The day we had all been dreading!

I awoke feeling a whole lot better than I had the night before, but still I had very little appetite. The fourth day was rumoured in the camp to be one of pain and suffering...and in retrospect, I can't say that I disagree. For me it was a dull and unenjoyable walk up lots of very, very steep paths terminating in complete physical exhaustion...but I'm sure there are things I could have done differently. The first challenge though was Barranco Wall: our ticket out of the valley we had camped in the night before. It was, as the name suggests, a wall...or vertical cliff face with a zig zag path winding across the face. There was some scrambling involved, but I quite enjoyed that bit...it made me feel like I was really climbing! However, there were so many people attempting to climb the wall, and heavily laden porters trying to pass them that a traffic jam had formed early in the morning and didn't look likely to clear. The fun of the initial climb soon gave way in the heat of the day to weariness as the monotonous rock face seemed never ending. It was demoralising that each time you felt you had reached the top of the wall, you turned the corner to see the tiny figures of other people climbing high up ahead of you, seemingly hours away. Every time I saw a sight like that my heart sank. Had I been expecting it, maybe I'd have felt differently? By lunchtime we had reached a rest stop, and the next demoralising fact was that we would now decend the other side of the valley before going back up a very straight, very steep, dusty track. I was reminded of the scene in the film Ice Cold In Alex where they crank the jeep up the sand dune in reverse using the starting handle...tiny fractional steps would get me there using as little energy as possible. it seemed to work, and I figured out what Juma had been trying to tell me when he said "pole pole"...he meant go slowly, but don't stop!