Everything we know about trekking in Nepal, written by the people who guide it, free and with nothing to sign up for.
Elite Trekkers is run by Nepali guides, and this section is the part of the site we would want to read if we were planning a first trip from the other side of the world. There is no gate on any of it. Take what is useful and book your trek with whoever you like.
If you are at the very start, read the first two pages below in that order. They are the ones that change plans.
The rules, and the paperwork
Do you need a guide to trek in Nepal? Since April 2023, on almost every trek you would fly here for, yes. What the rule says, which regions it covers, what counts as a guide, who is exempt and what actually happens at a checkpost.
Permits and park passes. Which permit each region needs and what it costs, including the Everest quirk that catches most people: the Khumbu does not use a TIMS card.
Guides vs porters. A guide, a porter and a porter-guide are three different jobs at three different rates, and only two of them satisfy the rules. Worth five minutes before you decide who to hire.
Planning the trip
When to trek in Nepal. What each season really offers, including the two windows everyone books and the two nobody talks about.
The kit list. Everything you need, filterable by budget, with what to buy at home and what to hire in Kathmandu for a few dollars a day.
Travel insurance for trekkers. The one purchase people get wrong. It needs to cover the altitude you are going to and helicopter evacuation, and most standard policies do neither.
What a guide or porter costs. Our published day rates, what a whole trek works out at, and the costs a day rate hides: permits, tips, teahouses and flights.
On the trail
Altitude sickness. The one page here that is genuinely about staying alive. How fast is too fast to climb, what the symptoms mean, the difference between AMS, HAPE and HACE, and when going down stops being optional.
Mountain weather. Live forecasts for the ranges, with separate pages for the Everest region and the Annapurna region.
Cultural dos and don'ts. How not to cause offence without meaning to, from which hand to give things with to what to do at a monastery.
Tips and tricks. The small things a guide learns after a hundred treks and a trekker learns on their third.
If your question is not here
Ask an ET expert. Send the question to the guides who walk these trails and you will get an answer from Kathmandu within two working days. It costs nothing and you do not have to have trekked with us, or to be planning to.
We would rather answer a question from someone who ends up booking elsewhere than have another trekker arrive in Nepal with the wrong insurance, the wrong boots or no idea that the rules changed in 2023.
