Despite the spine-jarring, four-hour trip off the Friendship Highway – that connects Lhasa to the Nepal border at Zhangmu – the craggy lunar landscape en route to Everest is enchanting. Rongphu is a good place for a stop and at 4,980 m is the highest monastery in the world. Although it has some good murals, the interior is not as riveting as its stunning location in front of Everest’s forbidding north face in the Rongphu Valley. The monastery was founded in 1902 on a site that had been used by nuns as a meditation retreat for centuries, and is now home to some 30 monks.

Everest Base Camp lies 8 km to the south. The trip across the glacial plain takes about 15 minutes by vehicle or two hours on foot. It is just a jumble of tents, with a makeshift teahouse and the world’s highest post box, but the views of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain at a staggering 8,848 m, are absolutely unforgettable.

The entire Rongphu and Everest area has been designated a nature reserve that covers 34,000 sq km, and borders three national parks in Nepal. A spectacular viewpoint at the Pangla Pass en route to Rongphu has a chart that helps identify peaks over 8,000 m high – Cho Oyu, Lhotse, Makalu, and of course, Everest, known as Chomolungma in Tibetan.

The rarefied air at this altitude 5,150 m makes any strenuous activity impossible. Unless visitors are properly acclimatized, it is best to go all the way back to the Friendship Highway and carry on to the town of Shekhar to spend the night.