"The Toilet Tent at 3am"

I promised you honesty. So here it is.

Nobody who has ever written a glossy travel piece about Kilimanjaro has adequately addressed the toilet tent situation. The brochures show sunrises and summit smiles. What they do not show is a 47 year old in four layers of thermal clothing, a head torch strapped to their forehead, attempting to locate the toilet tent at three in the morning whilst navigating a campsite they can only partially remember the layout of, in the dark, on a mountain, at altitude.

The zip on my sleeping bag took ninety seconds to open. I know this because it felt like considerably longer. My boots were cold. Everything was cold. The altitude had apparently decided that 3am was also a good time to make my coordination slightly unreliable.

I found the toilet tent. Eventually. I will not describe what happens inside a toilet tent on day five of a Kilimanjaro expedition beyond saying that it is character building and that you emerge from it with a profound appreciation for indoor plumbing that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

On the way back to my tent I stopped. I hadn't planned to. I was cold and tired and my coordination was still slightly unreliable. But I stopped, and I looked up, and above me was a sky so impossibly full of stars that I stood there in the cold for a full five minutes, head tilted back, completely still, completely alone, completely overwhelmed.

The Milky Way. Properly visible. Not a suggestion of it, not the faint smear you get from a dark country lane in England, but the whole extraordinary thing, a river of light so dense and so vast that it reframes every assumption you have ever made about the size of the universe and your place within it.

I went back to my tent. I lay in my sleeping bag. I thought: whatever happens on summit night, I have already seen something I will never forget. The zip on the sleeping bag took another ninety seconds.

Totally worth it.

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