What adventure would be complete without some hard learned life lessons? Feast your eyes upon these rocks of wisdom gleaned from the mountain:

• Travelling with a doctor is the worst thing ever because they tell you things like, "Did you know you can get hepatitis from food?" They generally dispense such info when you're eating at a ‘restaurant’ in the middle of nowhere. A restaurant that also seems to be a corner shop and doesn’t have any running water.

• Just because you can see your next campsite in the distance and it looks only 20 minutes hike away doesn't mean that round the corner there's not a massive ravine that you take an hour and a half to climb 200m down and then back up before you get to camp.

  

• You only have what you take with you. Don’t take a decent lip balm? Your lips will be dry and bleeding by Day 2. Don’t take a pillow? No sleep for you. No towel? Use your dusty clothes. No sense of humour? Good luck with that. There really are no Tesco Metros on the mountain.

• Travelling with a doctor is the best thing ever because chances are they’ll cart around hundreds of pills to fix whatever ailment you have – headache, diarrhoea, lung infection? – they’ve got it covered.

  

• Tiredness is not an illness – this is what our lead guide told us whenever we mentioned that we hadn’t slept well, which was pretty much every night.

• Things guys don't have to worry about on mountains: finding suitable rocks/trees/bushes to pee behind, taking off a sports bra in a tent and periods. You don't even know how lucky you are.

  

• Travelling with a doctor is the worst thing ever because they tell you things like "We're gonna get corneal ulcers from putting in our contact lenses with dirty hands." They dispense such info just as you're putting in your contact lenses with hands that are covered in dust and grime.

• High altitude can make simple tasks ridiculously hard - I spent 20 minutes trying to work out how to fix my belt, turns out all I had to do was thread the fabric through the buckle.

• I mostly went for the I Woke Up Like This approach of no makeup and if I was feeling fancy I brushed my hair but people do actually climb Kili wearing makeup and perfume, without a hair out of place. Meet ‘Paris’...

  

• It's impossible to cry sob and breathe 5000m above sea level - you simply don't have enough oxygen.

• Life back at sea level is claustrophobic after you've spent four days above the clouds.

  

• Going up a mountain and getting closer to the sun, does not mean it is warmer. I literally don’t understand how this works. We did discuss this and other geographical questions at length on the mountain though.

• Sunrise changes everything when you've been hiking in the pitch black of night for 7 hours (2 of which you spent hunched over your hiking poles unable to stand up as you tried to throw up and/or sleep whilst walking), two members of your team have had to turn back and you're colder than you've ever been in your life.

• It is what it is.