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Its about 1.30pm. The heat has warmed everything up to a lovely temerature and I cant quite believe how cold it was just 14 hrs ago. Again I have to climb the rocks up to the loo and then down again to the food tent. My legs and knees are starting to ache and I'm a little concerned about my joints for the first time this trip. I have very old knee and ankle injuries and I have a familiar aching feeling, though I havent felt them for years. We have a lovely meal and everyone is in good spirits despite having lost Travis who has gone down to the Mweka Camp already. I hope he's ok and not too ill. We talk about how delirious we have felt and after the news of losing Travis which none of us realised till he left, how some of us thought we were dropping like flies, how each time we looked up there were less and less of us! But how lovely it was to have mostly all been at the top together and how lucky we were to have such great weather up there. Despite how I was feeling at the time, the sunrise was a beautiful thing to behold and we saw lots of beautiful glaciers on our left towards the summit the Rebmann, Decken, Kersten and Heim Glaciers and on our right in the distance the Furtwangler Glacier. absolutely stunning views that certainly helped motivate me. we seem to all have chapped lips and noses from the cold and then the dusty descent. Even with my mouth and nose covering I still have dusty micro particles in my nose which gives us all hideous black bogies. My nose is really sore, from the sun and cold I expect and it hurts just to touch it. After dinner we pack up and are keen to get to the next camp as I know a lot of us will be much more comfortable at a lower altitude! The descent is difficult and rocky and the are lots of bits to climb down but for the most part its a steady descent. I am pleased to see slowly some sparse vegetation, there are also parts of frost in the shadows. More plants and shrubs and eventually more trees appear in the long hard slog down to the Millenium camp but after about 5 hrs we arrive and this camp is a joy. The ground here is a lot flatter and the toilets are so close by! The food tent isnt a dangerous rocky unknown path to get there either and these simple things make me and my sore legs so happy. My legs are really sore by now and I smother them with tiger balm and Eugenia offers to strap me up tomorrow with some of my Kinesiology Tape before we head out. We're all in bed by 9pm and boy do we sleep well!
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