Everest Base Camp

A pre-dawn drive to the airport and a 35-minute flight over the foothills, with the whole eastern range filling the left-hand windows. The landing at Lukla — uphill, onto a 527-metre strip cut into the mountainside — is the most memorable thirty seconds of the trip.

From the airstrip the trail drops gently north through Chaurikharka and Ghat, following the Dudh Koshi downstream. It is an easy first day on purpose: stone paths, mani walls, the first suspension bridge, and prayer flags strung across the river. You reach Phakding by mid-afternoon with time for tea on the terrace.

The day the trek begins properly. Five river crossings lead to the Sagarmatha National Park checkpoint at Monjo, then the high Hillary Bridge — a 125-metre span strung with flags above the confluence — and immediately after it, the Namche hill.

That climb is 600 metres of relentless switchbacks through pine forest, and it takes most people two and a half hours. Halfway up, if the cloud allows, you get your first sight of Everest itself: a dark triangle of rock behind the Lhotse–Nuptse wall. Namche appears suddenly, a horseshoe of blue roofs built into the bowl of the mountain.

A rest day that involves walking, because that is what actually works. After breakfast we climb to the Everest View Hotel at 3,880 m — an hour of steady uphill for one of the finest breakfast terraces on earth, with Everest, Lhotse and Ama Dablam laid out in a single frame.

We come back down through Khumjung village, where Hillary built the first school in the Khumbu in 1961, and drop into the monastery there. The afternoon is yours: the Saturday market, the Sherpa Culture Museum, a bakery, or a very long nap. Oximeter readings before dinner, and your guide talks each one through with you.

A contouring trail along the valley wall with Ama Dablam directly ahead for two hours — arguably the most beautiful stretch of the entire route. The path then drops 600 metres to the river at Phunki Tenga, and climbs the same again through rhododendron to the monastery.

Tengboche is the spiritual centre of the Khumbu, rebuilt after the 1989 fire, and you can attend the late-afternoon puja: drums, horns, butter lamps and forty monks chanting in a room that smells of juniper smoke. Outside, the last light goes up Ama Dablam’s south-west face.

Above Pangboche the last trees give up and the valley opens into a wide, dry, stone-walled basin. Dingboche sits in the middle of it at 4,410 m, a village of potato fields and windbreaks with Island Peak closing the far end of the valley.

The second acclimatisation day is here. We climb the ridge above the village to 4,900 m — ninety minutes up, thirty down — and come back to sleep low. From the top you see Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak, appear over the eastern skyline. Nights here are genuinely cold: −10 °C inside an unheated room is normal.

A short day by distance and a hard one by altitude. The trail climbs onto the lateral moraine of the Khumbu glacier and follows it north, the ice creaking and shifting somewhere underneath the rubble beside you.

We pass the Thukla memorials — stone cairns and plaques for climbers lost on Everest, including Scott Fischer and Babu Chiri Sherpa — and the tone of the walk changes there. Gorak Shep is the last settlement: five lodges on the sand of a frozen lakebed at 5,164 m, with Pumori standing directly over it.

Three hours over the moraine, boulder to boulder, with the Khumbu glacier on your right the whole way. In spring the tent city appears long before you reach it, a scatter of yellow and orange on the ice below the icefall; in autumn the site is empty and the silence is total.

You stand at 5,364 metres with the Khumbu Icefall breaking directly above you — a frozen cataract of seracs the size of buildings, audible as it moves. Everest’s summit is not visible from here, and it does not matter in the slightest. We spend forty minutes at the boulder, take the photographs that will be on your wall for the next twenty years, and walk back to Gorak Shep in the afternoon light.

A 4 a.m. start in the dark and the cold for the best viewpoint in the Khumbu. Kala Patthar is a black rock shoulder of Pumori, 400 metres above Gorak Shep, and it takes between ninety minutes and two and a half hours depending on how the altitude is treating you.

At the top, at 5,545 m, you get the whole south face of Everest with the sun coming across it — the one angle where the mountain reads as the highest thing on earth rather than just another peak in the wall. Ten minutes later the light flattens and it is gone. Then a long, steady, oxygen-rich descent to Pheriche, where you will sleep better than you have in a week.

The early flight out of Lukla, back over the foothills, and into a city that will feel loud, warm and impossibly full of oxygen. A hot shower, clean clothes, and an afternoon to wander Patan Durbar Square or simply sit still.

In the evening we eat together with the guides and porters who carried the trip: certificates, a slideshow of the week, and the inevitable conversation about which trail you are walking next. Day 15 is your departure day, with a transfer to the airport whenever your flight leaves.