Day 4 04/09/2012

Day 4

I woke up to find my headache still hadn't disappeared but after taking some good ol' Ibuprofen within half and hour it had gone. On this day we had to climb a wall called Barranco wall. This was almost proper rock climbing without the ropes. We had to use our hands and feet and pull ourselves up this wall. I found it to be so much fun even though there were some scary bits at times. But our amazing guides wouldn't let us get hurt.

 And as we reached the top of Barranco wall... This is what we saw. It was an incredible sight. We stayed here for about half hour to take photos and marvel in its glory. The summit seemed so close now!

 Here is a picture of me and my American friends I made on the climb. We crossed paths everyday and always had a little chat, mainly about the differences between the English language in England and in America. They were a lovely bunch! They were cheaters because they were on Diamox - medication to prevent altitude sickness - yet some of them were still badly affected!

The morning was great, and I thought the rest of the day would follow suit. But you know how they say "when things seem too good to be true, they probably are" ? Well that saying wasn't made up for no reason. The rest of the day was difficult and not really enjoyable in the slightest. After we left the place where you could see the summit we started to descend downhill, and as you can see in this picture, it was very steep. Not only was it steep, it was wet and slippery. At one point I fell over and somehow fell on my pole and bent it. Brilliant. Going downhill is really hard, I prefer going uphill by far!

And as soon as we finished going downhill, we had to go uphill, which was as steep as it was going down. At lunch they gave us chicken, chips and colesaw. We were all very excited by this, it was the best meal we had and I think this is because they knew that it was a pretty hard day. After lunch we started our walk to base camp. The walk was long and steep, and nobody was talking. Every one was pretty tired, and the majority of us put our headphones in. My brother made me a playlist full of motivational songs which helped. I was planning to listen to my iPod for day 5, the final walk to the summit (for motivation) so I didn't really want to use my iPod that much beforehand. But in the end it turned out that I didn't use it at all on the final day...

After about another 4 hours of walking we were near base camp. We had to walk up this very steep part to get there and my legs started to really ache... I hoped they'd feel fine for when we started our final ascent. Sadly this was not the case...

Barafu camp.

Height: 4550A.M.S.L