Mountain high

His teeth normally chatter at the thought of mountaineering, but after a week on the Serengeti Paul Howard was ready to conquer…

His teeth normally chatter at the thought of mountaineering, but after a week on the Serengeti Paul Howardwas ready to conquer Kilimanjaro - alongside his adventurous father

The only vantage point to appreciate a mountain from properly, I've always figured, is the bottom. It stands to reason: you can see nothing from the top of the really big ones except the clouds below you. I'm a bit of a windbag, really. I read Grania Willis's extraordinary account of climbing Everest and thought I'd never get the warmth back into my body. Even the sight of the Sugar Loaf is liable to give me an attack of diabetes.

But my father, David, and I climbed Kilimanjaro this year. I can state this for a fact only because I have a certificate to say it, some photographs of us at the top, looking bedraggled and beaten, and then, somewhere in the frozen seracs of my mind, a dim recollection of falling about the place like a drunken sailor at almost 6,000m (20,000ft).

When you're that high your brain screams for oxygen; it feels not unlike walking home from the pub with eight pints of your favourite sloshing around inside you.

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I always feel with travel articles that there's an element of selling going on, which means this certainly isn't a travel article. The living purgatory of that final climb - setting off at midnight, the temperature minus 18, climbing for eight hours, babbling like a loon between bouts of vomiting and grappling with the idea of going back every tortured step of the way - is something I would recommend to no one.

My father, on the other hand, recommends it to everyone, but he's made of different stuff from me. Dad's an extraordinary character: 60 years of age with a swashbuckling sense of adventure and the body fat of a 15-year-old Romanian gymnast.

My mother died a couple of years ago - a cruel time for a man to lose his wife, just as they were about to settle into retirement together - but he has coped with it in a way that has made me intensely proud to be his son.

Dad was in the merchant navy as a teenager. By the time he was 20 he'd stood on every continent and sailed every ocean but one. When he married my mother and started a family he had, I think, a secret checklist of about 15 places he wanted to visit, and for the past couple of years he's been girdling the world like Phileas Fogg, seeing the corners of it he missed the first time around.

Kilimanjaro was one. The attraction of climbing it, as opposed to, say, a Himalaya, is that it has no vertical faces to scale. You walk up it - slowly. Or, as they say in Swahili, pole (which is pronounced pool-ay).

"Pole, pole," is a phrase that the guides drum into your head like a mantra. The quicker you climb, the less time your body has to adjust to the altitude and thin air, so you tackle the mountain with the ardour of a man taking an elderly relative for a walk around the grounds of a nursing home.

Your first sight of Kilimanjaro is liable to floor you. The mountain has a bewitching beauty that stunned us into a respectful silence as we drove towards Marangu Gate, at its base.

The first day's trek was surprisingly pleasant. We walked - sauntered might a better word - for four and a half hours through dense rainforest, spotting monkeys and listening to the avian chatter around us, until we reached Mandara Hut, our first staging post.

We slept that night, under layers of swaddling, in a kind of Nissen hut with army-type bunks. When a mouse skittered across the floor I didn't give it a second look. Sleeping outdoors hardens you like that. We'd just spent a week camping on the Serengeti. When you have woken in the dead of night to hear a large mammal sniffing around the edges of your tent, or have been taking a leak in the long grass at 4am and, with the beam of your head torch, caught the whites of a dozen pairs of eyes quietly considering you, you tend not to be alarmed by a mouse.

On the second day the rainforest gave way to a vast tableland of alpine meadows covered in heather, and the pitch became suddenly steeper.

We did the entire trek with an Englishman called Amrul, a jolly soul who was the best of company and acted as a kind of referee between Dad and me on the couple of occasions when the cold, the sleep deprivation and the lack of hot running water threatened to spill over into an act of patricide or filicide.

Along the way we picked up a Danish girl called Louise, who had an extraordinary repertoire of pop songs that she could sing from start to finish. The lack of oxygen must have been getting to us at that point, or perhaps it was the quiet terror we were all feeling, having met one or two trekkers coming the opposite way, borne comatose on stretchers. Whether through hypoxia or fear we sang an awful lot of Eurovision numbers that day, joined by some Germans, who treated us to a soulful rendering of Nicole's Ein Bisschen Frieden, or A Little Peace, which, as we all know, won the contest for West Germany back in 1982, when Britain and Argentina were going at it in the south Atlantic.

Dad and I responded with a brilliant trifecta of Martin, Kavanagh, and Harrington and McGettigan winners - three in a row, meine Freunde: count them - and as we approached our beds at Horombo Hut, dizzy from singing, our German friends had no choice but to acknowledge that, for a few years, we won Eurovision Song Contests as well as they built motorways.

It all got terribly serious on the third day. The terrain became more pitted and rocky, and we were all thinking about those stretchers and remembering that only four out of 10 people who try to climb Kilimanjaro reach the top.

There are two routes you can take to Kibo Hut: the easy lower route or the picturesque upper route, which should properly be called Kill-a-man-dead-o. Our guide insisted we take the tougher route. I suspect this was to see whether my father had the lungs for the final climb that night. Dad was fine. I, on the other hand, thought the day would never end. Up, up, up we went, over the hip of Mawenzi Peak, until we could see our resting point for the evening across what looked like a short span of desert. Three hours it took us to cross that wretched moonscape. No matter how long we walked, the hut remained the same mocking distance from us.

At 5pm we were told to go to bed in preparation for the final ascent. It's necessary to climb at night, we were told, because the final leg of the journey is over scree, or loose stones and gravel. At night the scree freezes solid, making it a lot less like walking up a 350m-high sand dune.

My memory of the next 11 hours is sketchy. Altitude sickness hit me within minutes of leaving Kibo Hut, and I stopped several times to empty the contents of my stomach on the side of the mountain. It was so cold that you could hear a low drone in your chest when you breathed.

We zigzagged up in the black of night, slowly, like a wagon train. After about an hour I heard someone mutter something incomprehensible - like the drunk who insists on talking to you at the urinals - and I realised the drunk was me. Streams of nonsense started spewing forth from my mouth. Dad kindly assured the guide that it was entirely normal.

Then, after seemingly endless hours of shuffling forward, came the moment that made it all worthwhile. About an hour shy of the summit the blackest night I've seen gave way to the pale wash of dawn. We stood for 20 minutes and watched the sun rise over Tanzania. I must have cried. I can't think that I wouldn't have.

And we made it. We all made it to the top. The feeling? Numbness. We stood on the icy roof of Africa, and all we wanted to do was get off again.

I can't tell you much about coming down. I have just fragments of memory of it: the sensation of sinking deep into the thawing scree, picking myself off my backside every 30 seconds. Some Germans skied past on their way down, their confidence not dented at all by just one Eurovision win in 50 years.

My guide told me later that at one point in my delirium I asked him my name. He said he didn't know. "Well, one of us had better find out," I apparently told him. I have no recollection of that, although I remember looking at him and noticing that he was carrying my daypack on his back and - shame of all shames - was linking my arm. I told him I was well capable of walking unaided, so he let go, and I scuttled sideways, like a crab, across the dirt road and into some rocks.

I did manage to walk into the camp unassisted - it's Mister Shackleton to you - and I remember, just before my brain shorted out, eating the most disgusting bowl of soup I'd ever seen - then seeing it again almost immediately, when my stomach decided it couldn't hold on to it.

We were all too sick to feel any sense of achievement, but as we descended towards sea level a smug sense of satisfaction took hold. Every couple of hundred metres we'd turn and stare back at the beautiful but formidable mountain that beats six out of 10 climbers but didn't beat us.

There was another man it didn't beat. He was in a wheelchair. We saw him making his descent, a team of guides laying steel tracks in front of him as he pulled himself down the mountain, just as he'd pulled himself up it. Dad looked at me. "When we go home," he said, "we never, ever mention that." Well, I saw nothing.