About
Why Chautāri exists
A chautāri is the stone platform built around a peepal tree, the resting place on every Nepali trail where travellers sit, information changes hands, and plans get made by people who know the ground.
Chautāri is run by a small group of friends from Nepal who grew up with these trails and are still walking them. Between us we've slept in teahouses from Ilam to Dolpo, waited out landslides on the Karnali highway, overpaid in Thamel and learned better. We built this site because of what we kept seeing online: people planning the biggest trip of their lives with information that was outdated, copied from other websites, or invented outright. Confident answers about permit fees that changed two years ago. Itineraries recommending roads that washed out last monsoon. Prices from someone who has never paid them.
We're not done exploring. Every trek one of us finishes, every fare that changes, every lodge that closes goes back into this site. Chautāri is us taking you along.
How this site is made
Honesty about sourcing is the whole point of this project, so here is exactly how it works:
- The prices are real. Every cost figure in an itinerary is computed from our own pricing database, entries we maintain and verify in Nepali rupees, not guessed.
- The local tips come from people, with their names on them. Friends and travel-industry contacts in Nepal who agreed to share what they know. No invented locals, ever.
- A planning engine assembles your itinerary from our curated Nepal knowledge base: destinations we scored ourselves, seasons, permits, and real pricing. The engine does the assembly; the knowledge is ours and the judgment is human.
- When we earn from a recommendation, we say so. Some pages carry referral links, always disclosed. Nobody pays to be recommended.
The promise
If something on this site is wrong (a stale price, a closed trail, a changed rule) we want to know more than you want to tell us: hello@chautari.co. Nepal changes fast; keeping up with it is the job.
Where locals sit. Where plans begin.