Prancing around during the day in shorts and t-shirts (albeit t-shirts made from revolutionary fabrics available only from LIDL!) can lead you to a false sense of security about exactly what is going to happen the temperature once the sun buggers off. At this point being all mysterious about what does happen would be, I feel, counter productive, so here it is... It gets friggin cold. Very cold in fact, a cold I would have to say I was not prepared for, a cold I don't think Conor had expected either, a cold Ash missed out on because he was nicely tucked up in his Military issue tent he called a sleeping bag. Which brings me on nicely to my next and quite unexpected rant... SLEEPING BAGS!!! Do not hire the bloody things. Go out and spend the ridiculous amount of money they charge for one that'll do you at -20deg. Then go everywhere with it (in it preferably, but this depends on occupation. Civil servants are laughing!!) for at least a week before you leave, so as to learn its wicked ways and secret draughts. This is the only way you can guarantee getting a decent nights kip and not waking at various times to the sound of your body screaming "I'm colder now than I was an hour ago when I woke you to complain about the cold!!!" The alternative is to just hire one, quit moaning, just spill some water on it and borrow the guides spare one. Which of course is just bloody well toasty. This exercise in whinging is to avoid having to mention how cold I was at night, every night. Conor suffered too, but only until someone spilt water on his bag on day 5. The lucky bastard...
Anyway back to day 4. We were up at 5.45 to leave at 6.30. We left at 7.00!! We were woken by our food guy Donut, who brought us a cup of tea. We then dressed and washed (the order you do things changes in the wild!!) before sitting down to porridge followed by eggs and sausages. I think it was the food that delayed us every morning, and I can only hope that the guides weren't waiting on what we didn't finish. Cos it would have been a long wait for nothing. After a small time for packing and digestion we were up and ready to go at 7.00am. At which time the sun came up and we were now to warm. Typical. But did we complain?? Well we didn't, but I sure as hell did.
We walked for 3.5hrs slowly, which it turned out we were naturals at, taking small breaks every hour. We stopped for lunch at a place called 2nd cave, located surprisingly between 1st cave and 3rd cave. We had soup, followed by fried chicken and chips, followed by fruit. It was at this early point that we discovered that there was very little chance we were going to lose weight. We headed off after a quick refill of water (including chlorine tabs, and berrocca to kill taste of chlorine. A bit like the lady who swallowed the fly..) for another 3hr trek to our next camp. Along the way Joseph tried to teach us some Swahili, which was going well until we tried to teach him some Irish and Ash joined in the education session with some French and Maori. Needless to say we all finished the session with a poorer linguistic ability than when we started. We were greeted at camp with our popcorn and tea before we went on an acclimatisation walk for an hour. Which involved us climbing about an extra 100m higher, hanging around up there for a bit and walking back down for dinner... Ah dinner. Beef stir fry tonight, followed by cake!!. Its like a bleedin hotel!!
We skimped on the amount of cups of tea tonight, so we could fill our water containers with boiling water to act as hot water bottles. I might have mentioned it got cold at night..
Bed by 7.30pm. Wrecked.
Day 2. Simba Camp (2626m) to Kikelewa Camp (3679) 11.8km 6.5 hrs!
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