A MAC Year 8 student recently climbed Africa's highest peak, Mt Kilimanjaro. Read about his incredible experience here.

I summited Mt. Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa, on the 7th of October 2019. I did it with a group of 15 people,  two of whom were my dad and Mark Sedon. It was Mark Sedon’s 50th birthday and he decided to climb his seventh peak of the seven continents. He invited his wife Jo and 13 other good friends including us.

For me and my dad, we walked the Rongai Route that took five days up to the summit and from there two days to the bottom of the mountain. Mark and a couple of the others there were climbing with the intent to paraglide off the summit but due to bad weather conditions, their 12-hour walk was to just get to the top.

Starting from the bottom, the walking was painfully slow. But the slow walking paid off as it gave us a much better acclimatization to the altitude/ lack of oxygen. I was one of the few in our group that got a worrying effect of nausea, so bad I could not stand.

One of the guys got sent down, back to base camp, because of severe altitude sickness. He also happened to be a New Zealand Air Force helicopter pilot so he wasn’t an unfit man.

When you climb Kilimanjaro you legally have to have porters, so there are more local jobs, they can carry up to 12kg of your gear; they also carried food and the tents, so we had 50 porters, but a lot of them were for carrying the paragliding equipment.

My dad and I had this one porter named Mashik and every time we arrived at the next camp he would have all of our gear in a tent ready for us to go lie down. Because I was the youngest on the trip by about 20 years all of the porters were especially nice to me.

I may possibly, from the two minutes of research I have done, be the youngest known kiwi to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.