We woke up to morning coffee, sun, and cold. We wanted to leave by 8am as opposed to 8:30am, like we had the prior days, since our hike would be pretty considerable. Breakfast was the same, although, as we were preparing to leave by 8am, I left after porridge thinking that was it for the morning. I didn’t want to hold anyone up. I missed the eggs! Noting that I was gone, Bea made me a safety sandwich. Awesome. Bea is totally a team player.
It was warm again, so I stuck to my shorts and running shoes. I really thought that by day 4 I would be into the hiking boots and pants, but it didn’t seem necessary. Still, Godbless wanted to carry my pants and ski jacket just in case. So it goes. The challenge to Day 4 is the first part – the rock wall. It’s a scramble up terrain that requires using your hands to pull you up in some spots. It was fun, though, and we all managed the climb pretty easily.
After about an hour, we reached the top. The views were amazing. We took a few group shots and then, out of nowhere, a rainbow appeared. MK, still obsessed with her new camera, wanted to get a few shots of herself in front of the rainbow. I posed, too, for a rainbow shot. We all had some snacks (mainly chocolate), and hit the trail again.
It was a long hike to our lunch spot. We kept a good pace, but the terrain was up and down and rocky. Godbless and Peter kept telling us to sippy, sippy, so we did. At this point, we had become pretty close to the guys. We tried our best to learn some Swahili phrases – Asante (thank you), Karibu (you’re welcome). And we taught Peter ‘peanut’ in Spanish – Cacahuate. In our silliness, we would yell ‘Cacahuate!’ to be followed by ‘Paracheechee’ (avocado). It was entertaining at the time.
We finally got to our lunch spot and had our packed lunch. A few of our porters and our cook was there because they wanted to serve us soup. We had our lunch before heading to Barafu Camp. At lunch, we were told that it was the last water stop. At Barafu, the final camp before ascending Kilimanjaro, there is no water. We filled our water bottles to carry and the porters would carry as much as they could. We had become accustomed to pretty much as much water as we wanted, and were spoiled by hot water bottles at night that we used to keep us warm, the previous two nights.
The rest of the hike was exhausting. Day 4 seemed really long considering that we would be waking up at 10:30PM to start trying to summit at 11:30PM. We finally got to camp and I was exhausted.
Tea was served around 5PM, shortly after we arrived. I didn’t think we were being served dinner since we had to get up at 10:30PM and might want to sleep, but was told that dinner would be around 6PM. I was starting to feel a little nauseous and felt like sleep was more important than dinner, so I decided to pass on dinner. I went to sleep around 6PM and felt nervous about the challenge that was before us in just a few hours.
The success rate for people hiking Kilimanjaro on the 6-day route is around 60%, so, in a group of 8, it was normal to assume that 2-3 of us wouldn’t make it. It seemed like most of us were dealing with the altitude ok, but clearly I was nauseous enough to skip dinner after a day of 10 hours of activity. The other effect that I felt was that my personality seemed to be muted. I’m typically pretty excitable, hyper, energetic. I was a bit more moody, tired, and quiet. I noticed it in myself – I put my headphones on a few times during the hikes, which was rare for me.
The rest of the group had dinner, I went to bed to try to get some sleep before the big summit.
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