Passport Panic

After a few more days relaxing in Uganda, and a surprisingly comfy 13 hour overnight bus ride to Niarobi, we started the final leg of our journey in Kenya, as we met the rest of our Kilimanjaro team at the airport. We also met our tour guide for the climb, a man called Herman in who we would trust our lives to, 5895m in the air! As responsible, experienced and trustworthy team leaders, we shepherded everyone onto our shuttle buses that would take us to Tanzania. So far so good, the team were in good spirits (if a little jetlagged), everyone was accounted for and the border crossing  into Tanzania was going to be easy as pie as we were experts, having negotiated many border crossings on our travels already… Not so… It was when we actually reached the Kenya-Tanzania border that we encountered our first hurdle of the trip, however it was not one of our innocent, fresh faced team members… our very own team leader Katie had managed to leave her passport in Nairobi!!

As panic began to set in, “The Hermanator” (as he had dubbed himself) stepped in to save the day. After a series of frenzied called and jabbering in Swahili to Nairobi the passport was on its way – his reaction instilled us with confidence as he was obviously well equipped to deal with crisis situations! And so as the day came to a close we made it safely to Moshi at the base of the Mountain, our home until the real challenge began.

The following day we headed out to School Project to see where the money our group had raised would be going to benefit the local children. Our group had raised over 70,000 pounds (a phenomenal sum) and the children welcomed us with singing and dancing before showing off their impressive school facilities that Loughborough Students had helped to provide. Then we took to the playing fields, and whilst typical Loughborough competitiveness was evident, both our Football team and netball team were beaten fairly convincingly by small African School children…

The night before the climb was spent relaxing at the hotel, packing up kit and chatting to another Loughborough group who had just descended that day. They had many horror stories of altitude sickness and blisters and reminisced with glee about how awful the climb had been and how they wouldn’t wish that on anyone… A little taken aback we headed to bed that night, looking forward to getting cracking the next day, but also apprehensive as to what the next 6 days would bring…