About Bar Peepal

Jitu Gurung comes from Dordi, in the hills of Lamjung. He came to Pokhara young, and started where many of the people who work here now started: on the staff of somebody else’s hotel.

He learned the trade from the floor up — the rooms, the kitchen, the desk, the guest who arrives at midnight — and in time came to run the family’s hotel, Silver Oaks Inn, built in 1996. For thirty years now, Pokhara’s hotels have been his work.

Bar Peepal was the leap. He built it on ten and a half ropani in the heart of Lakeside, in the traditional Nepali style and with local materials, and named it for the bar and the peepal — the two trees planted together at a chautari, where travellers stop to rest.

It opened in 2020, into the pandemic.

Six years on, the team is about a hundred strong, and what he said at the second anniversary still holds: the staff are the pillars of the place. The vegetables and eggs come from the family’s own farm, and the primary school in Dordi has new uniforms and two computers from the resort.