A few weeks ago I returned to England after scaling Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa and the world's highest free-standing mountain, almost 6,000 metres or 20,000 feet high!
You might wonder why I would do such a thing at the age of (almost) 71 and rightly so. Google "climbing Kilimanjaro" and you get a whole litany of things that can go wrong, from altitude sickness to acute pulmonary or cerebral oedema. One friend suggested I should make my will before I left for Africa. Others simply said: "You're bonkers" when they heard my plans. They made remarks such as "What about altitude sickness?" and "Don't you know that Martina Navratilova had to be airlifted off the mountain last December?"
Looking back, I am delighted that I was not deterred by such reactions. Last year I became chairman of the Gorilla Organisation (GO) - www.gorillas.org - a small charity which has been working for over twenty years in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to try to save the remaining gorilla populations. GO also hopes to expand its work to other parts of Africa (e.g. Central and West Africa) where gorillas are under threat.
Small amounts of money can make a huge difference. For example.
£25 will buy a ranger pack, including waterproofs, a torch and much-needed rations for gorilla rangers.
£50 will plant ten trees, which will help to build up the buffer zone that separates the gorilla habitat and the local communities.
£150 will supply a community with ten much-needed firewood-saving stoves.
The Kuoni travel company very kindly agreed to sponsor my climb and people have been very generous with their donations. One person wrote to say: "I'll give you even more money if you stay up there at the summit!"
When I arrived in Tanzania I was assigned a superb guide, a cook, a waiter and four porters, one of whom carried my personal mobile toilet. Erected in its own special tent on the higher slopes of the mountain, it could truly be called 'the loo with a view'!
If you don't actually enjoy climbing Kilimanjaro you are wasting your time and money. I knew right from the start that I had the right formula.
Although I am sure that I could have arranged for some travelling companions I decided not to. I wanted to be free to set my own pace or, more accurately, to follow the pace set by my guide without having to worry if it was too slow or too fast for someone else.
I didn't want to find myself idly chatting about which film would win the most Oscars or whether the Lib Dems would pull out of the Coalition.
The rhythm of our days on the mountain was straightforward. I had decided to approach Kilimanjaro from the Kenyan side along the so-called Rongai route. There are six approaches but Rongai is the road less-travelled and one of the most delightful.
Entering Mount Kilimanjaro National Park at Rongai Gate soon after lunch on day one, we spent our first afternoon walking up to Simba Camp (8,612ft).
With the team having gone ahead to pitch the tents and prepare the evening meal, my guide Elibariki Simon and I took a leisurely uphill stroll through the rainforest.
That is one of the extraordinary things about climbing Kilimanjaro. In the space of four days you pass through tropical rainforest into a zone of heath and moorland. Then as you rise above the 4,000m (13,120ft) contour you continue through a kind of lunar landscape before ascending beyond 5,000m (16,400ft) into the summit zone.
That first afternoon in the rainforest we must have seen at least 20 black-and-white colobus monkeys, with their extraordinary long capes of white hair and flowing white tails, leaping from tree to tree. The same number of blue monkeys was also evident as well as a chameleon and a variety of sunbirds.
I found myself adopting a defensive strategy. Even if I don't make it to the top, I said, I will have had a wonderful outing in one of Africa's most astonishing national parks.
One of the advantages of taking a wholly tented approach to Kilimanjaro is that you are not bound by anyone else's timetable. You don't have to observe check-in and check-out times as you do if you take other routes up the mountain where you have to move from hut to hut under a strict timetable.
I never felt the advantage of our choice of route and mode of travel (tents plus porters) more keenly than at the end of day four when we made the final push for the mountain's summit.
We reached Kibo Camp, 3,000ft from the summit at about 5pm. Elibariki poked his head into my tent to give me final instructions: "Dinner at six. Then you sleep until 11."
It seemed a long time. "11 tomorrow morning?" I queried: "No, this evening; we start climbing at midnight."
Eli was as good as his word. We left Kibo Camp for the final push to the summit at exactly midnight. With a full moon shining on the mountain we had no need of head torches as we scrambled upwards, although we carried them with us just in case.
At about 6.30am the sun rose above Mawenzi Peak, Kilimanjaro's lesser twin. We were already high above the clouds.
At l0 a.m. we reached the rim of the mountain and from Gilman's Point we were able to look down into Kilimanjaro's ice and snow-covered crater.
Mission accomplished.
Eli helped me unfurl the banner of The Gorilla Organization, whose chairman I am. So far we have raised more UK pounds for gorilla conservation as the altitude (in feet) I climbed. The current total stands at £23,000!
As importantly, Eli helped me safely back down the mountain. Although I didn't experience any kind of altitude sickness at any point on the mountain my feet were certainly tired and aching when, at around 2pm, we made it back to Kibo.
This was where taking the tent-only option paid off. If we had been "hutting" rather than "tenting" we would have had to vacate our berths after the briefest of rests to trudge on down that same day to the next camp at Horombo three or four more hours' steady walking. This on top of a stint that had begun 16 hours earlier when we first set off for the summit at midnight.
Staggering into camp I put my foot down. "I'm not going on down to Horombo," I told my guide. "Not today. I'll do it tomorrow. I am going straight to sleep in my tent. Here and now."
Which is exactly what I did. Perhaps I should have taken a moment to announce my triumph to the waiting world. But frankly I felt a bit whacked. And anyway I had left the phone on the plane when I changed planes at Nairobi airport on the way out!
In retrospect, I realise that scaling mountains whose names begin with K can prove addictive. When this blog appears, I will - if all goes to plan - be half-way up Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in south-east Asia. According to Wikipaedia, " Many people have been lost on the mountain in the past, some never to be seen again!"
I hope this is not my last blog for the UK Huffington Post, as well as the first!
Click on http://events.gorillas.org/stanleyjohnson to learn about and support the work of the Gorilla Organization. Stanley Johnson's memoir "Stanley I Presume" is published by Fourth Estate in hardcover and paperback. See http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Authors/8283/stanley-johnson