Jiri

Jiri is a municipality in Dolakha District in the Bagmati Province of central Nepal, about 190 kilometres from Kathmandu. It is best known as the main gateway to the Everest region: nearly all the early Everest expeditions, including the party led by John Hunt with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, passed through the town on foot, which is why it is also called the Gateway to Mount Everest. It is the closest road head to the classic trek towards Sagarmatha National Park, although only about five percent of Everest Base Camp trekkers begin their walk here, the rest flying to Lukla. Jiri was set up as an agricultural development centre with Swiss government aid in 1938, hosts a technical school teaching agriculture, construction and health, and had 13,938 inhabitants at the 2011 census.