Today I was woken up at 4am by the rain falling on our tent, and because it was raining so heavily I wasn’t able to go outside to pee until 30 mins later, when the rain finally calmed down. we got our wakeup call at 6:30 and I got to grab a few shots of the clouds being illuminated by the sunrise before breakfast, where I only ate the sausage because I was still feeling sick.
We started our 3km hike towards Mawenzi tarn camp at 8:30 through the rain clouds making it hard at times to see where we were going. We ended up walking extremely slowly to get acclimatised to the altitude, as we were going from 3679m to 4303m a 600m increase. It took us 3h to arrive at our camp.
At camp, we got to eat our lunch, where we had pasta with meat sauce, following which we were able to take a 2h nap. when we woke up we saw that it was raining, non the less we put on our rain gear hiked about 1km to a point 200m above our camp so that we could help our bodies acclimatise. Unfortunately, it was very foggy, but it was a nice 1h30 hike. we spent 10 mins at the top to really take in the air up there and get used to it but didn’t stay longer since it was cold and rainy.
Once back at camp after our hike, we grabbed a cup of tea and went outside 10 mins later, where our porters, chef and guides treated us to a few traditional songs and dances, even getting us to dance with them. After the dance they all introduced themselves to us and us to them, before we took a quick photo with the whole team (10 porters, 1 chef and 2 guides)
We then had a traditional meal for diner, made of bananas, potatoes, carrots and chicken. Following our meal we had our briefing for the following day to base camp (kilo huts) and took our vitals, this time, unfortunately, I didn’t have better vitals than Mathieu or papa. Our guide Sam then told about the mountain and where its names come from, our assistant guide Eric told us a little bit more before they talked about the Masai people, their lifestyles and traditions (including painful circumcisions)
After all the stories, we went to our tent which was very cold, but thankfully it was okay in the sleeping bags.