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)!!!