MOUTAIN KILIMANJARO! l

Right, i believe I have been very neglecting of the blog of recent but that is with two vbery good reasons. Number one, i was up a big fuck off (large) mountain no where near any civilisation and number two when i got off that mountain i went strait to (via a very long uncomfy journey) a very nice but expensive beach., where the internet was extausionate and slow. (mind you, its slow everywhere...grrr.....).

so, lets start with kili. yes i climbed it, it was fucking (very) hard, by far and away the hardest thing i have ever done in my life ever, arnt i great. lalala.

We took the 7 day machame route, one of the longest so we could acclimatise properly therefore have the greatest success of summiting. I believe the celebrities took the mwangu route (otherwise known as the coca cola route) over 9 days (extende4d due to Fern's alititude sickness)
SO, DAY ONE, MACHAME GATE TO MACHAME HUT.
After poaying the park fees ($700 worth, eeek!) and genrally faffing with the organisation of porters we started off up the big hill-not very pole pole. Here i interject to say that pole pole is swahili for slow, and its the token saying of any porter, guide or climber attempting the mountain. All in great spirits, the terrain was rainforest and quite humid. Nice man made path an very easy walking, all up hill, but we got used to it after 2 days! Nice scenery but unchanging, a little annoying as you never knew where you were as you couldnt see anything except for trees. Drizzle started at about 12, continued of and offish into rain untill about 6ish. Discoverd thast my waterproof didnt work at about 23.30 ish. good times. A quick hint for anyone going to climb or walk anyhwere like this, never hire rainjackets. big error. HUGE.
stopped at a damp place for lunch, at what point im feeling distinctly queesy and discover i cannot eat anything really. lunch was a packed sort of hamburger thingie, which was unappetising anyway. After lunch i seriously lagged behind due to feeling absolutely horrible. All i could here was Phil Gibson's prep talk for switzerland going round my heafd about how many calories you needed to take in when doing something like this, all the time that i had hardly half of that amount in me. Really hard afternoon as then, due to miserableness, wetness and genrally being miles from anywhere started feeling horrendouly homesick. especially for my aga.
After what seemed an age we got into camp where we had cups of chai (tanzanian tea) and popcorn. Though i was barely halfway though when i had to run to the long drop and CHUNDERD EVERYWHERE! (this saying derives from a youtube video called gap yah, the amzingly middle class gap yah tradition that only two of the group had seen, but applied so well it soon became a fixation with kili. TAKE THAT NATURE!)

DAY TWO MACHAME HUT 3000 ASL
SHIRA HUT 3800 ASL
woke up nice and early, a good rest and felt better. Everyo9ne is very impressed by the quality ofg the food. our chef was called issac (though for the first 4 days i thought his name was George). For breakfast was an intresting porridge, which is good with loads of sugar, bread and powderd eggs _ weiners. Had some porridge then trumped off. Today we got above the rainforest, the trees reduced in number and sizeand steadily growing a ridiculous amounts of lichen. They looked like wisend old orks (urm, maybe not orks but the trek was very heavily lord of the rings oreintates thanks to Dans new found geeky side.)
Lunch today consited of many differnt stops, of which we all looked at each other hopefully and pout down our bags to get out our lunch before being told that we had to keep walking. In the end we lunched at camp (short day walking, 3-4 hours). Campt was b\muvh better than machame hut with the most stunning veiws, which got better and better as we got to the higher camps. In the afternoon we had an alimatisation walk, when the rain stopped, that was really more of a stroll over to shira platue that looked almost exactly like dartmoor. fantastic! Clammy and me found it hilarious that we'd got halfway up a mountain to go letterboxing. No one else found it funny, as they dont know what letterboxing was. silly northen fools!
Nice sit down hole toilet that was vaugly new, though var nippy noodles at night!

DAY THREE SHIRA HUT 3900 ASL
BARACO 3900 ASL via LAVA TOWER 4600 ASL

Day three experienced good and bad times. Willien (pronounced Villem, tis Dutch) made the mistake of walking backwards, tripped and almost fell off the mountain. not cool. This was the closetst we actually got to really playing the invented game of 'lkets throw Kim off the mountain'. the terrain was dartmoor esq fadinbg into boulder-y martian. Thisd day it rained. and rained and rained (probably no more than it did on other days but today it got to us more). We had lunch on lava tower (var high, var exposed) which was miserable. Dan at this point had given up with his hired waterproof and was just wearing a red t shirt. I felt awful for him, in the end our guide lent him one of his coats! i kept at mine, didnt work bu it was an extra layer. Lots of mice at lava tower, visibility rubbish as we were in the clouds. the real low was when we his in the long drop to escape the wind, Me, Kim and Alice all huddled in this ammonia infused hell hut, whilst both me and kim put on an extra thermal. urgh. on the way down we passed through anamazing valley which inspired Dan and Marxy to re inacct lord of the rings, becasue apparently it looked just like it. Also at this point we had all settled into seperate walking groups according to our speeds, therefore lord of the rings names where given thus;
The Long Legged Crew (stupidly fast people)
Williem - Aragorn
Marxy - Legolas
Dan - Gandalf (you can tell who chose the names here cant you)
Anna Mcsweens - Treebeard

The Country Ramblers
Clammy - Gimili
Victoria - Samwise
Rach - Arwen
Alice - Aeowen

The Pole Pole crew
Kim - Frodo
Celia - Pippin
Jess - Merry (/ork/balrog)
and me? yes well... i got prehaps the best choice, espcially compared weith my partner Rach, I got Gollum.

Fantastic, thanks guys.

Apparentlky when i climb down rocks i look like him, that compared with the colour of my hired coat. Bastards.

HOWEVER for now that is where i leave it as i have gone over time and have no wish to spend more money on the internet than i have to. Im in Dar es Salam at the moment, on the way back from Zanzibar, everything is very expensive compared to Moshi so im affraid youll have to wait until next weekend to hear the next installment!

love you all!
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