be in your pocket in Nepali rupees when you leave this village. It is also the last place that can sell you a forgotten glove, a headlamp battery or a better hat. Beyond Namche the prices climb with the altitude and nobody can fix what you left at home. The packing list page is written so that you do not need to buy anything here.

Connectivity is at its best here outside Lukla. Phone signal is usually good, the wifi cards are sold here, and this is where most people send the photograph that makes everyone at home nervous.

3,790 m (12,434 ft). Khumjung and Khunde sit side by side on a shelf behind and above Namche, out of sight of the main trail. Most groups visit them on the Namche rest day rather than sleeping in them, although there are lodges in both and a night here is quieter than a night in town.

Khumjung is one of the largest Sherpa villages in the Khumbu, a grid of stone walled houses with green roofs and potato fields between them. Its monastery keeps the object most visitors come to see, a scalp said to be a yeti's. The school below it was built by Sir Edmund Hillary's Himalayan Trust and is still running.

Khunde, a short walk further, has the hospital. Kunde Hospital stands at 3,840 m (12,598 ft), it has operated since 1966, it has 15 beds, and it is managed by Himalayan Trust Nepal and staffed by Sherpa doctors and nurses.3

We are stating that plainly for a reason. Pages belonging to our own parent company have said elsewhere that there are no hospital facilities on this route and that a helicopter is the only option. That is wrong, and it is the kind of wrong that could stop somebody asking for help. There is a hospital above Namche and an aid post at Pheriche, and both are on the safety page with what each one does.

3,860 m (12,664 ft). You can see Tengboche for an hour before you reach it, sitting on a saddle between two valleys with Ama Dablam behind it. The monastery is the religious center of the Khumbu and the home of the Mani Rimdu festival, which falls in autumn and which people plan whole treks around.

The saddle is exposed and the wind comes over it in the afternoon, so the lodges here are colder than the height alone would suggest. Evening prayers are open to visitors at the monastery. Ask your guide about the hour and the form rather than walking in, because it is a working monastery and not an attraction.

This is the first night that feels like altitude for most people. Sleep is shallower, the dining room is colder, and at some lodges the walk to the toilet is outdoors.

Deboche is a short walk below Tengboche, down among the trees and out of the wind. Plenty of itineraries sleep here instead of on the saddle, and the nights are noticeably warmer and quieter for it. We publish no height for Deboche or for Pangboche, because each rests on a single source we have not been able to confirm.

Pangboche is further up, a village in two parts with an old monastery in the upper one, and it is the access point for the walk to Ama Dablam Base Camp. Both villages have lodges, both have a stove and the same menu, and both are calmer than the places the crowd stops.

4,410 m (14,469 ft). Dingboche is a wide flat valley of stone walled fields, and the walls are there because the wind here is constant. You are above the last real trees, which is why the stoves from here upward burn dung rather than wood, and the light is different because nothing is softening it.

You sleep here two nights as well. This is the second acclimatization stop and it does the most work of the two, because it is the last chance your body gets before the highest ground on the route. The walk on the rest day goes up the ridge behind the village, Nangkartshang, high enough to feel it and back down in time for lunch.

The lodges are bigger than you expect for the height and some are genuinely good. A few sell power in the room as a fixed rate for a day or two, which is worth taking if you have a camera to keep alive. It is also the last village where a hot shower is a normal thing to be offered.

Pheriche sits in the next valley over from Dingboche, and some itineraries sleep here instead. The two routes join again above both villages. Our sources disagree about Pheriche's height by a wide margin, so we publish none.

What we can give you exactly is the aid post. The Himalayan Rescue Association has run one here since 1973, at 4,250 m (13,944 ft), staffed by volunteer doctors through the trekking season. It gives a free talk on altitude illness for trekkers, and its published schedule is Daily at 3:00 pm at its aid posts during the trekking season.2 If you are anywhere near it at that hour, go. It is the best education available on this trail and it is given by the people who treat the outcome.

Dughla, also written Thukla, is not really a village. It is a small cluster of lodges at the foot of the moraine, which is the wall of rock and rubble a glacier pushes ahead of itself as it moves. Almost nobody sleeps here. Almost everybody stops for lunch.

The climb out of Dughla is short and steep, and it is the hardest part of any morning on the way up. At the top of it is a flat pass covered in stone memorials to climbers and Sherpas who died on Everest, many with prayer flags and a name and a date on them. Groups go quiet there. Walk through it slowly rather than past it.

4,910 m (16,109 ft). Lobuche is a handful of lodges beside the Khumbu Glacier rather than a village with a life of its own. There are no fields and no shops. There is a row of buildings, a great deal of rock, and a view of Nuptse that makes up for some of it.

It is cold, it is crowded in season, and the dining room is the entire social world of the evening because there is nowhere else to be. Water is scarce and washing is basic. Toilets are often outside. This is the night where a lot of people sleep badly for the first time. That is common, and it is worth telling your guide in the morning rather than keeping it to yourself.

We do not publish a height for Gorak Shep, and that is deliberate. Our sources carry more than one value for it and none has been settled against a survey authority, so the figure stays withheld until it is. Everything else on this page about Gorak Shep we are sure of. Rival pages all print a number here. Not one of them tells you the number is contested.

Gorak Shep is a few lodges on the edge of a flat sandy basin that was a lake once, underneath Kala Patthar at 5,545 m (18,192 ft). It is the last place with beds before Everest Base Camp at 5,364 m (17,598 ft). You cannot sleep at base camp itself, because base camp is a glacier that carries expedition tents in the spring climbing season and nothing for the rest of the year.

From here, base camp and back is a day walk on the moraine, and Kala Patthar is the walk you do before dawn for the view of Everest that base camp itself does not give you. The Kala Patthar page explains why that morning is the real summit of this trek.

Everything above is the classic route. Three longer routes leave it and rejoin it, and they sleep in a different set of villages. The tea houses there work exactly the same way, with one difference worth saying out loud: they are fewer, smaller and further apart, so on those routes the lodge is not a choice. It is the lodge.

On the Gokyo side you sleep at Dole, at Machhermo, and at Gokyo itself beside the lakes. Crossing the Cho La between Gokyo and the main valley means a night at Thagnak on one side and Dzongla on the other, and each of those is a very small cluster of lodges and nothing else. The Renjo La route comes out at Lungden and down through Thame in the Bhote Koshi valley, past Thamo, where monks and nuns from the local monastery are part of the ordinary day. Chhukung at 4,730 m (15,518 ft) sits up the Imja valley and is the base for the Kongma La and for Island Peak.

Of those, only Chhukung has a height our sources agree on. The others are each published at two or three different values, so we leave them out here and list every value on the elevation page instead. The routes themselves are compared on the route and map page.