From the itinerary:

Day 4:  BARRANCO to KARANGA CAMP
13100’ ~ 3992m ? 2.2 mi~3.2 km ? 4-5 hrs
Today the group conquers the great Barranco Valley and up the Barranco wall, and adventuourse [sick!!!] stretch that ushers us into the arctic zone of Kili.  We continue the trek on the South Circuit path through the Karanga Valley. We camp tonight at Karanga Camp.

You guys, I cannot get over how much I love having coffee delivered to me when I wake up.  It’s so great.

Like the description says, today we conquer Barranco wall.  Which is, you know, really pretty much just a wall.  This was the most fun hiking of the trip, I thought.  Lot’s of climbing, carefully picking out handholds, etc.  Okay that makes it sound like it was some technical thing, but it wasn’t just walking.  Really fun.  Kinda slow going, and seems like everyone hiking that day left at the same time, so it was a bit trafficky, but it was really pretty fun.  As you’re going up, you keep thinking you’ve reached teh top, only to get there and see it goes up.  Then that feeling repeats, maybe four times.  But fun fun fun.

Oh, i forgot. Before we get to the wall, we have to go through a little valley and cross a little river. Which, for the sake of the title of this post, we’ll call the Barranco river, though really it was barely a creek.

After we climbed the wall, we walked down, down, down.  I think this was one of those days where we went up like 2,000 feet in the morning and then spent the rest of the day going down.  Went through long, rocky valley one after another it seemed.   At this point, there’s really little vegetation- little shrubby things but kinda dispersed, and nothing you couldn’t see over.  Feels like Iceland, actually.

Texting man, the moon, Venus.

Since the next couple days involve a lot of altitude, we get schooled on the portable hyperbaric chamber that they bring along.  It looks cool, but I reckon it would be pretty boring to actually have to use.  I wasn’t totally paying attention though, cause the meeting they called to discuss the chamber was right in the middle of a really gorgeous sunset, which I took about a thousand pictures of..  Thankfully, my lack of paid attention didn’t cause any problems- our guide continued his 10+year career without having a need for it.