Climbing Mount Kenya with my 13-year-old daughter

 Kenya Highlands

I’ve just descended Mount Kenya with Eve, my 13-year-old daughter, and her class of school leavers from Pembroke House. Afterwards our guide Steve, an ex-Grenadier guardsman, emailed me to say Pembroke kids were his favourites on these mountain expeditions. ‘How could one not enjoy the company of such a crowd of gregarious misfits,’ he wrote. On the scree in the freezing pre-dawn darkness a few hundred feet from Point Lenana, Eve’s altitude sickness kicked in so severely we had to return to the last camp, at Shipton’s, where she recovered and walked for another two days. But 30 out of 34 kids in her year reached the summit, puking and laughing all the way. It was a great rite of passage for all of them. Mount Kenya is a tough challenge. One father was coughing up blood on the way down. Steve told me sometimes only 65 per cent of British soldiers make Point Lenana, mainly because of altitude sickness. It was five days up and down in a 190-strong expedition of children, parents, guides and porters. On the first day we rose out of juniper forest full of colobus monkeys and turaco birds and camped at Old Moses on the edge of the moorland. Next we trekked through giant heather until we found ourselves among eerie forests of giant lobelias. Somewhere near our second camp was the site of ‘Icy Mike’, an elephant that had once been encased entirely in a glacier which in recent times has melted, and with it the ancient pachyderm, whose tusks also mysteriously vanished. Red-winged starlings flew around camp, and even at 13,500 feet I heard an eagle owl calling at the dead of night. Herds of eland grazed the moors and right beneath Batian, the highest peak, are caves where elephant trek up to mine for salt.