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Kilimanjaro diary - day four
Day one Day two Day three Day four Day five Day Six Day seven
Today we were to climb the
Barranco Wall - the nearest thing to rock climbing the
ascent offers. It certainly
looked scary; we could see the path opposite our campsite zigzagging up what
looked like a near-vertical cliff.
In the end it wasn't nearly
as bad as it looked. This picture was taken at the steepest bit, as the path
wound round a huge rock buttress, with vertigo-inducing views back into
the Barranco. The porters (left) needed considerable skill and some help to scramble
up the rocks with the packs on their heads. There's Isaac our guide at the
bottom, with his usual taking-care-of-business expression.
Up at the top we were back
into moonscape desert, with cold mist swirling round. It was amazing how as
soon as the sun went in and stopped warming you, the effects of altitude
would suddenly get worse. We plodded our way up over boulder-strewn slopes
and then down again into tiny secret valleys full of tinkling streams and
small patches of hardy plants, finally hauling
ourselves up an exhausting climb onto a windswept plateau.
This, Karanga plateau, was
to be our fourth night camp. We had paid more to take an extra day and it
was still only lunchtime. Otherwise we'd have had to slog all the way to the
summit base camp, Barafu Hut, snatch an evening's sleep and start climbing
to the summit at midnight.
I took myself on a long, slow, shuffling walk to acclimatise, up the barren hill up to where the mist started, feeling very intrepid. It felt really high and I was panting from the altitude.
The guides kept saying "pole, pole" - "slowly, slowly" - whenever we started to hurry but in reality you can't do anything other than an old-granny shuffle at this altitude. Any other exertion leaves you panting like a dog and running is out of the question. Yes as soon as you walk downhill you feel light as a feather. It's like being on Jupiter: is accentuates the brute force of gravity. Will I feel like this when I'm 80?
At the top the clouds cleared and Kibo did its nightly unveiling for us - still looking impossibly far away and steep. We settled down for a long, cold night. We'd need all the sleep we could get over the next two days.