An old friend asked if I could post a map of our trekking route so he could follow our journey since the place names were unfamiliar and not on many maps.
I have a good National Geographic map of the Khumbu area which I used to trace our route but it covers so much and is a little hard to read, it doesn't photograph well.
When we were in Namche Bazaar, I bought a souvenir t-shirt with a simple map of the route from Lukla to points of interest to the north, including Everest base camp.
If you look at the bottom center, you see Lukla, with the airstrip symbol. As I mentioned earlier, many people fly into Lukla and start their trek there. The problem is that Lukla is a little less than 10,000 feet high so AMS (acute mountain sickness) is a danger to the people who don't acclimate to the altitude.
We started our trek at Jiri, which isn't shown above because it is about three times as far to the west as the distance from Lukla to the west edge of Nepal in the map shown.
Three advantages of starting at Jiri are building strength, aclimatizing to elevation and seeing the not so touristy areas before reaching Lukla. The disadvantages are time and money since it adds an additional ten days to the trek.
Personally, I'm happy we started at Jiri since I had a chance to get into shape and used to the elevations before tackling the rough parts higher up.
In any case, you'll need a different map to find the places we stopped on the way from Jiri to Lukla, but from Lukla to Everest base camp you can follow along on the simple map, above. (You should be able to double click on the photo and enlarge it.)
Hope this, in conjunction with my blog reports, helps give you a better picture of what we've been doing for the past couple weeks.
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