Kilimanjaro Expedition 2012: Day 5 It's All So Close Now

Frost, on my tent

Woke up today and found that instead of a tent flap, I had a tent door instead. Yup, it was another freezing night and my tent flap had pretty much frozen solid, and I had frost falling on me when I opened the flap. Another day below freezing temperature, and it's hardly surprising considering that we were pretty close to the summit. 

It was a short day today, where we got into high camp, Barafu Camp (4600m), which was also our final camp before the summit attempt. As we were already in the arctic desert zone, the day's trek was a walk through the barren desolate land, under the gaze of the glacier. With this being the 5th day on the trek, my legs were starting to strain under the exertion of the climb. The inside of my nose was hurting like crazy too because of the freezing dry air, and it made sleeping at night really uncomfortable. The only solution was to pull the Buff over my nose so as to have a warm protective layer which might help warm and even put some moisture back in.

So close...

Swee Chiow was really happy today because we had become so efficient with our stops, we actually made it into camp in 2hours and 45minutes, better than the expected 3 hours. In fact, we had actually got into the camp before all the porters did, so we had to wait around a little while the porters caught up with our duffle bags. As we were on the steeper part of the mountain and was strewn with large boulders, it was really cramped. Thankfully, it was only our group at the campsite.


Due to the fact that we had to leave camp for our summit attempt at midnight (a couple of the slower students would be leaving at 11pm so as to have a headstart), we had an early dinner at 5pm. I'm not sure if it was because lunch was merely a few hours ago, or it was because of the nervous anticipation of our longest day ever (an estimated 7 hours up, 7 hours down, a quick rest at high camp, then 4 hours down to Mweka Camp, our last camp of the entire trek), but I just didn't have that much of an appetite that evening. "Wow... last camp of the trek... that's quick...", my minded wandered before I shook myself with the realisation that before I could get to the last camp, there's still the matter of 7 hours of a steep climb on a slope covered in deep scree. 

After dinner, our head guide, Paul, came into the dining tent as usual to give our brief for the following day, except this day, it was different: it was THE brief for the most important day of our trek. Paul has done about 200 summits on Kilimanjaro, and he had this ominous message for us: all of the guides, almost all of whom have chalked up over 100 summits, still feel the bite of the cold on their finger tips and toes, no matter how covered up they were. There wasn't much we could do about it, but to put up with it and push on. A valuable tip that Paul shared, and one that I'd never read about is about preventing our Nalgene bottles from completely freezing. We had already planned to keep our Nalgene in a bottle insulator to keep the water from freezing, but Paul suggested that we keep our bottles upside down in the insulator so that if it does start to freeze, it would be the bottom of the bottle that froze first, ensuring that we would still be able to drink from the bottle. Genius! And because of all the exertion, we were told to keep our backpacks as light as possible. In fact, he told us to have just 2 litres of water because we wouldn't be losing much hydration due to the fact that it was night. That, I'm not so sure if trekking at night would mean losing less hydration.


Back to my tent after dinner, I took the opportunity to repack my backpack and change to new lithium batteries for my headlamp. I brought along less food, mainly just oatmeal biscuits that were bite-sized, ensuring that it'd be easy to pop whole into the mouth for quick energy. After a quick entry into my Moleskin notebook, I tried to turn in and catch some sleep before waking up at 11pm for supper. Yeah right.. wishful thinking. On the previous nights on the trek, I had SO many problems trying to fall asleep, and honestly, although I was mentally exhausted from the lack of sleep, all I could think about was the summit attempt. I kept thinking about scenarios, and how I could plan for the contingencies. "What if" kept going through my head over and over again. I honestly cannot remember if I managed to catch any sleep at all, and even if I did, it might've been merely minutes. Nothing I did could help me get some much needed sleep. Before I know it, it was 11pm.. time to go to the dining tent and get ready. 


4 months of preparations, 5 days on the trek later... the time had come.