Facebook entry for summit night.

A very quick update. WE ALL DID IT!! We conquered Mount Kilimanjaro!!

A much longer update if you want details of our summit night experience are below:

I’ll post about the other days leading up to summit night later in our break when I have more time and energy!

So, after 5 days of trekking and wild camping; we were woken up from our tents at midnight, had porridge & coffee and then set off around 1.00am in the pitch darkness with only our head torches to light the way. If you looked up the mountain you saw groups of lights snaking their way up and with a cloudless sky if you looked the other way you saw millions of stars! It was like a BBC wildlife documentary! However, most of the time you only saw the boots of the person trudging ahead of you!!

Cloudless sky and an altitude that is FIVE times the height of Snowden meant minus degrees temperature and the tubes to our camelback water container all froze so we couldn’t drink

It was, honestly, absolutely brutal!!

The guides were singing African tribal songs to keep our spirits up and after 5.5hrs, the sun started rising and the views from the side of the mountain were breathtaking. But we still had 2 more hours to go. If I heard “One more push guys, it’s just around the corner” again I’d have thrown that guide off the mountain…if I’d had any energy left. We had a guide each assigned to us on this night in case of complications.

We reached Stella Point which is a mini-summit but still had 45mins to walk through the snow and glacial range to the peak. Fatigue and sickness was hitting everyone but we all made it in the end albeit at different times.

Fantastic feeling and hard to digest that we’d actually done it.

Once the photos, congratulations & emotions had passed we had to descend a different way to the ascent and that was mental. Sand, stones, gravel, choking and blinding dust with no discernible path, we just had to “get down” by slipping and sliding for 4hrs. Back to base camp and all the Climbing Kilimanjaro team members (porters, chefs, toilet duty guys, etc) were hugging and congratulating us all. They seemed genuinely as pleased that we’d done it as we were.

1.5hr sleep and another 4hrs difficult descent through a lunar landscape and a dried out stream bed to our night camp in the pouring rain.

The remaining teammates came back in through the night around 9.00pm. Everyone was exhausted and couldn’t really process what we’d achieved. That will come in a few days time when we can view photos & videos and reflect on it all.

I’m writing this on the following day on the 3hr bus ride back to the hotel, following another grueling 4hr hike down through the rain forest, where we’re looking forward to our first shower in a week, we’ve only had x2 washing up bowls of hot water twice a day for “washy washy”..

It has been a truly amazing experience.More to follow…