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| Departing Shira 2 |
This was another very difficult day where we had started to walk by 8am. All we did was climb, climb, climb, then descend, descend, descend. As we climbed, the shubs got thinner and eventually non-existent. Walking got slower and we had to concentrate on each step. I tried to keep a constant pace by singing some song to myself in my head while breathing, stepping and placing poles all in synch with it. I found that my steps got very small at times, but we inched ahead.
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| Our first peek at the lava-tower |
We reached our lunch point just shy of the lava-tower so I suggested that we just eat part of it and then continue to the top where we can have the rest of our lunch. It was around this point that the Lemosho route merged with the popular Machame route, though we didn't feel crowded at all. At one point we had caught up with a larger group of about 10 hikers. These larger groups tend to move slow, but no one seems to lose as much energy. As we were following these people, one person brought out their iPhone and played the song "Rains Down in Africa" which features Kilimanjaro and a bunch of people sang along, then another guy got everyone to do a conga line and recorded everyone as they walked past.
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| The lava tower |
We got to the top shortly afterwards but the winds had picked up, the temperature had dropped and it had started to snow on us. We were at 4 630 m (15 190 ft) and were only about 1.5 hours from the Barranco camp so we decided to skip lunch and head down. It turns out that this is as high as we would get on the hike. This next bit was very steep so it took us a little bit longer than expected. We descended down 650 m to 3 976 m (13 000 ft) over the next 3 km.
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| Our guide, Niko, about 1.5 hours out of Barranco. We'll have to get over that next hill first. |
The whole day took about 6 hours and we were able to flop in our tent by 2pm. We had popcorn for lunch and shortly after that is when Katie started to wheeze worse. She took a few coughs to try and dislodge whatever was in her lungs, but this just seemed to agrivate it. I immediately took her to our guide to find a doctor as her lung capacity was becomming seriously limited. Despite being the largest camp on Kilimanjaro, there were no doctors around. A few of the other guides had seen similar problems before and told us that it was a pulmonary edema which I've just looked up online and recognize the symptoms. The guides suggested that Katie puts on all of her warmest clothes and drinks hot ginger tea to "sweat" out the extra fluids. Poor Katie was already so cold from the altitude and dehydrated from the hiking and diamox combination that she just couldn't sweat. We knew that we couldn't go anywhere today so we went to sleep. I listened to Katie's breathing until she seemed to get better at about 4am. Whenever her breathing exposed wheezing during shallow breaths, I would wake her up and tell her to cough. This ended up happening once every 5 minutes or so and we kept a good portion of the camp awake that night with the coughing.
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| Barranco camp |
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