Day 6 - DAY 4 OF THE CLIMB!! - 26th August

Baranco Wall!

Jambo! Today has been a pretty rough day if I'm honest. Woke up feeling ill again and with very little appetite (to the extent that Simon forced me to eat some orange slices just so I'd gotten some sugar), but that all went away when we started walking. (Trekking up a beautiful mountain is a pretty valid distraction!)

Selfie at the top of Baranco
Wall!

We began the day with a climb up Baranco Wall (the one bit of the 'climb' that is actually climbing!) and it was great fun!! It was hard though as there was also hundreds of porters trying to get past us, so it kind of makes you feel a bit pressured to get a move on, and sometimes they took different routes, which was pretty scary to see... But I suppose they're used to it... Rather them than me! But nonetheless it was great fun, and really satisfying to complete!! And when we were at the top, we had sooooo many photos! And the girls all had a 'sports bra' photo, which I couldn't really participate in because my layers were a little tight... My bad!

After we had our little break at the top we continued on our walk to the next camp site, which is where we were going to have lunch at. That's when it got hard - we were high up and could see the camp, but little did we know it was going to take 2-3 hours to get there!! We had to walk down into the valley and then back up again - going down was so painful, it really got me down, when we got to the bottom, we had a break and I had a little cry as the frustration of my pain got to me and I started doubting whether I could really climb Kili. But Daudi advised me "stop crying, it'll give you a headache!" and I stopped anyway and then we cracked on, up the hill to camp for lunch!

Once we got up there I felt a little better, just by sitting down for lunch, and we even got a little cheer from the team when we arrived (as we were about half an hour behind everyone else).

Carrying on to camp!

Then we cracked on to camp, which was about another 4 hours away, and it was still rough, with ups and downs along the trek, along with a headache I had coming and going, which was delightful. But we finally got here after a painful slog and got some dinner and our briefing before heading to bed. So I'm currently sat in my sleeping bag, knowing that at 1am I'm going to be woken up, ready to set off up to Uhuru Peak at 2am. I am praying I wake up feeling good, as headache/sickness is last thing I need!

Dinner was great tonight, as even though we were all tired - we were all having a good laugh... Asin we'd laugh at something simple and then couldn't stop laughing until it hurt - probably from the lack of oxygen we have!! But it was fun nonetheless =)

I'm going to try sleep now. Biggest day of my life so far tomorrow, requires energy!!

La la salama!!

The ridiculous cost of prescriptions!

So, I've just forked out £104 for a years worth of prescriptions! Yippee, this is the delight of becoming an "adult" and having to pay for prescriptions from the age of 19. 

I'm not eligible for free prescriptions so, I've had to buy myself a PPC (Pre-Payment Certificate) to save myself a bit of money when buying prescriptions, because without this it's £8.05 per prescription, and at current I'm on 3 prescribed drugs every month. Overall that would be £24.15 a month, or around £289 for a year... Personally, I think it's completely ridiculous to have to pay for prescriptions that I don't voluntarily take... I don't want to take all my medication, I'd be a lot happier to not have to, and on top of that it costs so much? 

This probably stops a lot of people taking medication they should be taking, because why would anyone want to pay for something they don't really want? (even if it's for the best for them)... It just really annoys me, if I'm reading this correctly (from google), if I was a prisoner I'd have free hospital treatment and prescriptions? (correct me if I'm wrong) But things like this make you wonder why you bother trying to live life as a law abiding citizen when I could have such things for free? Most of the medication (in fact, probably all) I will be on for the rest of my life (unless a recovery is achieved) and I will end up dishing out thousands of pounds for medication for the rest of my life.

I'm gonna stop ranting for now, because no one wants to read rants. But naturally, this is annoying to me (and probably MANY others)... So yeah!

TTFN, ta ta for now! :)