Everest or Annapurna: How to Choose Between Them
Anos Tamang
Founder and trekking guide, Shamar Treks
This is the most common question we are asked and it usually gets a useless answer, because the honest one depends on four things about you rather than two things about the mountains. Here is the version that helps you decide.
The short answer
Annapurna if you have under two weeks, a fixed flight home, or this is your first trek. It has road access at both ends, routes as short as three days, and no internal flight to be cancelled.
Everest if you have sixteen days or more and the Base Camp itself is the point. Nothing in Annapurna replicates standing under the Khumbu Icefall, and nothing replaces the view from Kala Patthar.
Everything below is why.
The comparison
| Everest (Khumbu) | Annapurna | |
|---|---|---|
| Shortest worthwhile trek | 12 days walking, 16–18 total | 3–4 days |
| Getting there | Flight to Lukla, weather-dependent | Road from Pokhara |
| Risk of losing days | High — Lukla cancels routinely | Low |
| Highest point | 5,545 m at Kala Patthar | 3,210 m to 5,416 m depending on route |
| Scenery | High, stark, glacial. Above the treeline for a week | Varied — farmland, forest, ridge, high desert |
| Lodges | Best in Nepal, and the most expensive | Very good, noticeably cheaper |
| Crowds | Heavy on one trail | Heavy in places, empty a day's walk away |
| Route choice | Four, all long | A dozen, from 3 to 21 days |
Days available is the real decider
The mistake people make is underestimating Everest. It is sold as a twelve-day trek; twelve days is the walking. Add international flights, a night in Kathmandu at each end and a spare day for Lukla weather, and it is sixteen to eighteen from leaving home to getting back.
There is no shorter honest version. Cutting the acclimatisation days is what shorter itineraries do, and it is why people on them turn back at Dingboche.
Annapurna scales down in a way Everest does not. Poon Hill is a genuine Himalayan trek in four days. Mardi Himal reaches 4,500 m in four. If your holiday is ten days including flights, Annapurna is not the compromise — it is the only one of the two that fits.
The Lukla flight deserves its own paragraph
It is a twenty-five minute flight onto a sloping airstrip cut into a hillside, and in cloud nothing flies. Cancellations are routine rather than exceptional, in both directions, and in peak season flights often shift to Ramechhap — four to five hours' drive from Kathmandu, boarding before dawn.
Budget a spare day and never book an international departure for the evening you fly out of Lukla. If your schedule has no slack at all, that is a real argument for Annapurna.
They do not look alike
This gets lost in the comparison of logistics, and it is the part most likely to determine which you actually enjoy.
Khumbu is vertical and austere. You are above the treeline for about a week, walking on moraine among the biggest mountains on earth. It is monumental and slightly lunar, and the scale is difficult to convey.
Annapurna is varied. In a fortnight on the Circuit you pass through subtropical farmland, rhododendron forest, alpine pasture, a 5,416 m pass and then the Tibetan high desert of Mustang. In the foothills you walk between working villages the whole way.
If you want to be among enormous mountains, Everest. If you want a journey through changing country, Annapurna.
Crowds, and how much they matter
Both are busy in October. The difference is what you can do about it.
In Khumbu there is essentially one trail to Base Camp and everyone is on it. The alternatives — Gokyo, the Three Passes — are quieter but longer and harder.
In Annapurna the crowding is concentrated in specific places, and a day's walk gets you out of it. Muldai is higher than Poon Hill and usually has under twenty people on it; Kori Danda faces the eastern Annapurnas and sees almost nobody; Mohare Danda runs on community-owned lodges.
Cost
Annapurna is cheaper, for structural reasons rather than because the trips are lesser. There is no internal flight, the supply line to the lodges is short, and the routes are shorter. Khumbu prices reflect that every item in every lodge at 4,900 m was carried from an airstrip.
Our cost breakdown goes through what drives the difference and what a cheap quote leaves out.
If you still cannot decide
Two other options are worth putting on the table, because the question is often really "which good trek fits my two weeks".
Langtang reaches a glacial valley head under a 7,227 m peak in eight days, with no flight and a 4,985 m viewpoint as a day walk. It is the answer for a lot of people who ask this question and it is chronically under-booked.
Manaslu is what the Annapurna Circuit was before the road — a long walk to a high pass, restricted-area quiet, in about two weeks.
The region guides for Everest and Annapurna compare the individual routes within each, and our month-by-month guide covers when to go.
About Anos Tamang
Founder and trekking guide, Shamar Treks
Anos Tamang is the founder of Shamar Treks and a working trekking guide. He leads trips across Nepal's trekking regions and writes here about the practical side of them — routes, permits, seasons and the decisions that make the difference on the trail.
