Day 7 on Kilimanjaro

The mood was high our last morning on Kili. Sure, we and our guides were excited about our successful summit of Kili yesterday. But the whole trekking team took on an air of pride and accomplishment and celebration. We couldn’t have done it without them all supporting us in so many ways.

Before we took off, we held the tipping ceremony and said good-bye to the porters. The guide books say that porters will often look disappointed by the tip amounts, but ours seemed very happy. They perform some farewell songs for us…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d6RVdihGMQ]

We still had another 6,000′ to descend, so it wasn’t exactly going to be a couch potato kind of day, but it was all down-hill, so… just a walk in the (Kili National) park! And we would be descending down the south side of Kilimanjaro, so there was a complete change of scenery.

Our route down was via the southern face of Kilimanjaro - much greener than the northern face. — Our route down was via the southern face of Kilimanjaro – much greener than the northern face.

A couple of hours in, Anne-Marie and I were really ready for our celebratory Kili beers, so we took off running and skipping down the trail with Godlisten… the boys just waved us “Ba-bye!”