Day 7 - July 12, 2013 - Best sleep ever!!!

I have finally typed up my notes from on Kilimanjaro ... I will post them as a post per day ... only because otherwise it would be a 10 page post ... which I think would be quite overwhelming!!!  Pictures will come shortly ... I promise :)  My little inserts in italics are thoughts I've put in after the fact.

Day 7 - July 12, 2013

I had the absolute best sleep ever of my life last night.  Absolute, hands-down best.   The rock under my back didn’t bother me, the angle of the tent didn’t bother me, the cold didn’t bother me and the frequent trips to the toilet tent throughout the night (oh yes, I haven’t mentioned this yet – when you are made to drink 3L of water a day plus they give you on average 2L of water through soups and teas, there is a lot of trips to the toilet tent required at night) of my neighbours didn’t bother me; I slept like a baby.  I wasn’t even awake when they came to do our wakeup I was peacefully and happily fast asleep.  Amazing.

We had another long trek today – 19.7km.  And, where it should have been absolutely beautiful due to the scenery and views it was quite sad.   Apparently while we had been on the mountain, the south side experienced a very bad fire and acres and acres of forest and moorland was just smoldering (some parts were still burning).   It was very sad.   The guides were extra saddened as the area is a place of worship for the native Chagga people, of whom a few of the guides belonged.  It put a somewhat sad end to our trek.

The fire hadn’t reached as far down as our first pause at Mandara Huts (2743m) where they had … *drum roll please* … a working tap and showers!!!  We didn’t use the showers, but some of us definitely used the taps.  I actually walked into the shower stall by mistake thinking it was a toilet and just stood in it for confusion wondering why there was an empty stall …so foreign was the idea of running water or a shower.  Oh, and when I did find the toilet (squat toilet that is) I just about got stuck.   Apparently 40 some kms of hiking in 48 hours and that whole summit business leads to getting stuck in a squat position.   Thankfully the walls had some texture and I was able to pull myself back up without just collapsing into the hole … phew!  Ahhh, yes, more toilet talk!

The last 8km were absolutely breathtakingly beautiful with rainforest, waterfalls, amazing vegetation and air so so thick.  It almost felt too heavy to breathe.  Amazing.

That ends the summary of our days on Kilimanjaro.  It was a successful trip and provided me the best and worst experience of my life.   I didn’t have any great career revelations but did find a new zen inner self that I did not know existed.  I also, again, realized that I love travelling and so need to have a career that can support a future full of adventure!

I will post the lessons that everyone should know next week.

And then I can start thinking of our next adventure!!!

Day 6 - July 11, 2013 - A wedding anniversary to be remembered ... it's summit day!

I have finally typed up my notes from on Kilimanjaro ... I will post them as a post per day ... only because otherwise it would be a 10 page post ... which I think would be quite overwhelming!!!  Pictures will come shortly ... I promise :)  My little inserts in italics are thoughts I've put in after the fact.

Day 6 - July 11, 2013

Cold and dark and steep and dusty and slow and steep and tiring and steep (did I mention steep?)  for 6.5 hours.   That was a description of the first 6.5 hours of mine and Luke’s 3^rd wedding anniversary.  A strange activity, really, to celebrate a wedding anniversary!!  It was definitely one that we won’t ever forget though.  Or, for that matter, probably beat.  Although, it has given us a great benchmark for future anniversary activities!!

The professional description of today, that we read yesterday at lunch (possibly not the best idea ever) reads as follows:

Tonight is very difficult - particularly the final 550m - and you’ll need to commit to fight for the summit. You will inevitably feel like giving up and going to sleep. This is normal and can be overcome with perseverance. When resting please ensure you only stand or sit and do not lie own or close your eyes. Please trust your guide; he is very adept at judging whether your condition will allow safe progress or whether you have succumbed to a potentially dangerous condition and to proceed will not be safe. Nausea and headaches are normal and around a quarter of climbers will vomit at or near Gilman’s Point.

I did not vomit … woohoo!  A couple of unfortunate souls in our group did though making us the perfect average group.  A lovely stranger also did and splashed on my boot.   I didn’t like my boots very much by this point though, so it really didn’t bother me.

Going to the loo on the way up was the scariest loo experience EVER.  Picture pitch black, 2 foot wide (maybe) trail, 1 foot of light radius max from headlamp and being told to just step over the ridge to the next one down to have a wee.  Adventure loo to the extreme!  Plus, in the dark, you can’t really see what previous loo deposits you may be stepping down into.  I had a narrow miss!   And, yes, I am aware of the loo theme throughout this 6 day summary.  In times like this it really comes down to the basics!!

Arriving at Gilman’s Point (5708m) was AWESOME.  I’d love to say primarily for the view but it was just sheer JOY at finishing the ‘demoralizing switchbacks’.  I’d love to reference that properly, but it was read to me from a book and I’m not sure which one.  They are quite demoralizing though just due to the sheer number of them, the dark and the slow slow slow speed with which you move through them.

I was quite surprised by the remaining distances though to get to Stella Point and then Uhuru Peak (5895m) but I was very very lucky and had a load of energy and was super hungry (phew for all of my sharkies and cliff bars that I brought with me)!

The walk over to the peak (with a steady climb of some 180 more meters) was incredible with views of the crater and glaciers and just the sheer joy of having made it to the top.  I luckily had no feelings of altitude sickness and actually thought I could have jogged over to the peak … with that being said, I probably would have died if I tried … but I’m going to keep thinking I’m Wonder Woman with nothing to prove otherwise.

The descent was incredibly fun – think alpine skiing in deep soft rocks.  Now that I write that it doesn’t sound as fun as it was … but, perhaps the exhaustion and the sheer joy at not having to walk slowly down were great contributors to the experience.   I have since read that it is very bad to ‘ski’ down the face though as it is causing rapid erosion … oops (Lesson 7).

Arriving back at Kibo Huts for lunch we were all shocked and, I think it would be accurate to say, absolutely HORRIFIED to find out that we still had another 12km to hike to get to our camp for the night.  We had a big group HMPH.  The total distance that we covered was 20.4 km and we were on the move from midnight until about 5pm non-stop.  It was an incredibly slow and LONG day!  I have never, and I can’t imagine ever in the future, been so excited to see an outhouse and our tent at the end of that 12k (Horombo Hut at 3760m).

I had expected that tonight would be a great night of celebration but it was, instead, a night of falling asleep wherever we stopped and counting down the time until they had finished serving our dinner and let us go to bed.   

LONGEST.DAY.OF.MY.LIFE.

Day 5 - July 10, 2013 - extreme grumpiness achieved

I have finally typed up my notes from on Kilimanjaro ... I will post them as a post per day ... only because otherwise it would be a 10 page post ... which I think would be quite overwhelming!!!  Pictures will come shortly ... I promise :)  My little inserts in italics are thoughts I've put in after the fact.

Day 5 - July 10, 2013

Day 5 I woke up, after my first good night of sleep (yay for exhaustion finally kicking in), in a great mood and full of energy and super hungry.  Woohoo :)  

We hiked 4.9km to School Hut at 4722m and then got ready for what we thought was our afternoon of sleep before our midnight ascent start.   This was incorrect.   It turns out that you don’t get to have an afternoon of sleep after all.  Boo that.  In fact, EPIC BOO THAT.

Instead, we arrived at camp just before lunch.  Got set up (ps – I hate hate hate hate the set up/pack up process.  Sleeping bags suck when you are freezing cold and dirty and they have to get stuffed into their stuff bags and then fit into your bag.  Suck suck suck) for the afternoon sleep and were then informed about our 3pm acclimatization hike.  Umm, we are already at 4722m and we have to start hiking to the top at midnight … why oh why oh why must we go for an acclimatization hike at 3pm?!!?   Even better, after lunch we were informed that we had 1.5 hours to nap.  Hmph.  I hate naps.  But I did it.  I had the coldest nap of my life.  Well, actually, I just lay in my sleeping bag thinking about napping.  I suck at napping. 

Our 3pm acclimatization hike mostly just gave us a glimpse at how tricky the steep scree descent is going to be.   And we mostly all grumped about how we’d rather be asleep and how cold it was.   But we all did it.  That’s what counts on missions like this!  Do as you are told, drink water, walk slowly, get to the top.  Period.

Went to ‘bed’ at about 5pm, when all was said and done.  Very very very grumpy.  I think I slept for maybe 2-3 hours MAX before being woken up by a delightfully cheerful ‘Time to get ready, be in the mess tent in 5 minutes’ at 11:00pm.   I won’t write in here what I responded with (very very very grumpy x10) but it had something to do with 5 minutes being ridiculous ESPECIALLY since we had to stuff those stupid sleeping bags back into their stupid bags!

I’ll continue from 11pm onwards as Day 6.

Day 4 - July 9, 2013

I have finally typed up my notes from on Kilimanjaro ... I will post them as a post per day ... only because otherwise it would be a 10 page post ... which I think would be quite overwhelming!!!  Pictures will come shortly ... I promise :)  My little inserts in italics are thoughts I've put in after the fact.

Day 4 - July 9, 2013

On Day 4 I had a new thing to complain about in my head (I think I did a pretty good job of being silent, for the most part, about my complaints) in that my face felt like it was on FIRE from the wind burn.  My lips and nose and cheeks were all chapped and we didn’t bring Vaseline (Lesson 4).   At this point I actually cursed Arbonne’s lessons in skincare and wished that, above anything else, I had a tub of Vaseline to dip my head into!!

I did, HOWEVER, have a GENIUS revelation in the middle of the night and used my Body Glide on my face and had immediate relief.  Yup, I had reached the point where it was okay to just wipe off the item that I had been using on my feet and use it as lip protection.   I even shared it with the group.  

(Lesson 5) It is an amazing thing how quickly you become very close and comfortable with strangers when you are all experiencing something like climbing a mountain!  On Day 1 we were sort of shy about personal issues, by Day 2 we discussing toilet patterns at dinner and now, on Day 4, pretty much anything goes!!  

Day 4 was awesome, but very very tiring.  I am not supposed to give camp names as we were doing Team Kilimanjaro’s custom Rongai route.  They add in an extra ‘secret’ camp for their climbers to give extra acclimatization chance and a more secluded camping option than the super populated Kibo hut.  To get to our secret camp though we covered a total of 11.6km!!  

We hiked via Mawenzi’s north west ridge (maximum height 4614m) to The Saddle between Mawenzi and Kibo.  This was a walk that never seemed to end as you just don’t seem to get any closer to Kibo for, what feels like hours and hours.  Hours and hours of scree and nothing but scree.  Oh and the remains of a crashed plane … very eery.  We also got thoroughly freaked out by seeing the summit ascent route.   Not a word of a lie, it looked straight up for a kilometer.  I will put pictures on our website and link to here in the next little while … you will hopefully be able to see what I mean from these pics!  The view of both peaks though was absolutely incredible!

We veered off the beaten path and actually descended to our camp for the night.  After being so high (4614m) it was really amazing to get to go down to camp.   I’m pretty sure I wasn’t imagining actually feeling the air getting thicker.  Oh, camp was at 3936m.

(Lesson 6) Oh yeah and, at this point, at night I was sleeping in my winter running tights, fleece pants, 800 down jacket and a toque in my sleeping bag.  So, if you are coming for this mission – bring warm sleeping apparel … it’s crazy cold at night!!!

Day 3 - July 8, 2013

I have finally typed up my notes from on Kilimanjaro ... I will post them as a post per day ... only because otherwise it would be a 10 page post ... which I think would be quite overwhelming!!!  Pictures will come shortly ... I promise :)  My little inserts in italics are thoughts I've put in after the fact.

Day 3 - July 8, 2013

 I stopped writing notes on Day 3 due to being too cold in the tent to want to write once in bed, except to jot down distances and altitude … so I shall write the rest of this from the jaded memories I have of the experience … lol, I am not actually that jaded and hopefully can remember the most interesting moments.

There will be a repeating theme from here until the end of Day 7 – I am cold, hungry and DIRTY.

For Day 3’s main hike we only covered 3.7km, but gained 624m in altitude ending at our camp at 4303m at the Mawenzi Tarn.

Arriving in camp I actually had a moment of energy burst as I had a potty emergency and, at this point, the rocks were getting such that a privacy break didn’t seem to be up to my level of standards (these standards disappeared within about the next 24 hours).  I managed to pull an almost run out of somewhere and rocketed (all things considered) into camp for the last 200m or so.  This 200m felt the equivalent of a 5k run in terms of exertion and I had a few moments of breath catching on my luxurious toilet bucket.   Yup, I have now changed my opinion of the toilet bucket and love it.  Mostly because I don’t have to squat and secondly because the tent around the bucket stops the dirt (sort of) from blowing into places that shouldn’t experience blowing dirt!!!

After lunch we had to do an acclimatization hike to one of the ridges of Mawenzi (the lower peak of Kilimanjaro) and it was quite steep and a little bit dizzying at the top.  I say ‘had’ … it was optional … but really, when they say they suggest doing an optional acclimatization climb who would say no?!?!  That would only be for sane people and at this point I think my sanity was sincerely up for debate!   But, oh my goodness, the views were FANTASTIC.  We just sat up there (I think it was a couple of hundred meters above camp) and looked down on the world for 15minutes.  This was, at that point, by far my most favorite moment of the climb! 

Day 2 - July 7, 2013

I have finally typed up my notes from on Kilimanjaro ... I will post them as a post per day ... only because otherwise it would be a 10 page post ... which I think would be quite overwhelming!!!  Pictures will come shortly ... I promise :)  My little inserts in italics are thoughts I've put in after the fact.

Day 2 - July 7, 2013

I didn’t sleep at all (well barely at all) last night and woke up this morning in a bit of a grump … a cold uncomfortable grump.  While we have great sleeping pads the angle of the campsite is not flat (SURPRISE lol.  I’m not sure why, or how for that matter, I was thinking there would be a flat campsite on the side of a mountain) and there are mighty big rocks in random places.   We also have very tight mummy sleeping bags on account of the cold and I am definitely not used to sleeping with things over my head.  Turns out though that it does drop below zero on night one and you do indeed need to have something over your head.   I also learnt that I should have brought a wonderful pillow with me (Lesson 2). 

All things considered, I found it quite difficult to get moving this morning.  It was just cold and everything was very dirty from yesterday and … well, I already did not like the toilet bucket.   Sigh, what a princess!

Oh, and, day 1 was all it took for my boots to start rubbing on my heels.  I changed my socks and put in a liner in hopes that this will solve the problem.

Today’s hike has morning and afternoon portions covering a total of 11.8km.  In the morning we hiked to Second Caves at 3482m and had an AMAZING lunch of chips (French fries for my North American friends) and veggies and a really delicious salad.  The carnivores of the group (hehehe) also had fried chicken – I think it was fried anyway; I didn’t pay a lot of attention as I wolfed down my amazing chips!!

My boots have officially eaten a solid chunk of both of my heels.  Bugger.  I do have a blister kit though and applied freezy gel things to both heels.  I wasn’t convinced (and correctly so) that they would stay put …but I didn’t think of any alternative.

After lunch was HARD.   The scenery was heathers and then moorland and it was steep for almost the full 6.0 km.  I also smoked my head super hard exiting a lava tube … which is one of the few things I haven’t actually banged my head on ever in the past!!  As cool of a first as that was, it didn’t really help my headache and dizziness that stuck with me from lunch onwards.

It was very cool that we were above the clouds all day.  It is a strange feeling as it’s like a great big white fluffy pillow and makes you forget how high you are!  A couple of times a bit of a gap cleared and we had a great view of Kenya very very far below us!

Our camp for tonight was Kikelewa camp at 3679m and we had an amazing view of Kibo.  It was a little daunting knowing how much higher we had to go … but only for a few minutes before my feet and the dirt distracted me!!

Luckily, in our group of 8, we had some seasoned trekkers who know the genius of duct tape and travel with it on their water bottles for easy access.   I learnt that duct tape is, among many other things, really useful with blisters when your freezy gel pads come unstuck about an hour after putting them on  (Lesson 3)!

So … I am now the dirtiest I have ever been and have duct taped feet.  I even put the duct tape on over dirt … I am not sure if this is a safe thing to do but you know what they say about desperate measures.  There is no way I’m going home without summitting (I'm making up words) because of my boots (Turns out it is perfectly safe to duct tape dirty blisters)!!!

Day 1 on Kilimanjaro

I have finally typed up my notes from on Kilimanjaro ... I will post them as a post per day ... only because otherwise it would be a 10 page post ... which I think would be quite overwhelming!!!  Pictures will come shortly ... I promise :)  My little inserts in italics are thoughts I've put in after the fact.

Day 1 – July 6, 2013

We started this morning with a 5 hour van ride to the base of the Rongai Route from Arusha (as Rongai is the only Northern approach there is a significantly longer drive to arrive at the start point than the other routes).  Upon arrival at base, we had a somewhat embarrassing lunch … let me explain that a bit … in booking with Team Kilimanjaro, one of the ‘perks’ offered is chairs and tables for all meals.   This, when I read it from the comfort of my desk, did not sound like a huge and wonderful perk (oh how I have now discovered otherwise).  However, at the base of the route there is a tourist picnic area with benches on which all of the other climbers were sitting eating their provided boxed lunches.   We arrived and our guides promptly set up a full table, with table cloth, and proceeded to serve us a fully cooked meal.  We got quite a few jealous glances but also a good hint as to the level of care that we had signed up for!! Once we had all eaten our 3 course lunch and filled up our 3L camelbaks we got started.   OH WAIT … hint for the ladies if you are ever starting at Rongai’s base … nearest to the tourist area there are toilets that are only squat … walk down the hill to the further toilet building and there is an amazingly luxurious (after a few days in Arusha, my definition of luxurious here is nice and generous) toilet building with actual toilets.   Trust me; this walk will be worth it as that is the last toilet you are seeing for a week!

The trek for today was a nice and mild one, traversing first through plantations, then through a pine forest (yes, that was as weird as it sounds … apparently the pine trees were imported) and then into bush country and, amazingly – I expected this to take a few days, above the clouds!   The total distance covered was 6.7km and our camp was at 2626m.

I felt really great finishing day 1.   We had great company in our group of 8, the guides were really fun and Luke and I had already learnt the Kilimanjaro song in Swahili before leaving so got to sing along with one of the most popular songs (this later became more of an irritant …but for Day 1 it was cool).

I did, however start to notice the dirt and was FILTHY by the end of the day (Lesson 1 – I will do a next blog post on the Lessons of Kilimanjaro that they don’t tell you about in the pamphlet).  But, as the temperature was still above zero when we arrived in camp I was able to have a warmish wash in my bowl and felt good by bedtime.