Day Four - Moir Camp to Barranco Camp

Day Four 

Last night after all the singing I was playing Robbies 'I Love My Life and then did it again this morning when delivering hot chocolate and tea to Lindsay and Ashers tent, which was so popular both Lindsay and Ashley begged me to wake them up with that song every day...... NOT!!  Anyway the Porters loved it and would sing I LOVE MY LIFE back to me while Lindsay and Ashley would roll their eyes, very funny!

I think our guides Gaston and Peter like us because we are always singing even if we don't know all the words to the songs and usually only know the chorus!!! and we are always laughing or taking the piss out of each other.

We had our oxygen levels taken this morning before we set off and at 4200m mine was 97% which is normal!  Thank you olive leaf extract, turmeric, beetroot, ginger shots and garlic tablets!!! and of course all my hard work in the gym paid off too - thank you Vince, my amazing Personal Trainer!

I was quite excited by my oxygen level as you can tell from the video!  The girls were 85% and 86% and Gaston, our guide, was 93%.  Hope my wee healthy body stays like this!  

At Lava Tower 4600m

We made it up to 4600m and had a hot lunch at Lava tower and then walked on for another 2 hours mostly down hill to Barranco camp which is 3800 I think.

Lindsay's solar charger isn't working so she can't listen to music so she is getting bored on the walks so we sang 10 green bottles, although with the altitude you end up quite out of breath whilst walking so we only made it to 7 green bottles!  To keep her brain going I had asked her to name the 7 dwarfs which took us a wee while to get all of them, why is it there is always one you can't remember!!! We then played Where Is my Button to much hilarity.

Some of the pretty plants we saw on the route

It was a really interesting landscape, and the clouds would just travel through

Don't jump Ash! 

We reached camp and got to lie down for an hour before dinner then we went to find phone signal and did some stretches.  I showed Lindsay how to do her hip stretches using a rock, and also showed her how to massage your glutes using a rock - where I learnt these things I have no idea but Lindsay took both tips on board and used them for the rest of the trek!

Steps 18327

Floors 108

11km

suzxxx

Day Three - Shira Camp to Moir Camp

Day Three

We left at 8am and headed off into the Shira Plateau.

The view from my tent at Shira Camp, that is the Worlds Tallest Freestanding Mountain 

in the background!!!

Day 3!

Hilariously Ash taught Gaston and Peter the lovely Scottish word 'minging'!

We were supposed to stop for a hot lunch on the way but our pace was good apparently so we went straight to Moir Camp and had lunch there.  It's great that we have a good pace on the flat!!

We did quite a bit of singing as we went along today and we did the Hokey Cokey!!  Day Three was definitely packed with funny moments!

We arrived at Moir Camp which is 4200m and had lunch and a wee rest and then headed off for our altitude acclimatisation or as it turned out took our guides to where there was phone signal!  We went up 200m to the phone signal spot so we were at 4400m.

Three Happy Adventurers at Moir Camp

Lunch was our favourite of cucumber soup and dinner was tomato soup and spaghetti with veggie sauce.  Its amazing how Coleman can produce such fab food on a mountain side.

When we came back from our acclimatisation walk the guides gave us a wee treat by singing to us and then when we arrived back at the camp all the porters sang to us and one of them got Lindsay up dancing, it was brilliant fun.  Moir Camp has been my favourite camp so far - it is so much quieter than the others as most people go to Shira II Camp.

The lovely and quiet Moir Camp the Barranco Wall in the distance.

Today didn't feel hard at all, I really enjoyed it and no sign of altitude bothering me except the lactic acid burn lasts a bit longer and I could not hold my video arm up for very long.

Lindsay and Ash had mild headaches at at one point but we all seemed happy and healthy when we headed off to bed.

It's a full moon tonight and the stars are amazing.

We climb the Barranco Wall tomorrow and head up to Lava Tower which is 4600m.

We did 16.4km and the equivalent of 42 flights of stairs today.

suzxxx

Mount Kilimanjaro Day One - Arusha to Londorossi Gate to Mkubwa

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

Day Two - Mti Mkubwa to Shira Camp

Day Two

I didn't really sleep last night as it was so noisy with chatter and the guides tent was right next to my tent and one of them was snoring like a big snoring thing all night and then from 5am it was noisier than Piccadilly Circus at lunchtime as all the porters start packing up and preparing breakfast.

We set off just after 815am and took us about 5 hours to get to Shira Camp.  We arrived and had lunch and then got a wee kip before we had to do our afternoon acclimatisation walk, I am sleeping better in the afternoon than at night. On our way to Shira Camp we got to see the mountain clearly for the first time - its HUGE!

Here is a video of us just after we set off on Day 2.  You will need to cut and paste the link below into your browser - too big for blogger.com to upload apparently! 

https://vimeo.com/202444425?utm_source=email&utm_medium=vimeo-cliptranscode-201504&utm_campaign=28749

And its a long way to Tipperary!!

This pic was taken on our acclimatisation walk.

The World Tallest Freestanding Mountain!

Back from our acclimatisation walk for dinner and bed, head is exhausted but body feels ok even though I had an almighty trip where my foot got stuck in a rock so I fell forward but managed to get my hands out in front and the other leg so I sort of fell in crouch position and then was able to remove my foot from the rock!  Lindsay came running over and asked if I was ok and righted my hat in a motherly type of way and then sent me on my way. Was very funny and I needed a pee so couldn't laugh too much!

The moon is amazing tonight and the sky is clear but it will probably be really cold and didn't sleep last night because I was cold so I am now in my thermals with my jacket on and my hat on and we all filled our water bottles with hot water so we have a wee bit of heat for now.

Day two was amazing and at times hard and as we reached over 3000m I could feel the altitude pushing on my head and the lactic acid burn in my legs took longer to go away.  Tomorrow we walk the plateau so we can see our end point but it's at 4200m so we have to take our time and walk pole pole.

Today was 23500 steps, 15.6km and the equivalent of 74 flights of stairs which seems so much less than yesterday but we seemed to go much higher up today! Not sure how the app calculates the floors.

suzxxx

Diamox Dilemma

I travelled from Makoa Farm with my friends George and Lindsay – George unfortunately wasn’t given the ok for his doctor to climb because of a recent operation, so he was going to spend his time at the farm enjoying the company of all the animals while we climbed The Worlds Tallest Freestanding Mountain.

We arrived but Ash hadn’t arrived yet but she was on her way.

Our Guide Gaston started to brief us on the next day and weighing our bags etc but Lindsay and I were more interested in what we were going to be fed up the mountain, Lindsay is Vegan and I am nearly as I am dairy free vegetarian but didn’t want to eat eggs having discovered that Germany (who are now cage free) have now sold all their cages to Africa and Africa is going to be the new super power in battery eggs (apparently).

I think Gaston felt slightly under attack when he kept talking about me getting sausage for breakfast and both me and Lindsay were trying to get him to understand there would be no sausage and there would be no porridge either, hate the stuff! But fortunately he started talking about fresh fruit and toast and jam so now we were talking.  In the end Coleman our chef did an incredible job of feeding a Vegan, a difficult vegetarian and a meat eater who doesn’t like vegetables!

Anyway pushing on with the Diamox story – once Ash arrived Gaston asked the three of us if we were taking Diamox, Lindsay and Ash said yes and I said no, explaining instead that I plan to keep my body going with Beetroot, Turmeric and Ginger shots and garlic tablets and of course my trusty Olive Leaf Extract.  At that point I was very happy with my decision – I had afterall climbed a mountain to 5700 metres before and not needed it although I did have 3 weeks of acclimatization. 

All briefed and with the task of making our duffle bags weight 15kg and our rucksacks weight no more than 7kg by the morning our guide headed off – I will always wonder what was going through Gaston’s head that afternoon – had he picked the most difficult group of women ever or was he going to have the time of his life?! 

While we were in reception there was an American woman and her son – they had just got back after climbing Kili together.  She told us she didn’t make it – she was only 500m from the summit when she had severe Altitude Sickness symptoms.  She wanted to push on but her guide was telling her she was sick and she needed to go back – it took her son in the end to tell her she was going to die unless she turned and went back and she said at that point she turned and went back down.  The rest of her famility summited.  The reason for telling this story is that I had never even considered that I wouldn’t make it to the summit, is that arrogance/ego/stupidity?  I don’t know but I really hadn’t let that throught process in.  The woman had started taking Diamox but at the onset of the altitude sickness symptoms when it is generally too late.

What would I do if I was told I had to turn around 500m from the summit having come that far – although now having done it 500m is still so far from the summit as its nearly vertical!  I was worried that I would over rule my guide as I can be so pigheaded in wanting my own way and would I actually kill myself on the side of the mountain?  And what about Lindsay and Ashley?  How would they feel if I was told to turn around and I refused to do it – the worry for them would have been horrible – just as it would be for me if it was the other way around.

Why didn’t I want to take Diamox?  Well I don’t ever take drugs into my body unless I really have to – I am asthmatic so I have inhalers that I have to take but other than that I am drug free.  I never take paracetamol or neurofen unless its an emergency, I never have injections, I wasn’t taking malaria tablets or any other of the chemicals they try to pour into you so you can go to a different country.  Instead I keep my immune system healthy with vitimans, minerals and Olive Leaf Extract. 

What does Diamox do?  Acetazolamide is its proper name and according to Wikipedia, it decreases the amount of hydrogen ions in the body  It forces the kidneys to excrete bicarbonate which makes the blood more acidic and apparently the body equates acidity of the bood it is co2 concentration, so artificuslly acidifying the blood fools the body into thinking it has an excess of co2 by causing you to breath faster which in turn brings more oxygen into the blood, clever or what?!  It is a diuretic too but I didn’t notice I pee’d more than usual and other side effects and numbness, ringing in the ears, loss of appetite, vomiting and sleepiness.  I didn’t get any of those side effects just the tingling in the fingers and toes.  I would have taken the sleepiness as you don’t sleep a bit on the side of the mountain!  It isn’t a cure for acute mountain sickness but helps to speed up the acclimatization process which relieves the symptoms.

But this seemed a much bigger decision than just what I wanted.  When I shared my worries with the girls, Ash had offered some of her spare Diamox and the American lady had also offered spare Diamox if anyone needed it.  I soul searched and ran everything through and it seemed that the decision wasn’t all about me and my wish as always to be drug free this was about the 3 of us making it to the top together and without regret or worry.  If I didn’t make it and didn’t take Diamox I would always regret that whereas if I didn’t make it and was taking Diamox then I had done everything I could to make it.  The girls wouldn’t have to worry about me every step of the way, if I got a headache or was a bit further behind them or any of the other things that could happen whilst on Diamox or not.

So I decided to take up Ash’s amazing offer of her spare drugs – I did ask the side effects first though and thought I could cope with them – in the end it was just tingling fingers and toes.  I started to take it that night and took it until we started our descent.

Do I think I could have made it without Diamox?  Probably.  The first time we had our oxygen levels taken at Moir Camp which is just under 4000m my oxygen was 97% which is normal.  The girls were in the high 80’s somewhere I believe.  I was so happy for my sturdy little body that had worked so hard with me to get fit for this climb!  I am 47 years old and I am holding my own with the youngsters!  The next time my oxygen was taken was at base camp (I think) and at 4600m it was 92% which was still higher than Ash and Lindsay's. My pulse was also only 75bpm which is normal for me as I have lowish blood pressure so my body was coping really well with what it was being put through.  The Diamox probably helped to make it a really enjoyable experience, I had such a great time right up to Summit night.  I did love Summit night too but that was when it was really really hard.  I didn't get have any altitude sickness symptoms at all and it wasn't until we were at approx 4600m on our descent that I got a headache but that was probably dehydration and lack of sleep as I hadn't really slept properly in 26 hours!

Do I regret taking Diamox?  No.

I am really glad I did, for myself, for my friends, and  for the charities who will benefit from the amazing amount of sponsorship I have had from friends.

And because I don’t have any pictures from this first day in Arusha, here are some cute pics of me with some monkeys I fell in love with!!!

suzxxx