The summit

We got there about 9.30am. All of us.

That's 10 hours of climbing through the night. Incredibly tough.

I had a bad time in the last couple of hours. We reached the crater rim at Gillman's Point about 7.30am. When I saw that the summit was still 2km and 2 hours away, I wanted to give up and go down.

The guides pushed, pulled, cajoled, encouraged and bullied me to the top. Thanks guys.

We got 20 minutes at the top. 19,000 ft is very bad for you, so you get the hell down from there as fast as possible.

By lunchtime we were back at Kibo (15,000 ft) for lunch and a 30 minute nap. Then a 9km hike to camp 6.

Between midnight that day and 6pm when we got to camp 6, we hiked or climbed for 16 hours out of 18. We went up over 4,000 ft, and down about 5,000. We all slept well that night.

The Blip - not a triumphant shot of the summit. Its one of the glaciers, and away off in the background, wee Mt Meru (over 14,000 ft and the 5th highest mountain in Africa)