Today we woke up at 11 pm (on the 27th) to grab our “breakfast” aka biscuits and tea. We left at 11:40 on our way to the top, we were the second group to leave the camp for that night.
We started walking through the valley, zigzagging our way up to make it easier, but even with all that it was very hard to walk up and as such we were walking very slowly (pole pole as our guide would say) We walked for almost 2h before taking a well deserved 10 min break. unfortunately at that point is also the point where diarrhoea hit both Mathieu and papa which meant that every 30 mins after, they would take a break, so much so we ran out of toilet paper.
As we continue going up it started getting harder and harder to walk up, which meant we took more breaks, during which I saw 2 shooting stars. We finally arrived at Gilman’s point at 5:15 am, being the first group up there after the solo polish guy. There we took a break and I took a few photos.
From there we walked to Stella point, through the snow around the crater, when we got there, we merged with all the other groups from the other routes and continued to Uluru peak as the sun was rising on our side. We walked for about an hour, where I started to feel more and more exhausted.
We finally made it to the top at 6:50 and got to see the famous sign. It was very cold so we took a few photos and videos before heading back. As I was feeling very low on energy / groggy from the lack of oxygen, one of our CEO’s forced me to go back down quickly to Stella point, and then Gilman’s peak, where I could breathe air with more oxygen content.
When we arrived at Gilman’s point, we took a 10 mins break before the descent, and I got to use the satellite phone to call Jamie, but only for a minute. Unfortunately, the connection was quite bad, so I couldn’t hear much. Just as we were here about to head down, Eric saw that I had a massive headache and pushed me to go down the mountain even faster to recover. We ended up going down the sandy ones with Paul by sliding, which meant and I got to the camp first and much faster.
When I arrived at the camp at about 9 am I was greeted by our porters who welcomed and congratulated me, before helping me in my tent so I could take nap until 11:45 for brunch. my alarm rang at 11:30 so I started packing my bag for the last stretch of today’s 8km hike to our final camp on this mountain. We had our brunch (soup, pancakes and oranges) at 12 and started heading down at 12:30 towards the next camp, Horombo huts. Luckily for us the rest of the journey was downhill which was much easier than going up, this meant that we were able to do 4 times the distance we would have been able to do if we had been going up. Once again it became quite foggy and rainy, even sometimes feeling like it was hailing, but it was very hard to tell. But when we looked back at the summit, we saw lots of clouds on the summit and realised we were lucky to have had a car summit when we were up there.
At 3 pm after 2H30, we arrived at our final camp, there we had some tea and went back to napping for 2h. At dinner I wasn’t feeling amazing so I ate quite slowly the soup and rice, we then had one more oxygen reading before our final briefing for the following and final day. After the briefing, I went away from the camp so I could see the sunset before going back to the tent to sleep.