Hitting the peak of Kilimanjaro is a shock, a relief and an ecstatic rush all rolled into one. The orange horizon burned my eyes after hiking for 6 hours in the dark, my fingers were frozen, lips ripped apart from the wind and sand. My boots weighed ten times what they did when we set off 5 days before, my head was throbbing from the thin air up here. But still it was amazing. Having trekked through monkey-filled mountain rainforests, from soaking cloud layers to parched, dry deserts and up the steep volcanic ash fields to the frozen glacier walls, i was now looking down on Kilimanjaro, the saddle between us and the sister peak, Mawenze, and over the clouds and Tanzania's early morning steppes. I was looking back on the past days, plodding along at
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