I was never going to climb Kili myself – by that I mean noone other than porters & guide.  After quitting Dragoman & my last tour, from Cape Town to Nairobi, I recooperated at Indaba campsite on the SW outskirts of the city, the closest thing I have to home & where our trucks get rested & fixed between trips.  There I hoped to meet someone with enough free time & cash & a desire to climb the highest peak in Africa, the ‘worlds highest freestanding mountain in the world’.  And there I met Wilco, an Afrikaans overland tour leader who’d just finished his last trip fro Drifters.  With time & tips he agreed to come along.  A week earlier while checking pax into the Marangu hotel, near Moshi in the Kili foothills, I met a guide & agreed on prices 500USD less than if I was to book through a hotel/agency.  800USD it cost us to climb:  5 days park entry at 50/day, 5 nights accommodation at 50/night, 20/day for two guides & 10/day for three porters.  It sounds like an unnecesaarily large support group but five days of food (for overland guides) + equipment (inc. china teacups) reassured us hat these local porters were required.  The Chaga tribe populate the base of Kili, and known for their coffee, telerance of altitude & later I found out shrewd business brains, being likened by some folk I’ve met to the Kikuyu, the ruling tribe of Kenya.  Just like the Maasai & few other tribes, even a mzungu can distinguish their features – a prominently wide & straight top lip & squarish lower head & jaw.

So at 0730 we set off down the road toward the Bomas junction on the Langata Road near Karen, Nairobi, & it took no more than five minutes of thumb erection for a local lady with a thick Carolina accent to pick us up & take us thrgouh suburban town Rongai & drop us off.  Not another five minutes inc. a roadside baanana purchase we got on the back of an old 18 tonne banger with a few locales also catching a liftee buree (trans. free lift).  I’m glad I rode like this just once before leaving Africa.  An hour later & with burning forearms from holding on tight over some aweful roads, we were dropped off again.  There roads from Nairobi to Namanga border town were familiar, though I’ve rarely stopped along them.  More bananas ten a ride with some well dressed men in an old Mercedes working for the Tear Fund charity.  We arrived in Namanga where we entered Tanzania, hamna noma (trans. without worry), & passed the half way point in my 10 month old passport.  Onto a 3000TZS (2USD) shuttle to Arusha, then another to Moshi, where we met out guides, brothers Lionel & Goodluck, & our porters John, Joseph & our cook Edgar.  We were then taken to a 10000TZS/night guesthouse in Marangu, bid ‘kesho’ (trans. tomorrow)bto ther guys & headed for nyama choma (trans. meat grilled) & beers, & momphur (South African lychee-based spirit), & konyagi (cheap local gin), & ended up rather merrily wrecked.  From my infantry March & Shoot experience in the Falklands – 20 miles hike & range shooting after two hours sleep & huge pissup with Michael Fish in the Sergents’ Mess – I wasn’t worried about our fitness the next day, still drunk doing our shopping & last minute kit hiring the next morning.  All was grand & sunny as we headed to the gate, at 2000m ASL (Altitude above Sea Level).  Sign-in, Mars bars purchase, & a dress-up session at the kit-hire place – a godsend, as the gloves, woolley trousers & balaclava I’d have been very uncomfortable without.  About 1400 we began our climb, through the rainforest featuring two blue monkeys & a decent downpour.  Good paths & a ‘happy hangover’ helped make the three hour hike a pleasure, & we were surprised at the first hut site – 10 or so prism-shaped 4-man chalet huts, & two with long benches for dining.  That night we had zuchini soup then ugali & stew, with tea, coffee & biscuits.  A few tots from the litre of Johnnie Walker – keep on walking - & bed, tonight sharing with a lone Korean traveller.  0700 brekky for 0730 leave.  Porridge, toast, sausage, tomato & cucumber, & we ade peanut butter & jam sarnies for the road – but after a good hike we arrived 5 ½ hours later at Horombo huts, at 3800m.  Dat 2 was slightly tougher due to thinner air, but the rainforest opened out into Moorland, heather, tussock, flowers, & brillian views of Kili’s two ice caps – Mawenza peak & the highest, Kibo (or Uhuru, trans. freedom) peak.  This part took us both back home, as Wilco compared the protea & moorland to South Africa’s Karoo & Cape Point, & with the low cloud sweeping over, I could have been in many places in th UK.  Great banter along the way with Canadians & others – perfect clear skies, no rain.  That night we shared with a lone German female – wherever I go, there’s a lone German female travellers, always sound.  Those like Julia on the six-day climb stay two nights at hut 2 for acclimatisation, so we’re not sure how some of our fellow climbers faired toward the summit.  More Johnnie Walker & some Malawi cob after another superb dinner of cucumber soup, then rice & stew.  2030 to bed & 0800 departure to 4800, Kibo hut the folowing day.  Another beauty as morrland turned to alpine desert – open rolling views with the ever approaching snowy peaks.  Climbing became tough this dayas Lionel enforced ‘pole pole’ (trans. slowly) as we plodded a gain of another 1km vertically.  Morale still very high.  Day 3 featured the saddle between Mawanze ridge & Kibo peak, a stunning landscape I will never forget.  Walking on level ground was fine, but the steps & inclines which weren’t serious, for the heart racing, & the mind focused on breathing.  The body felt great bu that evening I did ponder the possibilities of altitude sickness, heart attacks, & those stories of fit young things keeling over & dying randomly.  Thoughts like these get me thinking of Mum & brother Mike.  With the climb behind me now as I sit & write in Snake Park camp, Meserani, near Arusha, Dad just emailed about his accountant’s heart stopping & restarting on his summit attempt.  You never know, but boundaries are there to be explored & occasionally broken.  It’s quite common knowledge how one’s brain’s reaction to altitude is far more important than general fitness when climbing Klimanjaro.  The love birds, the sounds of the workshop, the warm breeze, the skink finishing off my breakfast, is all a long way from the excitement of summitting & simply being at 4720m.  We hit Kibo hut in the early afternoon – climbers & porters milling about the camp, a hunger-making meaty smell in the otherwise fresh air, light scree & gravel underfoot, light whispy clouds overhead.  We had a huge lunch & hit the cold sack from 1600 til 2300 – we were to start our summit attempt by midnight, with the aim of peaking by sunrise.

Come quarter to eleven we, & two young antipodean couples, a single young English lad, & a team of 20 Russian colleagues who’d won the trip in a competition, had ‘breakfast’ – oats, fruit & tea.

Bag packed:  extra t-shirt, 2.5ltrs water, Mars bar, biccies, lollies, iPod for hard times.

Dressed:  2 pairs socks, boots (found on Drago truck), woolley trousers, Cat’s waterproof trousers, vest, t-shits, hemp top & cotton jumper (found on Drago truck), raincoat (found in Victoria park), woolley hat hopefully to be swapped with woolley balaclava, gloves, undies, done.

And after Wilco’s ‘nervous crap’ & ciggy (he is to give up smoking at peak), we set off at 2345, the first group out.  The first thing to strike us were the stars on the clear, still night.  The weather we had couldn’t have been better which is just as well in retrospect – winds that Kibo can experience wouldn’t made the challenge a lot worse.  The course we followed from Kibo hut to Gillman’s Point (5750m) was due West, & as we zigzagged up we faced the Plough & the Southern Cross alteranively, leaving Scorpio, Wilco’s constellation, behind.  The path ahead was pitch black & as the terrain went from decent rocky path to very rocky uneven path, the headtorch had to go on.  We both thought Lionel was joking when he pointed out the route the previous day – a near-verticle scree slope for 2/3km ASL.  After what seemed like a good while of plodding we hit William’s Point – slightly disheartening as this is only 280m ASL gain from the hut.  Possible photo moment but that was far from number one priority – ‘we’ll get it on the way back down’ – just to reach the end of this incline, which 5 hours after setting off turned out to be Gillman’s Point, a place I heard among many curses prior to our trip.  Hiking five hours is no big deal from my experience, but this does not include such altitudes.  The heart was pounding with every [slow] ‘flurry’ of steps, & every breath an effort, but with fine weather & being my first time in such surroundings, my morale was very high still.  Wilco wasn’t having such a grand time a few steps ahead of me.  After every few penguin steps his free leg would waver, nearly followed by the  toppling slightly delirious Afrikaaner, but he’d save himself before he went arse-over-tit sideways down the scree.  I’m sure he knew his limits but it looked a bit dodgy from behind.  I thought it important to keep your two feet on ground, keeping the body low & only lifting when stepping, but this muscle use does not help the movement of lungs & heart.  With the news that ‘you don’t have to be fit, you just need a suitable brain’, the odd cigarette was smoked up until the peak, which can’t help, but when you fancy something at certain times, looking after your mind can be more important than looking after your body.  Towards the beginning of the kibo hut-to-Gillman’s point stretch Blink 182 & other rock was helping out, but that turned to the slower tunes of Pink Floyd & possibly ironically it gave out at Bill Withers’s Lean On Me.  One important thing to remember is that batteries lose life with temperature, so my camera being inside my jumper & rain-jacket next my heart was fine, but the iPod in my pocket lost it.  Another thing that helped me up that climb was the view I try to get others to adopt – keep going & you’ll get there, job done; then you’ll get back home safe & sound, warm, dry & comfortable, & everything will be as it was, only you’ve just completed the challenge you set out to do, for whatever reasons.  ‘Ask a mountain climber why he climbs a mountain, & he’ll say, ‘because it’s there’’ (Jasper Carrot).  My reasons were many & few, but none more distinguishable than ‘why not ey?! It’s the highest peak in Africa, & I bet there’s a good view from the top’, though actually I wasn’t expecting nearly such a pleasant 5 days, being low (ie rainy) season & having me people who mostly did not enjoy their experience.  Ours became a whole lot more pleasant once we reached Gillman’s Point, a couple of hundred metres ASL from the peak, though this was the other side of Kili’s volcano crater.  To us at this time this was a huge bowl of black & white splodges which turned into snow & rock with the brghtening sky.  We could see again our destination, knew we were due there at this rate at around 0630, sunrise – this meant more hard slog over & between rocks, but far more horizontal a walk, giving our hearts a rest.  I think by this time I’d had 500mg paracetamol.  We regained our voices (or the botheration to use them) as we bumped into climbers from another route, but they were a lot less coherent than we were.  I’ve heard that many people don’t really know what’s going on when theyre around the peak – photos taken they don’t remember & swear ‘that doesn’t eve look like me’, as if they weren’t there at all!  A shame.  They passed us twice as they peaked & retreated in 5 or so minutes.  I don’t see the point if you’re not going to hang out & enjoy, especially with the changing skies as the sun rose above the Indian Ocean’s blanket of cloud.  North of the emerging sun was a massive, evolving cumulo-nimbus giving us the occaionsal lightening show, over a glacial escarpment, next to Mount Meru & our very own shadow, then ice caps & plains, the volcanic crater from above, & the stunning Mawenzi peak just by the sun.  The sun’s warm & welcome yellow disk breached the horizon as we breached Kili’s Kibo peak, at approximately 0630.  Being so close to the admospheres edge, the cold kept us in check, but our souls warmed, we hugged, thanked & congratulated each other, & very importantly made sure that we spent some alone time with our own thoughts & views.  I killed my camera with video & photo knowing that Wilco’s was in reserve, & that I wouldn’t see a sight like this again for a long long time if ever.  We spent roughly 20 minutes up at the 5895 metre mark, but Lionel was keen to get us down out of the danger zone, which I always thought to be around 4000m, less than where we were to lunch & knap late that morn.  In terms of hard climbing, having reached the top did not excite me as I knew we had it all to do in reverse, with more chance for the knees to go.  It was easier on the way down but it was still a long way & the air was still very thin.  To be continued one day I'm sure - meanwhile, there are a great many more mountains to climb...