5 Things They Don't Tell You About Kilimanjaro by Ben Colclough
Last year, an estimated 25,000 people set out to climb Mt Kilimanjaro , Africa's highest mountain. In so doing, they ate approximately 110,000 snickers bars, drank 70,000 litres of tea, expelled 75 cubic metres of intestinal gas and used 962 kilometres of toilet paper. More significant for the rest of us, they also produced some 25,000 personal accounts of the climb, tales of altitude, aptitude and attitude that have been written up, blogged about or televised more times than Britney Spears' waist line. With all this exposure, you'd be forgiven for thinking that a trek up Kili (as it's affectionately known by morons) would yield little in the way of surprises, every trivial twist and turn having been cogitated ad (altitudinal) nauseam in the pages of some glossy travel mag. Certainly this was my feeling as I embarked on the climb last month: there was nothing that could catch me unawares, right? Well, it turns out I was wrong. And here in testament t...