Day one! Bloody hell it has been 18 months since we decided we were doing it and now we actually have to do it! What on earth was I thinking!
I didn't really sleep because I kept thinking, 'what am I doing'!!! The stories of people failing to make it to the top filling my sleep deprived brain kept me tossing and turning all night and when I did eventually fall asleep I dreamt about Jonah Lomas making an advert to sell scones in an old haunted country house, totally bonkers so it was easier to just wake up and get up so was up at 5am and sorting my bag which weighed 19kgs and needed to weight 15kg!
I ended up dumping anything I had two of except pants and socks and not my thermals although I had three pairs of those so dumped one pair.
I did manage to get my duffle bag down to 15kg but my rucksack weight 10kgs and it is only supposed to weight 5 or 6kgs as I have to carry it but most of it was my little bottles of ginger and beetroot juice and my snacks so there was no way I was leaving those behind. In the end Gaston our guide said that he would give my snacks etc to the assistant guide to carry so poor Peter got mine, Lindsays and Ashleys snacks to carry every day but at least these got less as the days went on.
Once our bags were all sorted we loaded up and then had a 4 hour drive to check in at the first gate. We got there and there seemed to be a delay in our paperwork and payment going through which meant we had lunch there and we were the last of the trekkers to leave and set off.
We used the time while we waited trying to figure out how my new go pro camera worked! Lindsay managed to get it from French to English instructions so that helped! Here is my first go pro pic!! Three fresh faced and clean adventurers ready to get going.
Once we started walking it was pretty easy going and Peter our assistant guide walks so slow I apparently say "did you go to a special school to learn to walk that slowly?"!!! Lindsay had to stop to right that down! It was bizarre how slowly he was walking though but they get you training straight away to walk Pole Pole so you are totally in the rhythm of it for summit night when it really is tough and you can't do anything other than Pole Pole!!
We were in high spirits and full of energy now we had got over the anxiety of getting our bags sorted, I got over my Diamox Dilemma and we realised that the trekking was not as hard as we had thought it would be! Ashley decided to teach Peter a scottish word and taught him jobbie - when she explained what it meant, he really laughed - for those that don't know what a jobbie is here is a link! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jobbie. We then started what became our thing of singing as we walk - we are not bad singers and as it turns out we know lots of choruses to songs but not many of the versus!!
As we set off our porters, we had a team of 15 looking after the three of us, would pass us with all of our stuff and the porters for the other walkers would pass too so we constantly were shouting "incoming" or one that became a favourite "coming up the rear"!!
We had been encouraged to drink water constantly which with the diamox meant we were all peeing like racehorses, we established a 'poo bag' which was a plastic wallet that we all deposited our used toilet paper which was then emptied into the rubbish bag at the end of every day - Ashley did the amazing job of looking after the poo bag for us, well done Smashers. It was amazing how much toilet paper was discarded all the way up the side of the mountain, climbers should have more respect.
But in return for emptying the poo bag I have to remove an eight legged friend from the outside of Ash and Lindsays tent at the first camp - fairish swap I would say.
We arrived at our first camp after a two and a half hour easy walk and settled in to our tents.
Coleman our chef had made us popcorn which was fab but it was very quickly being eyed by a local monkey who sat on the tree next to our dining tent just waiting for us to not be paying attention. He looked well fed so I am sure he was getting plenty of popcorn elsewhere so we didn't feel bad as we stuffed our faces with the whole tray of it.
Popcorn and a Monkey!
Coleman then made us a fab dinner of cucumber soup then we had boiled potatoes with veg sauce and avocado salad which was delish and it was served to us by the amazing Jonny our waiter.
Our tents next to our dining tent.
It was pretty cold already cold already and we were only at 2400m. I put my thermals on to sleep in, so began to worry that I had dumped my third set of thermals as if night one was this cold what was it going to be like on summit night?!
We have a 5 hour trek to Shira camp the next day so after dinner we head off for some rest but the camp is like a mountain Piccadilly circus with loads of chatter and people moving around so none of us really slept - this pretty much continued through the trek, the best sleeps were the hour you got in the afternoon after walking when the camp was relatively quiet and warmish.
According to my iPhone app we walked 13km, 351 floors 19032 steps but that will have been recording all the running around I did in the morning getting my bag weighed and then unpacked then repacked and weighed 20 times!!
suzxxx
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