As I write this it has been just over a week since I returned from Tanzania and Team Twende’s climb of Kilimanjaro. I’m still meeting family, friends and colleagues for the first time since coming back, and unsurprisingly often get asked “How was it?” “What was it like?” Before the climb, I made a concerted effort not to read too much about it, or look at photos from other peoples trips. This could have been to avoid coming to the realisation that I was entirely unprepared (I called the few weeks before we left for Kili my ‘denial phase’), but I consciously felt it was to not ruin my own experience. In the end I wonder if that would have made any difference, as one thing I can say is that “you had to be there!”

Everyone has a different experience on the mountain; mine was awe-inspiring, confidence-boosting, invigorating and humbling all at the same time. It’s a fantastic collection of memories – from the singing and dancing with the local porters and guides in the earlier stages of the climb, to the jaw dropping beauty that surrounded us every day that couldn’t quite be captured on film, to the sense of achievement once the summit had been reached (though this took a while to sink in!) All this with a group of great people that I’ll forever have a once-in-a-lifetime shared experience with.

I came off the mountain with a sense that most of us are a lot more resilient than we’ll give themselves credit for, and that while the day-to-day challenges we face in our very comfortable lives in the West are actually quite small, we do a very good job at making them much bigger than they are. It puts things in to a new perspective. It also gives a real clarity to why raising money for charities like Unicef is so important.

I’ll always carry with me the knowledge that I made it up to the very top of Kilimanjaro, and was able to forego the usual comforts and luxuries and push beyond what I thought were the limits in pursuit of my goal, to reach the summit. I don’t believe when an experience like this ends that learnings suddenly present themselves as a nice bulleted list and that’s it, job done. We are the sum of our experiences, and each one influences the next. For want of a better set of words, climbing Kilimanjaro was ‘a big thing’, and I’m confident I’ll be influenced by it for the rest of my life.