Having reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro with a disparate band, including ex-footballers and a Melbourne Cup-winning jockey, I now understand why Sir Edmund Hillary resisted for years revealing whether he, or Tensing Norgay, climbed Everest first.

It doesn't matter. After an ordeal which would exhaust a sled dog, you don't care. Plus, it's a team effort.

When you are pushed to the top by Col Murphy, the 50-year-old former Newtown forward with bad knees - while ploughing through shifting scree and slippery snow, and fighting for oxygen in the thin air - and he constantly implores "dig your toes in, Roy," it's refreshing for an ex-player to remind an ex-coach, "There's no 'i' in' team."

Nor is there any thought of personal bests when most have blisters as big as 50-cent pieces, black toenails, teeth missing fillings, chafed lips, sunburnt faces and headaches, all mere inconveniences when you see a silent man spitting pink blood on to the pure, white snow.

Climbing by flickering head lamps and the light of a disappearing moon, you need each other for a shove up a boulder, or to blow hot air into the frozen pipe leading from the two-litre water sack built into your backpack.

Mt Kilimanjaro is 5895 metres high, several hundred metres higher than Everest base camp. It's the largest free-standing mountain on earth. It fills the starboard window of your flight into Arusha, Tanzania and you understand why the first European who sighted it was ridiculed by London's Royal Geographical Society, which dismissed this German missionary's claim of seeing a snow-capped mountain on the equator.

According to the Australian adventurer, Sorrel Wilby: "Fewer than 30 per cent of the 8000 to 10,000 people who attempt the climb annually succeed in reaching the summit." It kills 30 registered climbers a year, together with an unknown number of Tanzanians.

Ernest Hemingway, in his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro , described it as "wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun".

All the white will be gone by 2020, about the same time John Singleton and I - born three weeks apart - expect to depart, assuming the climatologists and gerontologists, respectively, are correct. But what a time we shared for seven days in a tent, both snorers; me in need of a compulsory liver-cleansing diet and Singo months into his single-minded approach to fitness - which is to get off the grog.

We're complementary in other ways, such as his long vision to point out distant mountain paths and my short vision to read by the light of a head lamp. At night, I would read him details of the next day's climb, always inventing two or three pars of colour towards the end, such as the sight of the carcass of a frozen leopard, or a monument to mark the death of Swiss mountaineers, or the supernatural forces local tribes believed inhabited the summit.

Sometimes he would let me ramble, but always end it with: "OK, when did the bullshit start?"

I never intended climbing to the peak, having decided Kilimanjaro base camp would do. "Base camp" does not mean the base of the mountain, as I had hoped, but the camp from which the final assault on the peak is based.

For six days we circled "Kili", following the 100-kilometre Machame route, ascending through paths padded with soft ferns and palms, past stunted trees with wispy growths of moss, and down stony ravines with strange, prehistoric bulbous trees. As the soil became skeletal, boulders gave way to scree, which, unless you summoned the energy to drive your toes into the shifting shale, causes the climber to slip backwards.

All the time, the squat mountain itself seemed impossible, certainly forbidding, always imposing. Only when we reached Barafu base camp at 4550 metres did the peak suddenly seem achievable. Our head Tanzanian guide, Joseph, said: "Don't even think about it. It is sooo eeeasy."

But the mood of those coming down did not reflect this. They looked shrunken, sallow, defeated. Bar two Dutch girls, all were silent. We couldn't be sure whether they were overwhelmed by failure or exhaustion. Even those passing us going up seemed consumed by doubt and dread.

Despite this, we happy band of brothers left at 11.30pm, two groups of five in single file; the oldies first, followed by Jack and the noisy ones.

We called Kilimanjaro "Manly", partly because our 1980s prejudices viewed it as a shimmering jewellery store but also because the "Silvertails", like the mountain, challenge you to play a fast game.

Success in reaching the summit is based on walking slowly, playing the game at your own pace, following the steps of the man ahead, all behind the lead guide, Charlie, while continually sipping water. The small village of porters and guides which accompanied us - 63 in all - thinned out to 10 for the final assault, one guide per trekker, just in case we were all forced to return separately.

The plan was for the younger group to overtake the slower, older group, but when their banter and laughter died about 4am, we knew altitude was sickening them as much as us.

In fact, "Sock", the American, began hallucinating halfway to Stella Point, the rim of the crater. A gregarious type but generous of spirit, he was given to exuberance and loud proclamations but this time his gibberish was indistinguishable from the Tanzanian Swahili. However, he wasn't about to let nine Aussies beat him and, after an hour with the doctor, joined us.

Just on daybreak, the sky turned a welcoming pink, signalling the minus-26 degrees temperature would not fall further and the icy winds might abate. But with eight layers of clothes, the exertion is such that the climber has to unzip jackets, and I found the breeze curiously energising.

The crater is not visible until finally reached. I don't know what David Livingstone said when he first saw Victoria Falls, but my first emotion on sight of that snow-filled caldera was exhaustion followed by exhilaration, leading to all-consuming excitement and pride. Uhuru Peak is only 100 metres higher and one kilometre further but altitude sickness still robs many of the final assault.

Col Murphy produced a golf ball and the crest of a Newtown jumper and made a beautiful speech. His elder brother, Ron, a keen golfer and former Newtown player, had died only two days before we left.

Col buried the ball, crest and a family photo in plastic under a pile of rocks, where, barring the mountain erupting, they will rest forever.

The view itself - an unbroken blanket of clouds where you'd expect to see 747s - is no compensation for the effort expended. Nor are you allowed to linger in the thin air. Still, the order to descend came brutally quick. You wish for a surfboard and the skill of a wave jumper to transport you on a wild ride down the snow and scree.

It soon becomes apparent why Kilimanjaro is climbed at night. First, if you could see what lay above, you wouldn't attempt it. Second, you need every ray of light to track the torturous, treacherous, slippery path down.

At one point near the summit, I slipped and rolled onto my back and remember thinking, just before Col and Charlie grabbed me: "If I slide down to a sublimely white remote valley cemetery, it will be blessed relief."

We returned to base camp at 2pm; had one hour's break and then moved to the 3100 metre exit camp, arriving at 10pm. So, in a 23-hour period, we had been on our feet for 22 hours and without sleep for longer.

As Singo and I climbed fully clothed into the cocoons of our sleeping bags, we both confessed to considering turning back many times, while agreeing it was the hardest thing, mentally and physically, we had ever done.

Yet this was forgotten in the euphoria of the following morning.

The guides and porters honoured us with Masai songs and war cries and Singo informed them of their tips: $US100 per porter and $US200 per guide. With a junior guide averaging $US75 a month and $US200 paying for the schooling of a child for a year, his generosity set off a wave of joy that seemed to cascade down the valley, ringing into the Tanzanian economy.

The Newtown patron wasn't finished: he gifted porters his jackets and pants to the point where he stood almost naked in his boots, relying upon his fellow trekkers for clothes.

Kilimanjaro was our personal Everest and possibly the closest we'll ever get to heaven. Everest is nearly a third higher and at the absolute limit of man's ability to exist without oxygen. Maybe God planned it that way: the highest point man can reach unassisted equates to his physical limit.

But the reality is man can't do it alone; one climber helps the other. And why do 66-year-olds do it? Because we still can.