The classic Everest Base Camp trek, walked in both directions

11 stages, in order, with the bed you sleep in at the end of each one. This is the shape rather than the schedule. What happens hour by hour on each walking day, with distances and times, is on the day by day itinerary, and the trail itself is drawn on the route and map page.

The two acclimatization days are stages four and six, and they are the part people try to cut. Acclimatization means letting your body get used to less oxygen before you climb higher, and it takes days rather than willpower. On both of those days you walk several hundred meters uphill and then come back down to sleep in the bed you slept in the night before. That is what makes them work, and sitting in the lodge instead would be more restful and far less useful.

We will not sell you this walk with either of them taken out. If the calendar does not have room, the honest answer is a different trip rather than a compressed version of this one, and the last section of this page names the alternatives.

Everybody on this route walks the same trail and sleeps in the same villages. The differences between operators are in who is actually running your trip, what happens when something goes wrong, and whether the page you booked from told you the truth.

You are booking the operator, not a reseller. everestbasecamp.tours is Nepal Unique Treks and Expedition Pvt Ltd, a licensed Kathmandu company and member 2291 of the Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal. Same company, same office, same guides. Nobody is taking a cut between you and the people on the trail, so when you ask what is included you get the answer from the company that will be running it. The license numbers and the public membership record are on the page about our licenses.

A person reads your inquiry and a person answers it. There is no booking engine on this site and that is deliberate. Whether this format suits you depends on your dates, your fitness and sometimes your medical history, and a checkout page cannot ask about any of those. If the honest answer is a cheaper trip or a shorter one, that is the answer you get.

Both acclimatization days, on every departure. They are not an upgrade and they are not removed to hit a price. The one change we push back on hardest is taking a day out of the climb to shorten the trip.

We publish what we can source and say when we cannot. You have already seen three cells on this page that say not settled, and you will see more of them further down. Every rival page on this route prints a tidy number for each of those, and most of those numbers were copied from a page that copied them from somewhere else. How we decide what may be published is set out in our editorial policy, and how the trip is run on the ground is on how we run the trek.

Both lists below are transcribed from our own published inclusion list for this trip1, in plain words. Read the second list as carefully as the first. On this route it is usually the excluded column that decides what a trip really costs you.

One line in the excluded list is not optional, so we will say it twice. You need travel insurance. For treks and passes we require cover to 6,000 m (19,685 ft), and the policy must name helicopter evacuation and repatriation. We do not sell it, we do not earn from it, and we will not take you on the trail without it.

Here is why it matters so much. We have no standing contract with any helicopter or rescue company, so there is no provider of ours to name. If you need to come down by helicopter, your own insurer decides and sends it, under your policy. Your guide makes the call to your insurer from the trail. If your policy does not name evacuation, nothing of ours stands behind it. So carry your insurer’s emergency number and your policy number, and give both to us before you fly. What a policy has to say is on the page about travel insurance for this trek.

For where the money goes in general, rather than for this package, the cost page breaks the trek into permits, flights, guides, porters, beds, food and tips. That page owns the components. This one owns the format.

The classic walk suits somebody with about two weeks, ordinary fitness they are willing to build on, and a real wish to arrive on foot. It is not a technical trip and it is not an expert trip. Most people who finish it are not athletes.

Book this one if you have the days. The full length is what buys you the slow climb, the two flat days and the unhurried descent. If your calendar has room for 15 days, this is the best version of this trip and nothing on this site beats it.

Book this one if you want to have walked there. That sounds sentimental and it is the single strongest predictor of whether somebody enjoys the trip. People who wanted the arrival are happy on the tenth uphill hour. People who wanted the photograph are not.

Book something else if your problem is time at the end. The Everest Base Camp trek with a helicopter return runs 12 days. It keeps the entire climb, both acclimatization days included, and replaces the way down. That is the honest way to shorten this trek, because the days come off the safe end.

Book something else if the altitude itself is the problem. Do not compress this trip to cope with thin air, because compressing it is exactly what makes thin air dangerous. Look at the shorter Everest treks instead, which stay lower and say plainly that they do not reach the camp.

Talk to a doctor first if you have a heart or lung condition, if you are pregnant, or if you are traveling with a child or an older relative. We are a guiding company and not a clinic, and we are not going to write as though we were. What thin air does, and what your guide is watching for, is on the page about altitude sickness on this trek.

Five to seven hours on foot on most days, day after day, on rough ground, with less oxygen in every breath than your body has ever worked with. There is no climbing, no rope and no technical ground anywhere on this route. It is walking, and the difficulty is that it does not stop.

Three days do more damage to a group than the rest put together. The climb to Namche Bazaar, 3,440 m (11,286 ft), which is a long uphill afternoon with no flat in it. The base camp day, which is the longest of the trip and finishes at a height where nothing recovers quickly. And the pre dawn climb to Kala Patthar, 5,545 m (18,192 ft), which is short, freezing and the highest point you will stand on. All three are taken apart on the page about how hard the Everest Base Camp trek really is, and the answer there is yes for most reasonably fit people who train for it.

Train for the descent as much as the climb. The walk out is where knees hurt, because going down is harder on a joint than going up and you do it for three days with ten days of walking already behind you. The training plan is built around that, and it is the single most useful thing you can do between booking and flying.

The other half of the honest answer is that you are not carrying much. Your porter takes the duffel and you walk with a day pack. You are not cooking, not navigating and not pitching anything. Every night is a bed in a building. What the buildings are actually like is on the page about tea houses on the Everest Base Camp trek.

We run set departure dates on this route through both trekking seasons, spring and autumn, and we will run it privately on dates you choose. Which months are actually good for walking is a real question with a real answer, and it is on the best time to trek page.

The thing that moves dates is the flight. The airstrip at Lukla closes for weather, sometimes for days, and in the busy seasons the flights leave from a different airport several hours by road from Kathmandu. That is not a footnote and it is not a small risk. It is the reason a serious itinerary carries spare time, and ours carries its margin at the Kathmandu end, where a delay costs you a day in a city instead of a missed flight home.

What that flight is like, what happens when it does not go, and what we do about it is on the page about the flight to Lukla. If the flight is the part you do not want at all, we run the same trek by road with no flight in either direction. Our set dates are on the fixed departures page. A fixed departure runs 14 days, Kathmandu to Kathmandu, against the 15 days in the product record for this trip, and your quote states which one you are booking.

The price of this trek is 1,295 USD. Your written quote confirms that price for your group and your dates before you pay anything.

What the trip includes is in the two lists higher up this page, and the quote sets it out again, line by line, for your trip. The booking deposit is 30 percent of the price, and what happens if you cancel is set out on our booking terms page.

Send us your dates and how many of you there are, through the inquiry form. We reply within 24 hours.

Three other products on this site walk this exact trail. They are not better and worse versions of one trip. They change one thing each, and the thing they change is the thing you should choose on.

Two more formats change the walk rather than the wrapping. The trek with a helicopter return at 12 days keeps the entire climb and flies you out instead of walking down. The short Everest treks stay lower and do not reach base camp at all, which several of them say far too quietly on other people’s websites.

If you are weighing walking against flying as a whole idea rather than as a format, that argument has its own page: the Everest Base Camp trek compared with the helicopter. Every format we run, including the ones that add a pass or a lake valley, is on the tours and formats page.

Every number above is listed here with the body that publishes it and the date we last read it. If a figure has changed since, write to us and we will correct the page and say that we did.