Summit Day - Part 2

City's Andrew Neville makes his final journey to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro along with his fellow climbers, as he aims to raise as much as possible for the Harley Staples Fund.

Part two of the final day blog sees the team reach the summit of the mountain, in what proved to be an emotional moment for a drained Neville.

To view part one of the summit assault click HERE.

"The sunrise was welcome as I had lost power in my head torch and could only follow my rhythm with Robert's feet and my breathing by moonlight. I was also encouraged that Brian was still persevering despite obviously suffering.

Finally, I was encouraged by the fact that I was not experiencing either headache or nausea. We did continue to pass other climbers being rushed down or being sick on the way though.

After climbing for about seven hours we finally reached Stella Point where we rested for a short while and were given energy drinks by our guides. Some climbers are so expended by this stage that they decide to go no further, but we all wanted to reach the summit, which is about another kilometre away and another 150m higher. I found this last kilometre quite hard but at least you can see the summit sign which pushes you on.

You walk through some snow furrows during this last kilometre and have a magnificent glacier to one side and a dormant volcanic crater to the other. Clouds by now are far below, I cannot describe the scene to do it credit.

I was pretty much spent by now and becoming quite emotional. I walked on my own for about thirty minutes until I got within about 200 yards from the summit sign. I then stopped and waited for Brian as I wanted us to "cross the finishing line" together. As he got to about 10 yards of me I just bent over, and don't mind admitting, broke down in tears. We hugged and both "had a moment" before we collected ourselves to get to the summit sign where we hugged and congratulated all our climbing colleagues and our guides.

We had made it. At 7.51am local time. We were almost four miles above sea level! I placed a plaque in memory of Harley Staples, and a heart stone beneath the summit sign. You don't have long at the summit due to the cold and lack of air pressure, so we all took as many photos as possible, took in the scene as it is unlikely any of us would ever see anything like that again, and began our trek back to Stella Point. Robert then complained of feeling a bit unwell so he went on ahead with one of the guides to reduce altitude as soon as possible.

As they say "what goes up must come down" and I then began to struggle myself. Brian and I made very slow progress from the summit to Gilmans Point which itself is still about 5600m high. The other problem I had was that I was covered in thermal clothing but the sun was out and I was getting hot again. The terrain was also difficult and we had to rest a lot.

All my energy and concentration had gone into getting to the top and I had precious little reserve left. For the next three hours I struggled badly. Although we were descending, we were on loose scree and my left knee was hurting quite badly (the method of "running" down the scree just jarred my knee more). Brian was better than me by this stage, but you had little choice but to keep going. I was last to reach the lunch huts at Kibo (4600.).

I was dehydrated and physically and mentally drained. But we still had nine kilometres to go! We were only allowed about 20 minutes lunch break during which both Brian and I nearly fell asleep. We then loaded ourselves up again and headed across desert like terrain for about three hours until we arrived at Horombo (3700m).

I have never felt so exhausted in my life and my left knee was by that stage pretty painful. Dinner helped a lot but I was still very low on body fluids. And we had another 20km ahead of us the following day - which was to prove more eventful than we would have wished! However, to use the "no pain no gain" cliché, we were all out on our feet, but we were all so happy that the whole group had made it.

To close the day our lead guide told us we would be woken at 6am the following morning for a 7am trek back to the park entrance!

Now that I have completed the climb I would be grateful if any money pledged to the Harley Staples fund could now be paid and anyone who has yet to sponsor me to make a donation to fund holiday homes for families of terminally ill children.

We were woken at 6am on Saturday morning. I had been quite unwell in the night and won't forget a couple of trips I had to make across camp in the darkness to the toilet huts! I was also not looking forward to the long trek back to the park entrance. However, at least we knew we had a hot shower awaiting us at the hotel at the end of the day.

Our descent took us across quite thick vegetation to begin with and I was relieved that the terrain was fairly level, enabling me to make quite good progress with the aid of my walking poles to relief pressure on my knee. After we had been walking for about three hours we descended into rain forest which was damp and quite greasy underfoot.

I found that more difficult on my knee especially as it was all downhill which naturally puts more pressure on your knees in any case. I then started to think that somebody could easily slip on the greasy rocks when just in front of me Brian did exactly that. First of all I was really worried that he had fallen on his back and landed on one of the rocks. However, whilst he had fallen on his back, his backpack has softened his fall.

What he had done though was to twist his ankle. The guides were excellent trying to relief him of his backpack and bandage his ankle, but we were still two hours from the park entrance and there was no way Brian would make it, or if he tried it would have taken much longer than two hours.

I'm not sure if I could have made it either as the terrain at that time was making it difficult to protect my knee. So the guides called for an ambulance and we headed for a clearing. A Land Rover type vehicle arrived after about 30 minutes and Brian and I were both driven back to the park entrance, which was welcome!

We waited there for the rest of the group to arrive about an hour later. Our whole support crew of guides, chef and porters then did a farewell dance for us before we boarded the bus for Moshi and lunch.

We got to our hotel in Arusha at about 6pm and had our first proper wash for nearly a week! I looked in a mirror for the first time in a week too and the condition of my face told a story, particularly my eyes! We invited our crew out to dinner last night and in a surreal atmosphere enjoyed a few drinks and food with them round a camp fire! Goodness knows where we were, but the company was great and we were happy but tired fellows!