We stayed in a fairly typical guest house last night. There's a small flagstoned courtyard with a few benches and a lot of firewood stacked nearby. Most of the wood seems to come from young trees - the branches aren't even as thick as my wrist around. I guess there aren't really any bigger trees around any more - the deforestation is really horrendous in places we've been so far. The main entrance to the guest house leads to a common room lined with low, wide benches covered with a thin layer of foam padding. Usually, the family who lives in the house and any porters staying there use the benches as beds. There are a few crudely made wooden tables scattered about the common room, and an old kettle stove in the middle. I've read that many of the guest houses don't have chimneys and are therefore absolute smokefests,but I haven't seen that yet. They do, however, often use dung as fuel, which does create quite a bit of smoke.
The kitchen is connected to the common room, and I think serves as the family room for the owners. A few cases in the all between the common room and the kitchen show the various items for sale to trekkers - mineral water, half liter bottles of beer, pink Chinese toilet paper, biscuits, and so forth. The stove is usually a one or two burner affair made of clay or packed dirt, with an opening in the bottom so that the sticks of wood can be gradually fed into the fire. Usually, another curtain in the common room hides the entrance to the dorm room; in this lodge, you actually have to walk a few meters outside to get to the door. The dorm is crammed full of simple wooden beds, covered with the same foam padding you find on the common room benches. The beds aren't really conducive to a deep, restful sleep, and whenever someone has to get up in the night, the noise made stomping around and stepping over backpacks usually wakes everyone up.
Kitchen service tends to be pretty casual - you just stick your head in the kitchen and ask for whatever you want. It usually takes quite a while for food to be prepared, but you can speed up the process by having everyone order the same dish, preferably dal baht, the national rice and lentil dish. All teahouses have a log book into which you record your consumption, and add up your bill by yourself when you leave. Although the Sherpas seem to be pretty sharp about most trade-related things - keeping track of who's where and haggling good deals - the seem to be hopeless at arithmetic, and have to resort to calculators for even the most simple sums. Usually, I just add up my own totals and tell them how much I owe. I wonder how they managed before the advent of calculators.
The toilet is located almost always a short distance downhill from the house, and is without fail an Asian squat-style job, with a bucket of water and a container for the paper we Westerners insist on using (I admit to it, I'm just too culturally hardwired not to wipe). After a long day of hiking with stiff backs and joints, it can be quite a task getting into position and maintaining balance. I've heard stories of people losing their balance and falling in - actually read a first-hand account of it on the LP web site - but I've emerged safely every time thus far.
To avoid altitude sickness, you're supposed to climb no more than 300 meters a day. Being, essentially, idiots, we ended up sleeping about 500 meters higher than in Namche. Mongo La is a pass with a nice view of Ama Dablam, and great sunsets, but I suffered from the altitude. Falling asleep, my respiration would slow down to its regular rate, which brings in nowhere near enough oxygen to survive. So, every few minutes, I would wake up gasping for breath. The down sleeping bag I rented in Namche contributed as well: it's so small and tight that I can barely move inside it, and have to keep my arms crossed like a corpse. So, the gasping was usually accompanied by sitting bolt upright and tearing the bag from my upper body. Waking up the next morning, I felt like I had a hangover, quite a headache, bright light hurt, no energy. No nausea, at least.
