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!!!