A.M.
After waking at 6.45 a.m. and getting organised we are about to start our second day of walking today which we believe is the longest but not the most strenuous day of trekking. We are told we have about 7 or 8 hours of trekking probably on similar terrain to yesterday, which will be, needless to say, uphill all the way. The good thing is we stop at a place called Second Cave for lunch which, as we have all the cooks and porters with us, they race ahead and we will have a hot cooked lunch.
P.M.
Day 2 was, in the end, about an 8.5 hour walk and as I said we were expecting this to be one of the hardest days given that we didn’t sleep so well last night However, I think we are all in very good spirits laughing and joking along the way.
It was another gloriously hot day and we were all concentrating on drinking lots and lots. We knew the first part was going to be steep because we walked it the night before as part of our climatisation routine (up to 3800m). The only thing was it seemed to get steeper and harder as the day went on.
The vegetation gradually thinned out and by the end of the day was more like a scrubland with about 5 foot high clumps of gorse but with some very pretty meadow flowers and alpine plants along the way. We were walking along deep dry river beds that will flood in the rainy season and these were strewn with boulders of all shapes and sizes.
Throughout the whole day we had to choose where we stepped and it was really very demanding indeed. We stopped for breaks every few hours and some of the breaks were in some famous caves which were about 10 metres deep and 30 metres wide where climbers used to camp before it was less organised than now.
That seems all the blog there is for today -tune in tomorrow for the next instalment of…….’The Crisis Guys in Kilimanjaro!