Wow I slept almost a full 9 hours, unlike everyone else. It’s so worth buying a proper expedition down bag.. thank you Mum for my awesome Marmot bag xxx

Up at 0630 our cook brings mugs of Milo to our tents. (Milo is like a watery malt hot chocolate drink.) I manage to get one arm out of my sleeping bag to hold the mug and drank it slowly.

FUCK IT’S FREEZING!!! That’s all I can think, when I’ve just unzipped my sleeping bag. We are only at 3000m, we will be going to almost 7000m! I really want to get dressed immediately. Do I bother changing my pants? This was the first decision I had to make. Inevitably I forced myself to wash and change. To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to carry on changing my pants when it’s this cold.

Today our trekking has almost been vertical, rock after rock, it was like climbing a waterfall. Even though technically this is harder than yesterday, I’m the only one actually finding it easier. I’m thinking this is solely due to my karate and deep training stances, which made it easy for me to take the big high steps.

After arriving at Shira Camp at 3850m we are almost 2/3rds of the way to the top. The air really is noticeably thinner up here, I’m having to breathe much faster. Now that our bodies really need to start to acclimatise better, we walked for another hour or so vertically above our camp, then slowly walking back down. Walk high, sleep low is the saying for climbing.

We have such an amazing view from our tents, we’re at the edge of a small rock face overlooking the clouds which are now below us. The sun has now quickly set and it must have dropped 10⁰C in the last three minutes. On with the jumper and jacket.

We sit down for dinner and celebrated Diedus’s birthday (our guide). Our team song lots of Swahili songs and was great fun until my head started to rapidly feel like it was going to explode. My headache from hell, is due to the lack of oxygen. I still have it as I write this 🙁

Anyway I’m now in bed and equally impressed that my biro hasn’t freezed yet. My thoughts are with Tom. Poor little Tom Morphy. Tom has hired a sleeping bag, which wouldn’t keep you warm in Jamaica. Let alone on an icy ridge 3850m high!

I’m dreading getting up at 0630 again, it’s going to be freezing, and worse still it’s only going to get colder. I need to empty my bag out so that I can find my thermals and any sort of movement at this height is making me out of breath. Still when trekking I’m not sweating as much as the other guys so at least I’m not getting as dehydrated as well.

Right I’m now off to bed for a very hard cold and windy trek. Hopefully we will be above the second cloud layer and we won’t all be damp in the morning.

Night.