The Geos Group’s financial controller Lindsay Ganson travelled to Tanzania early this year to climb Mount Kilimanjaro – Africa’s highest peak. She and her friend Nathalie have taken on challenges in the past, but this seven-day expedition was the most physically and mentally demanding one yet. “We did lots of training beforehand,” said Lindsay, “we walked with weighted backpacks and wore our boots in really well. We were going up and down the steep steps at Box Hill and walking on the treadmill at an incline, and we hiked up Mount Snowdon and Pen y Fan in Wales. I tried to walk backwards on the treadmill but it’s difficult to train those downhill muscles – I probably ached more coming down than I did going up.”
The first day of the trip involved filling in the forms required to enter the National Park, meeting the other 25 people in the group and the local guides, and three hours of trekking to the first camp. They trekked for 11 hours the following day, mainly through rainforest which gradually turned into moorland, carrying essential supplies in their daypacks while the porters and chefs transported the tents, food, gas cookers and duffel bags up the mountain.
The peak of Mount Kilimanjaro is 5,895 metres above sea level. There’s less oxygen and the air is thin up there, so the aim of day three was to give everybody time to acclimatise to the altitude by ascending and then descending again. Lindsay said: “You have to go very slowly and take your time and you can’t go in front of the leader – you get used to constantly hearing the word ‘polepole’, which means ‘slow’ in Swahili. We went up to the Lava Tower at 4,600 metres that day, and we started to feel the altitude by then. A few people were a bit poorly, some got headaches and some felt sick, even though we’d all taken a pill for altitude sickness. We had lunch up there, which was amazing, and then we went down to about 3,900 metres where we stayed in the camp for the night. At that point it was becoming more desert-like, with these massive senecio trees that are only found on Kilimanjaro.”
On the fourth day the group got up early and climbed the steep Barranco Wall, which meant treading carefully and scrambling on all fours at times, and then crossed a deep ravine to get to the next camp. The day after they trekked another four hours to base camp, the last stop before the summit, in time for lunch. “We had a briefing about what was going to happen on summit night,” said Lindsay, “we got all our kit ready and then we were told we had to go to bed at four o’clock in the afternoon! No one slept at all. It was daylight and really windy as well – it felt like the tents were going to blow away – and then we were up and out. They woke us at about 10pm and made us eat breakfast, which was a big bowl of porridge and a pile of pasta.
“We set off at about 11pm, so we had head torches on and we were climbing over rocks and zigzagging up the mountain for about eight hours. It was absolutely freezing, about -20 degrees by the time we got up there. You have no energy because of the altitude and you can’t really breathe, so it’s tough and my feet were really cold even though I had quite a few layers on. At about 5.30am the sun starts coming up behind you and you get to the crater rim just as the sun has risen, and you think ‘brilliant, we’ve done it’, and everyone’s really happy and crying. But then you realise you’ve got another 700 metres to get to the summit, and that takes an hour because you’re going so slowly. We knew it would be difficult and it was really tough, a lot of people were in quite a bad state at that point. The summit itself was a real mental challenge more than anything, and I must admit I was exhausted.”
After a quick celebration at the top of the mountain, the group headed back downhill at varying speeds, side-stepping and slipping all the way to base camp. A couple of people suffered from altitude sickness and had to be taken off the mountain, but everyone else reassembled in their various states of wellness and rested for a few hours before continuing on to the final campsite of the trip. “We ate dinner but I don’t think anyone waited around for pudding, even though they’d made us a cake. I had the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had – I’m pretty sure we were sleeping on a slope and on some rocks but we just didn’t care.”
On the last day, the group had a gruelling eight-hour walk back down to the start. “When we got there, all the crew came towards us and started singing and welcomed us into camp. They had a big banquet for us, we all danced and it was lovely, and for an extra $5 we got our shoes and walking poles washed too! For seven days you’re sleeping in a tent and you can’t wash for a week, it’s really cold at night and there are no fires so you can’t sit around a campfire eating marshmallows or anything like that. But none of that really matters. I would recommend it, it was fantastic.”
Lindsay and Nathalie are raising funds for Cancer Research – if you would like to donate to this worthwhile cause, please visit their Just Giving page.
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