Where to stay in Bir Billing
People book a room 'in Bir' and then find out they are four kilometres from everything they came for. Bir is not one village. Here is how it actually splits.
Updated
Chougan — the landing ground and the Tibetan Colony
This is the bit everyone means when they say Bir. The paragliders come down in the open field at Chougan, and the whole settlement grew up around it: the Tibetan Colony with its monasteries and handicraft workshops, Deer Park Institute, and the row of cafés that Instagram is responsible for. Everything is walkable. You will not need a taxi to have dinner, and when your flight gets cancelled at eleven in the morning you can walk home and go back to bed.
It is also the noisiest part of Bir in season, which is a real trade-off. October and November evenings in Chougan have a lot of people in them. Streets one row back from the main strip are quiet by nine.
Bir Road — cheap, convenient, and not really Bir
The stretch along the main road towards Baijnath has the bus stop, the ATMs and the cheapest rooms. It is genuinely useful if you are arriving late or leaving at dawn. It is also a main road, and you will be taking a taxi or a scooter to get anywhere you actually wanted to go.
Upper Bir and Gunehr — quiet, green, and further out
Uphill towards Billing the houses thin out and the views open up. Beautiful, considerably quieter, and a fifteen- to twenty-minute walk downhill to the cafés — which is a pleasant walk down and a less pleasant one back up at midnight. Worth it if you are here for a month and want silence, less good for two nights of flying and eating.
So which one
- Two or three nights, here to fly: stay in Chougan. Everything you came for is inside a ten-minute walk.
- A week or more with a laptop: Chougan or Upper Bir. You want a desk and reliable WiFi more than you want a view.
- Arriving at 4 am on the Delhi bus: anywhere. Message your host beforehand and get the check-in sorted rather than optimising the location.
- Travelling with a dog, or a lot of luggage: pick somewhere with parking off the main road.
What it costs
Dorm beds in Bir run from a few hundred rupees a night. A clean private room with its own bathroom is usually somewhere in the low thousands, and climbs steeply through October and November and over long weekends. Nothing in Bir has fixed year-round pricing; if a listing shows you one number in every month, it is a placeholder.
