16th - Kili day 5 aka Hell on Earth

As I didn't have time and energy to write any notes this day this post will be done by memory.

Barafu camp/Base camp (4500 m) – Mweka Camp (3100 m) via Summit (5895 m)

This day would be the absolutely longest of the entire trek. Started at midnight, with a climb to the summit, followed by a descend back to the Base camp for a couple of hours of rest, and then continuing down to our last camp at 3100 meters.

First of all: Yes – I did make it. I did reach the summit at 5895 meters. And to my big surprise I didn’t feel much of altitude sickness during the ascend. I felt a little nauseous at times, but I suspect that was because of my pulse being in the high end for all 8 hours it took us to reach the top.

It was a beautiful sight looking up towards the top when walking, as all you could see was other people’s head lamps. It was like looking at several worms of light crawling up the side.

If it was easy? Pff. It wasn’t a problem at all.

And if you believe that, I have $10.000.000 for you, and you just need to pay me $25.000 to cover transfer expenses to get them.

It was probably the physically hardest thing I have ever done in my life. You headlamp gave you the possibility to look at your own feet, the feet in front of you, and the ground in between. You felt disorientated as you had no knowledge of what was going on around you, but that was for the best, because you had to save as much energy as possible for just walking. The pace was extremely slow; a step that took one foot and put it all the way in front of the other would be considered as being a long step. Every step drained energy you didn’t have, and now and then rock formations appeared from the dark which you had to climb over, which drained even more energy. Long breaks weren’t possible, as the wind and low temperatures prevented us from staying still for too long. The average steepness is hard to estimate, but I probably won’t be far from the truth when guessing it was between 30 and 40 degrees.

When reaching Stella Point (5685 m) the rest was almost a walk in the park. Uhuru (the name of the peak) was almost 200 meters higher up and less than a km away. But due to the previous steep slope this felt as nothing.

Carys and I at the roof of Africa

Going down again was done slightly faster; it took us 8 hours to get up, but only 1½ hours to get down. But the issue here was that it was all gravel (we didn’t take the same way down as we did up), so for every step we really had to force the boots down into the gravel to be sure that we didn’t lose our grip. It gave a huge strain on legs and knees. We finally made it back to Base Camp, where we got a couple of hours of rest (i.e. sleep). Glenna, who hadn’t joined us when we left due to her problems with the altitude, had enjoyed her morning with a good sleep and relaxation. If we had left for the ascend around 0800 instead of midnight she would have had a chance to try to get to the top (yeah yeah, Glenna. That’s easy to say… :P ).

After the rest we started the first part of our descend, down to 3100 meters altitude. As we didn’t have to take acclimatization into consideration any more as we were going down, we were let go by our guide and could walk as fast as we wanted. Looking forward to getting to camp to get some well-needed sleep it couldn’t go fast enough.