The Route and Schedule

I'll just go over the general route and schedule for those of you that are interested. I'll go into more detail about the experiences in the next posts.

There are a few routes to Everest Base Camp (EBC). There is a long trek of about 21 days where you start in a town called Jiri. I considered it, but the word was that the hiking at the beginning is grueling, sometimes gaining (and losing) over 3000 feet in one day! The shorter, and more popular version is to fly into Lukla. This is the little mountain village that I mentioned in a previous post. From here you can hike directly to the base camp. I chose another option, which was fly into Lukla but after the village of Namche Bazar, in essence, take a left instead of a right and hike up another valley the little village of Gokyo. We then returned to the valley with EBC by hiking over the Cho La pass. It makes part of the trip a loop. This turns out to have been a fortuitous decision.

This ended up being my schedule:

Day 1 - Fly into Lukla and hike to Phakding

Day 2 - Phakding to Namche Bazar

Day 3 - Acclimatization day at Namche

Day 4 - Namche to Dole

Day 5 - Dole to Machhermo

Day 6 - Machhermo to Gokyo, climb Gokyo Ri at sunset

Day 7 - Gokyo to "fifth lake" and then back through Gokyo and on to Dragnag

Day 8 - Dragnag, over Cho La pass and on to Lobuche

Day 9 - Lobuche to Gorak Shep, hike to EBC

Day 10 - Climb Kala Patthar at sunrise, on to Pheriche

Day 11 - Pheriche to Namche Bazar

Day 12 - Rest day at Namche Bazar

Day 13 - Namche to Lukla

Day 14 - Fly back to Kathmandu