We start about 9:00 a.m. today. This will be a shorter hiking day. We only will hike for about 4 hours. We leave Karanga headed for the Barafu camp at about 15,000 feet. Barafu is the main camp where folks start their summit attempt of Kilimanjaro and several trails converge at Barafu. We arrive at Barafu around lunch. Tobias, our lead guide, has gone to see the Kilimanjaro park rangers to see if he can get permission for us to hike on up the mountain another hour or so to the Kosovo campsite (which is not a regular site) just above Barafu. By moving on up today, it will make our summit attempt tomorrow a little shorter. Also, there will be no climbers at the Kosovo site other then our group so it should be a nicer spot. After lunch, we learn he received permission from the ranger so we pack up and hike up a very steep trail (lots of large boulders) to the Kosovo campsite at 16,000 feet. We arrive around 3:30 p.m. which gives us a little bit of time to unwind and get ready for tomorrow. The Kosovo campsite is in the summit zone of Kilimanjaro where the oxygen level is about half that at sea level. It is like breathing on one lung. There also is little atmosphere to protect you from the sun. No mammals live in this zone, but there are two interesting stories about animals that have appeared there in the past. In 1926, a German missionary found a leopard frozen in the snow near the crater rim of the summit and he cut off its ear as proof. And in 1962, three climbers were followed to the summit by five wild African hunting dogs, who watched as the climbers signed the log book at the summit and then disappeared. We do not see any animals. That evening, we eat dinner around 6:30 p.m. and everyone is off to their sleeping bag early. The plan for tomorrow is get up at 5:00 a.m. and start out for the summit.