Like this:

Lou’s post was good – but one of us needs to describe the summit trip on the final day for it was truly insanity. What follows is what I wrote in my travel diary (yes, pen and paper are still used among some of us antiquated beings!).

2am: Awake. Up groggily to be nursed into the land of the living by a cup of bark tea (I’m sure, ish, that it wasn’t really made from bark) with 3 sugars. Clothes on – 2 T-shirts, 2 long-sleeved shirts, a thin jumper, boxers, a pair of boardshorts, jeans, 2 pairs of socks, a rainponcho that cost 50p in Malaysia and a travel-towel-cum-bandana warapped around my head (whoever said we weren’t prepared for sub-zero temperature mountain climbing?). I had no torch of my own (due to our ever excellent planning) so I spent the walk picking my way in the the shifting gloom between Maxim and Bettina (see previous post for the cast of characters).

4.30am: Halfway up. Going not so bad after a brutal first 20 minutes. Bad from here though.

5.45am: Must keep going. My whole existence centres around heavy breathing, aching legs and the soul-destroying slide down the shingle with every step.

5.55am: Sudden burst of energy. The end is in sight. Possibly the same feeling as the final thrashings of a mortally wounded beast. Both of us know we won’t last much longer and the end is in sight.

6am: At the summit! But not without loss. Half an hour of absolutely shockingly hard climbing. The trail had been shingle before but hit new levels on the last third. Each step forward brought half a step backwards, sometimes more. In the gloom I was constantly falling down onto my hands and knees, body telling me to just to ‘stay down’. “Get up Rocky!” my mind would call back.

Most of the way up I operated in some kind of exhausted (possibly due to the fact it wasn’t even dawn yet) trance. I was following Bettina almost step-for-step, trusting her judgement to avoid perils I couldn’t see. Towards the top my burst of energy saw me break free from my trusty pacesetter and power onwards to the top alone. Some might see this as a cruel abandonment, but it was every man for himself by this stage and I am sure any of us would have done the same… that or I’m just a cruel-hearted Brit. I just had to keep going, I was just too close to stop. And anyway, any stop now would most likely be unrecoverable from. No. I had to keep going.

I hit hard rock, tentatively my aching legs started hoping that the gravel was finished and that my feet had slid backwards for the last time. 50 steps later it was confirmed. I burst out onto the small summit alone, exhausted and somewhat overwhelmed. I let out a loud whoop and looked around. The sun had not arrived yet and neither had the others. Next up came Maxim. We hugged and congratulated each up with cries of Bonjourno!!! (which had become a running joke among our troupe following our porter running past us all with 20kg on his back up the mountain before shouting it down at us from some point high and out of sight).

Next came Bettina, my Swiss trailblazer, her headtorch obscuring her face, her arms raised in celebration. Last, but not least, Nasser appeared holding his two cigarette lighters (with built-in mini-torches) followed by the two guides. Cue more hugs and much ‘admiring the view’ (ie. taking about a million photos).

7am: By now thoroughly cold we began out descent. Buoyed by our sense of achievement and by our thoroughly insane guides we hurtled down the mountain ridge. The gravel-sand that had frustrated us so much now formed a ski slope of sorts. With giant bounding steps we slid our way down the volcano in a kind of slow-motion skiing-come-moon-walking (think Buzz Adrin not Michael Jackson). In this fashion it only took us about an hour to get down and by 8.30am we were tucking into breakfast (banana pancake as always). We were exhausted but exhilerated and had a set of photographs that a GCSE Geography textbook would have been proud of. Maxim and I were also lucky enough to be greeted by our (well at least in my case) long-suffering girlfriends who had decided that getting up in the middle of the night and climbing another bit of rock just for a slightly better view wasn’t really neccessay. The whole scene had the feel of one of those old war movies when the hero returns from the front line and climbs down the ramp of the boat into the arms of his lady who has been waiting all this time for him… well that’s how it felt like to me anyway, Lou’d probably only been up an hour or so, I’d fought a bloody war against a volcano… and all before breakfast!

The day wasn’t over then. Not by a long shot. We still had another 8 hours of walking ahead of us, all downhill, but then downhill ruins your knees and your feet, so don’t go off thinking that it was a cake-walk. And it rained. But that’s a story for another day.

Here’s a taster of what it looked like:

Climb a bloody mountain and guess who’s still there waiting for you!

Sunset over Mount Batur, Bali – our view that awaited us at our campsite on day one.

Nasser watches sunset on day one.

So do Maxim and Erynne.

Sunrise over Lombok and it’s islands.

Another look at the low sun.

The sun gets brighter as the day is older.

The view on the way back down the rim.

The characters:

Maxim – the Russian.

Nasser – the Manc.

Bettina – the Swiss Mountaineer.

Our trusty porter “Bonjourno!”