Kilimanjaro! What was I thinking!?

Travel Photographer // Kilimanjaro

I took a little break from the wedding photography late last year and went for a little jaunt up a hill in Africa, I’ve decided to show you some of the pictures I took as I think they still add to how I capture moments and people and a shared experience, so here’s a little bit of travel photography to break up the lovely weddings that fill the rest of my blog.

What was I thinking? To be totally honest I wasn’t thinking… My family and I visited Africa on a safari about five years ago and we saw the top of Kilimanjaro from the plane and the bottom of it from a van driving across the Serengeti, but we never saw it all in one! I didn’t really think much of it other than it would have been nice to see it in all its glory.

Early in 2015 a friend of my mums told her that she and her partner were thinking of climbing it for a 50^th birthday adventure and my mum jumped at the chance to join in… and in turn so did I… apparently :/. After committing to it my mum subsequently went off to have knee surgery and I got set into a summer of weddings. We didn’t exactly do anything close to what you’d call training for the enormity of the task at hand. Not that you can prepare yourself for the altitude, as nothing in Britain comes close. All we did was fit in a bit more walking into our everyday lives, mums knee recovered, and then relapsed and then recovered again and then I managed to pull something in my knee while running. I’m not sure how we both got ourselves to Tanzania in one piece but we did.

We flew to Tanzania and were picked up by the African Walking Company who were amazing from start to finish! We had a day in a hotel before starting and one by one our group of trekkers was formed in total there were 14 of us who would after a week together get to each other pretty well and have a shared experience that’ll bond you forever.

We were dropped inside the national park at about 3000m where we were to start the trek, as soon as we got out of the cars it started to rain so it was on with the waterproofs and off we went. We got to know the camp routine ‘washy washy’ a bowl of boiling water to wash every evening and morning that you had to use pretty sharpish before it went cold.