Himalayas: Room With View, and Bath

 
  Trying out some panorama-making software!

While hanging out in the tea houses with other trekkers, one recurring theme I heard had to do with trekker's cravings for their favorite foods. The tea houses had reasonably varied menus--everything from pizza to spaghetti to french onion soup--but it was definitely not gourmet cuisine. So the fantasies went something like this:

"Man, what I wouldn't give for a juicy, rare steak...
"An ice cream sundae, with fresh strawberries and whipped cream..."
"I can just taste that Big Mac with cheese ..."

Me -- I had absolutely no appetite, at least until we were almost back down the mountain, so I wasn't bothered by food cravings. Even my beloved Pringles (yes, they did have them in the tea houses) weren't enough to entice me. But I had fantasies of a different sort.

All the way up the mountain, as I shivered in the lodges from altitude sickness and tried to get used to the community squat toilets, my two fantasies were of a scalding hot bath, and a Western-style toilet to call my own. One that I wouldn't have to navigate in the middle of the night with a flashlight.  Instead of Big Macs, I was fantasizing about soaking my weary body in a hot bath for an entire evening.

Needless to say, there were no bathtubs in the tea houses. In my research before I left for Nepal, I had read somewhere of a luxury hotel in the Himalayas, which sounded like it might have them. The room rates given were outrageously expensive, so at the time, I didn't seriously consider staying there. But after 10 days of squat toilets and shivering, and trying to console myself for not making it to base camp, I decided I needed an indulgence.

On the map, the hotel looked like just a short detour from our route. But what I didn't pay attention to was that the detour was off the path, and straight uphill. Two hours of climbing in icy snow later, I was wondering whether any fantasy was worth this much effort.

The hotel, called Hotel Everest View, is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the Highest Altitude Hotel in the world. It is tucked away deep in the mountains, at 13,000 feet (3964 meters). By the time we finally made it to its doors, exhausted, cold, and out of breath, I was thinking, this hot bath better be worth it.

As we walked up the steps, my heart sank. The place looked completely abandoned. There were no guests at all. The door was open, but the lobby was empty.  Our "hello, anybody out there?" echoed through the lobby. This was not looking good. We rang a yak bell hanging by the reception desk, and finally someone came out into the lobby.

He quickly escorted us into the dining room, where there was a stunning view of the mountains. "Come quickly, you can see Mt. Everest right now, before the sun sets."  And indeed, the view was spectacular. But my mind was on other things.

"Do you have a room available?"
"Yes, yes, we have rooms. But..."
"I just need two things in the room -- a bathtub, and heat."
"I am sorry, madam. Our pipes burst because of the cold last night.  We do not have hot running water, and the heat is not working."

I saw my toilet-and-hot-bath fantasy go down the toilet.

"But madam, we can make you hot bath."
"You can?? How?"
"We will boil water and bring it to your room."
"You'll boil a whole bathtub full of water and deliver it to my room."
"Yes m'am. It is no problem. It will take about an hour."
"But I want a long hot bath - maybe several hours."
"That is no problem. We will bring extra water. And we have space heater also."

While they got busy boiling, I had a scrumptious dinner that was several orders of magnitude better than lodge food, and then retired to my room. Sure enough, about an hour and a half later, a posse of men with eight buckets of boiling water arrive at my door. They dump six of the buckets in the tub, and leave two more sitting on the floor for a long soak.  A few minutes later, one of them returns with two hot water bottles that he tucks into my bed.

I soaked in that tub for over two hours, until I started falling asleep. (I was picturing this blog entry: No, she didn't die of altitude sickness. She drowned in a bathtub in the Himalayas.) Then I crawled into a bed with fluffy down quilts, snuggled in between the two giant hot water bottles, and fell asleep with Mt. Everest towering over me.

Paradise.

The bucket brigade

It also turned out that the rates had been dropped considerably, because of the lack of business, which made me feel less guilty about this indulgence. Even so, a single night at Hotel Everest View still cost me more than all the other 14 nights at the tea houses, combined.

But that bath! That bath will go down in history as the most exquisite bath I've ever had in my life.