Caboose

Another bad night’s sleep, with the freezing draughts blowing across me. The view down onto the clouds from Station F was lovely though.

Fortunately day 3 is a short day, spending the morning walking from Station F down to Mann Spring. We passed the craters from the 1999 eruption, with a surprisingly varied landscape of cinder cones as well as grassland and patches of forest. Another surprise was how quickly plants are recolonising the eruption area, starting with lichens and mosses then the strange-looking “Mountain Flower”


After climbing up several of the cones, and in Charles’s case climbing down into one of the craters we kept going down towards the edge of the forest and Mann Spring camp with a small detour to see part of the 1999 lava flow.

After only about three hours walking we came through the knee-high billowed grass to Mann Spring, a lovely campsite among the trees at the edge of the forest. The porters made up for last night by being especially helpful, our tents were set up ready for us and they had spread out sleeping mats for us to lie in the sunshine. We took advantage of the spring to have a wash and Jonathan made coffee for us. As we lay there clouds occasionally drifted up through the forest.

Later an Austrian couple arrived, they had been told they needed three porters and a guide but ended up carrying the load of one of the porters. Later still a party of nuns (don’t know where from, spoke various languages) arrived. Amy cooked a nice dinner, we had baked potatoes and cheese afterward and joined the guides and porters for a bit of dancing round the campfire before the smoke got too much.

I settled down for the night much more comfortably than the last two nights, sharing a large three-man tent with Jonathan and Indar. The soft grass under the tent made for a very pleasant night.